‘The prestigious science journal, Nature, reported on 31st May 2023, that the Indian education authority is dropping several key scientific and political subjects from the education curriculum for pupils under 16. the magazine reported:
In India, children under 16 returning to school this month at the start of the school year will no longer be taught about evolution, the periodic table of elements or sources of energy.
The news that evolution would be cut from the curriculum for students aged 15–16 was widely reported last month, when thousands of people signed a petition in protest. But official guidance has revealed that a chapter on the periodic table will be cut, too, along with other foundational topics such as sources of energy and environmental sustainability. Younger learners will no longer be taught certain pollution- and climate-related topics, and there are cuts to biology, chemistry, geography, mathematics and physics subjects for older school students.
Overall, the changes affect some 134 million 11–18-year-olds in India’s schools. The extent of what has changed became clearer last month when the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) — the public body that develops the Indian school curriculum and textbooks — released textbooks for the new academic year that started in May.
Researchers, including those who study science education, are shocked. “Anybody who’s trying to teach biology without dealing with evolution is not teaching biology as we currently understand it,” says Jonathan Osborne, a science-education researcher at Stanford University in California. “It’s that fundamental to biology.” The periodic table explains how life’s building blocks combine to generate substances with vastly different properties, he adds, and “is one of the great intellectual achievements of chemists”.
Mythili Ramchand, a science-teacher trainer at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai, India, says that “everything related to water, air pollution, resource management has been removed. “I don’t see how conservation of water, and air [pollution], is not relevant for us. It’s all the more so currently,” she adds. A chapter on different sources of energy — from fossil fuels to renewables — has also been removed. “That’s a bit strange, quite honestly, given the relevance in today’s world,” says Osborne.’
Some material was cut from the curriculum last year in order to lighten it during the Covid pandemic. It was expected that it would be reinstated once the pandemic and the lockdown was over, but this hasn’t happened. Academics and educationalists appear perplexed by the decision, but it looks like it comes from the RSSS, the militant Hindu nationalist organisation linked to Modi’s BJP.
[Amitabh] Joshi says that the curriculum revision process has lacked transparency. But in the case of evolution, “more religious groups in India are beginning to take anti-evolution stances”, he says. Some members of the public also think that evolution lacks relevance outside academic institutions.
Aditya Mukherjee, a historian at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Dehli, says that changes to the curriculum are being driven by Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a mass-membership volunteer organization that has close ties to India’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party. The RSS feels that Hinduism is under threat from India’s other religions and cultures.
“There is a movement away from rational thinking, against the enlightenment and Western ideas” in India, adds Sucheta Mahajan, a historian at Jawaharlal Nehru University who collaborates with Mukherjee on studies of RSS influence on school texts. Evolution conflicts with creation stories, adds Mukherjee. History is the main target, but “science is one of the victims”, she adds.’
One of the other subjects cut from science teaching is a section ‘Why We Fall Ill’, which seems to me to be particularly wicked and dangerous. Everyone really needs to know about the causes of disease, regardless of their level of education or the country in which they live. This removal threatens to increase the incidence of disease in a country where many people lack access to medicine.
In an article from the previous day, 30 May, Nature reported the Indian education authority’s, NCERT’s, reasons for the changes
‘NCERT says that ‘rationalization’ is needed when content overlaps with material covered elsewhere in the curriculum, or when it considers content to be irrelevant. Moreover, India’s 2020 National Education Policy says that students need to become problem-solvers and critical thinkers, and it therefore advocates less memorization of content and more active learning.
NCERT also wants “a rootedness and pride in India, and its rich, diverse, ancient and modern culture and knowledge systems and traditions”. Some people interpret this as a motivation to remove the likes of Charles Darwin and Michael Faraday, and instead use the time to learn more about India’s precolonial history of science.’
But it comments
‘India is not the only postcolonial country grappling with the question of how to honour and recognize older or Indigenous forms of knowledge in its school curricula. New Zealand is trialling the teaching of Māori ‘ways of knowing’ — mātauranga Māori — in a selection of schools across the country. But it is not removing important scientific content to accommodate the new material, and for good reason.’
It all reminds me of the furore back in the 1990s when Christian Creationists in Kansas banned evolution from being taught in their schools. The great comedian, the late Bill Hicks joked about it, saying ‘In many parts of our troubled world, people are crying ‘Revolution! Revolution’. In Kansas they’re shouting ‘Evolution! Evolution! We want our opposable thumbs’. There have been periodic concerns ever since about the teaching of evolution and Creationism in schools. Western scientists have been particularly worried about Creationism, or Creation Science, being taught as scientific fact. There was particularly controversy nearly two decades ago with the emergence of Intelligent Design, and the Discovery Institute. Intelligent Design accepts evolution, but considers that it has carried out by a God or other intelligent force that has actively intervened at specific points. One form of Intelligent Design, proposed by the cosmologist Fred Hoyle in his 1980s book, Evolution from Space, is that the creator may have been an extradimensional computer civilisation. For years discussions of Creationism and its supposed threat to science was chiefly confined to Christianity. There was some discussion of the rise of Islamic Creationism in Turkey, but from what I recall this was mostly confined to the internet. India at that time seemed not to be experiencing any similar concerns about evolution or other doctrines which may have challenged traditional religious teaching.
This looks very much like it’s going to damage India as an emerging global economic and technological force. Yes, the country has a millennia-old tradition of scientific and medical innovation, but the country has become a scientific powerhouse as well through embracing modern, western science, just as its neighbour China has done. I’ve been particularly struck by the country’s ambitious space programme, which has made some remarkable advances and has made India a space power. If these changes to its schools curriculum continue, I can see the tradition of scientific excellence that the country has done so much to build being severely handicapped.
I also note the similarity of its stance on the environment to various right-wing political lobby groups and think tanks to ban the teaching of environmentalism and climate change, and to make us all believe that the massive pollution of the environment by business isn’t happening and won’t cause permanent damage. Trump when he was in the White House passed legislation preventing the American environmental watchdog from publishing anything about climate change of the environment. This partly came from oil industry, whose own, astroturf climate organisations has a policy of buying up independent climate analysis laboratories and using them to turn out its own, anti-climate change propaganda.
Regarding the excision of material on politics, I’ve got the impression that India is trying to establish itself as the true home of democracy, looking back to its traditional village councils or panchayats. But there seems to be a more sinister purpose to the removal of chapters on democracy and diversity; political parties; and challenges to democracy, as well as a chapter on the industrial revolution for older students. It looks here like the BJP and its storm troopers are trying to stop India’s young people from acquiring the historical and political knowledge to understand how their country could be – or actually is – being taken towards authoritarianism and Fascism.
Vicious totalitarian governments of both left and right, from Hitler’s Germany to Stalin’s Russia, have all attacked and refashioned science, history and education as part of their programmes. Now it seems India, under the BJP, is also going down this path.
Okay, I’ve got to confess to making another mistake. Earlier today I put up a piece reporting that Starmer had told the leaders of the Labour party that people weren’t interested in woke, and condemned the Tories for being ‘out of touch’. This had been covered in a video put out by That Preston Journalist. I watched it and got the wrong end of the stick. He seemed to me to be saying that Starmer had decided that woke policies weren’t appealing to the public and was ready to ditch them. At the same time I thought that Starmer was also attacking that part of the Conservative party that is woke.
How wrong I was! It seems Starmer isn’t prepared to ditch ‘woke’ at all. He just doesn’t think that voters care enough about it to vote against Labour because of it. Instead they’re more interested and concerned about the NHS and the cost of living. When he said that Sunak and the Tories were out of touch, he meant that they failed to appreciate that these issues took precedence over the woke policies Starmer is promoting and defending and that the British public generally didn’t share their concerns about woke policies. This is how it’s been interpreted by GB News and their presenters.
Before I go further, let’s try and unpack what is meant by the term ‘woke’. Gillyflower, one of the great commenters here, remarked that I should refresh my memory over what it means. As I understand it, it’s Black slang meaning being awake to injustice. Looking at how it’s now being used, it seems to have replaced the old term ‘political correctness’ for extreme and intolerant anti-racist, feminist, anti-homophobic and anti-transphobic views. More narrowly, it’s being used to describe the various Critical Social Justice ideologies derived from the Postmodernist, Critical Theory revision of Marxism which narrowly sees societal issues through the lens of privilege and oppression. These differ from previous forms of anti-racism, feminism and so on in rejecting individualism. In Critical Race Theory, all Whites are privileged because of their skin colour and the fact that some Whites are less privileged than some Blacks is ignored. It isn’t enough to be non-racist, and judge people on their merits and character regardless of race. You must be positively anti-racist and fight against White privilege and for Black uplift through social programmes that demand the granting of opportunities to Blacks and other underprivileged minorities simply because of their colour. For example, in America Black and Mexican students generally do less well at Maths at school than Whites and Asians. So some schools in California are trying to even these results out by giving pre-calculus lessons only to Black and Hispanic students to the exclusion of Whites and Asians.
In the eyes of GB News’ Mike Graham, however, woke means just about every anti-racist, feminist, environmentalist and radical gender view or ideology. Yes, he conceded, people did care about the NHS and the cost of living, but people also cared about: woke teacher telling kids there were 73 genders, environmental protesters gluing themselves to the road, petrol and diesel cars being phased out in favour of electric vehicles, and the cost of power rising due to green energy policies. And so on.
Piers Morgan also did a piece about whether people cared about ‘woke’. This included Reform’s Richard Tice and a woman from the Labour party. Unsurprisingly, Morgan and Tice believed that people did care about ‘woke’. The lady from Labour didn’t. She didn’t like biological men being allowed into women’s private spaces and sports, nor rapists in female prisons, when asked by the former editor of the Mirror. He replied with, ‘Ah, but they’ve prevented you from talking about this’. She replied that they hadn’t, and she’d been talking about it for a year or so. This contrasts with the case of Rosie Duffield, who has been isolated and shunned by Starmer and other senior Labour members for her views. I can’t remember whether the lady believed that people didn’t care about woke policies, or did, but that they were far more concerned about the cost of living and the NHS. I think Morgan had claimed that it was because Labour was pushing these woke policies that it looked like they would not have an absolute majority at the election next year.
My guess is that the Labour lady is probably right. People are directly affected by the cost of living, and wondering how they will afford food, heating and their rent or mortgages. The latter was one of the major issues on the local news tonight in Bristol, which has been revealed as the most expensive city outside London. One woman spoke of how she had been forced to move back in with her parents after the landlord raised the rent by 66 per cent. And they are very much concerned about getting hold of a doctor, thanks to all the wonderful privatisation that Rishi’s so proud of. These are issues that immediately affect everyone. I’m not sure how many people are aware of the debate over transgenderism, let alone so concerned that it affects the way they vote. Some are, and it may become a more important issue in the public consciousness by the time the next election comes round.
But Starmer’s less than exciting performance can also be blamed on other problems apart from the ‘woke’. Like he broke every promise and pledge he made, and has done his level best to purge the left. Corbyn’s policies were genuinely popular, and he enthused and inspired the public in a way Starmer can’t. The turnout at the local elections was low, and my guess is that many of the people Corbyn had appealed to didn’t vote. They had been alienated by a party leadership that was actively hostile to them and which to many people just offers the usual Tory policies, or something not too different from them. Tice, I think, said that Labour’s woke policies wouldn’t appeal to the socially conservative voters of the red wall. He might be right, though if they do become disenchanted with Labour, it’ll be far more to do with the lack of proper, old-style, socialist Labour policies.
Thanks to Gillyflower for pointing me towards this excellent article in Yorkshirebylines on Andrew Tate, the British/American far right activist Andrew Tate. Tate has just been arrested by the Romanian plod on charges of enslavement and human trafficking. His extreme right-wing supporters have been crying that somehow he’s been framed because it came after a Twitter spat with Greta Thunberg. Why the Romanian police would be so worried about that is, of course, never explained. It’s just left to the imaginations of their supporters, who assume that because Thunberg is a global Green activist and celebrity, the Romanian government is somehow desperately keen to defend her by imprisoning her critics and opponents. In fact, it appears that Tate was arrested on charges of imprisoning women and forcing them to perform pornographic acts. If this is correct, then Tate deserves to do a lot of time.
Tate’s father was Black Californian chess champion, who was honoured by the state for his achievements in the game at his death. After his father died, Tate and his brother’s mother moved to Luton, where they lived in poverty. He took up kickboxing, got on Big Brother and then was thrown off it after a video was found of him whipping a woman. He then set himself up as a self-help guru and anti-feminist, men’s right’s activist. He’s been thrown off a number of internet platforms for promoting conspiracy theories, violence towards women and rants about the World Economic Forum. This bunch, led by Klaus Schwab, seem to have replaced the Bilderberg group and the Trilateral Commission as the objects of right-wing paranoia. Tate’s mates have included Alex Jones of Infowars, now facing a $1bn bill for damages for libelling the bereaved parents of the Sandy Hook shooting victims as ‘crisis actors’, as well as Paul Joseph Watson, Donald Trump jnr and Nigel Farage.
Eventual things got a bit too hot for him in Blighty, so he fled to Romania. According to the article, 40 per cent of his reason for doing so was to escape rape allegations. He’s also very aware of the promotional benefits of being a controversialist, telling his viewers that if they want their blogs and vlogs to get anywhere, they should aim for a 60/40 mix of friends and haters. After the other platforms got rid of him, he was taken up and promoted by Peter Thiel, an American magnate connected to the Alt-Right. Thiel wrote the foreword for William Rees-Mogg’s Libertarian manifesto, The Sovereign Individual, and, as the head of a private healthcare company, wants a slice of the NHS’ business. He was given a £190 million contract by the Tories before this was challenged over breaches of the commissioning process.
To some it all up, he sounds a very nasty piece of work. The article is well worth reading for exposing the connections Tate has to the extreme right, including the people who want to privatise the NHS. And far from appearing like an innocent self-help guru advising men and boys how to reclaim their masculinity constructively, he instead seems to be a violent misogynist.
Last week Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, proposed that the state should pay reparations for slavery. This would consist in a payment of $220,000 to Black Californians descended from slaves. Newsom had previous passed or proposed legislation for the payment of a monthly amount to homeless trans people for a fixed term of one year. This was because there was a disproportionate number of trans people living on the streets, and the payment was to allow them to begin to purchase or rent a home. Newsom’s proposal to pay reparations for slavery was discussed by the Lotus Eaters over here and there’s a video by Black Conservative Perspective in America criticising it. The Black Conservative was not impressed, calling it divisive and playing a clip of Black speakers before the California state legislature or whatever demanding more. One man wanted the payment to be in a fixed amount of gold for each enslaved ancestor. An angry man wearing the red fez and tie of the Nation of Islam ranted about how God had a particular hatred of America and if the money wasn’t paid, He’d destroy the country with an asteroid or something. The Black Conservative considered that these payments would be inflationary, that the money would go on cars and cocaine, and that it would never be enough. People would always come back asking for more.
These are legitimate criticisms. Simon Webb, of History Debunked, made a video attacking the reparations for slavery campaign a few months or so ago. He also thought that it would cause racial divisions rather than solve them, and illustrated it with this example. Say there were two people living next to each other, in identical houses and with the same amount of wealth, but one was Black and the other White. If the Black man received £40,000 simply as compensation for his ancestors being enslaved but not for anything he personally had done, it would cause the White man to become resentful. It might not be true everywhere and of every White person – some may well share the opinion that it’s right Blacks descended from slaves should receive reparations for the suffering of their ancestors. But many others may well become extremely resentful. It could easily result in insults, abuse and worse. When Bristol city council passed a motion a year ago calling for the payment of reparations, Deputy Mayor and head of Equalities Asher Craig received an enormous amount of abusive messages.
I’m also sure that the Black Conservative also has a point about some of the prospective recipients squandering the money. I don’t doubt that some Blacks would use the money wisely to improve conditions for themselves and their children. But I can also see others wasting the money on expensive luxuries, like top of the range cars. There have been a number of stories in the past about people who’ve won millions on the National Lottery and who’ve then spent it all with nothing to show for it so that they’re back as poor as before. This has been done by people regardless of race, White and Black alike. I am also afraid that if these sums were paid, the gangster element in the Black community would use it to expand their violence and drug dealing, as criminals of any colour would if suddenly given a massive cash boost. Perhaps some would use it to leave the gangs and crime behind and try and establish themselves as respectable, law-abiding citizens. You’d hope so. But I think rather more criminals would simply use it to finance more of their destructive lifestyle, which would cause further damage to the Black community. And I am also afraid that whatever was paid would never be enough, and that they would always come back for more.
Thomas Sowell in one of his books argued against slavery reparations. He felt that the people, who were victimised and responsible for it are now dead, and so beyond our ability to help or punish. He also argued that whatever profits America had made from slavery had vanished in the bloodbath of the American Civil War. Furthermore, the guilt for something as terrible as slavery could not be absolved simply by paying money. He also made the point that no society could survive a moral viewpoint in which it had to be constantly criticising itself and paying compensation for the acts of the past. I think these are excellent points.
When Bristol passed its motion calling for reparations, the practical measures made it seem more like a call for further affirmative action for the Black British community as a whole justified through the connection to slavery. The motion ruled out payments to individuals. Instead they should be paid to Black-led organisations which would work to improve conditions and create sustainable, prosperous Black communities. All Blacks were to benefit from this, not just those of Afro-Caribbean or slave origin. While it’s better than Newsom’s proposal in providing for their real, collective benefit of the Black community rather than just the compensation of individuals, there are real moral problems with this as well. By including all Black, it also makes the British state morally responsible for people we did not enslave and who may themselves be descendants of the very slavers who sold their human cargo to us. It also ignores the fact that other nations, like the Arabs and Indians, were also involved in the African slave trade and the fact that White Europeans, including Brits, were also the victims of enslavement in the Turkish conquest of the Balkans and the Barbary pirates. I sent email messages to Craig and Cleo Lake, the Green councillor who proposed the motion, but got no reply. This, in my opinion, shows their absolute contempt for those challenging the notion.
In the British context, it could be argued that any profits Britain acquired from the slave trade were spent on our efforts to stamp it out through the activities of the British West African squadron and its patrols as well as a wider campaign against slaving and slavery during the Empire. There is also the problem that some of the countries responsible for kidnapping slaves also want reparations paid to them, even though some of their chiefs became extremely rich from the trade’s profits. The Caribbean nations, or some of them, have also demanded reparations. Some of this has been to deflect attention from the failings of their own rulers, while I don’t doubt that the venal kleptocrats are looking at a source of further money they can steal and loot. There’s also a question of the amount paid. Britain paid £20 million in compensation to the slaveowners at abolition, something that has been bitterly resented by some Black activists, just as it was by some abolitionists at the time. This translates into billions in today’s money and we only stopped paying it off a few years ago. If we were to pay a commensurate amount today, I think it would bankrupt us. And I can’t see that being to anyone’s benefit in Britain.
So far I think Newsom is on his own on this issue, and it remains to be seen whether he goes ahead with it. But this could be one issue to watch, as it’s possible other states will take it up, as well as activists over here.
Drag Queen Story Hour, in which drag performers tell stories to children in school and public libraries, is the subject of growing intense controversy. It was started in Los Angeles or one of the other Californian cities with a strong gay community a few years ago. Since then it’s spread across America and into Britain. It’s supporters believe that it promotes tolerance, while their opponents are worried that it’s a forming of paedophile grooming. The accusation has a degree of verisimilitude, as there have been papers written by from the perspective of Queer Theory, a form of postmodern Marxism, promoting Drag Queen Story Hour as a form of ‘queer pedagogy’ intended not to create tolerance and acceptance for gays, or to lead young gay people to become comfortable in their sexuality and become otherwise normal, well-adjusted, happy members of society. Or as happy as anyone can be as capitalism crumbles all around us and the elite get richer while making the rest of us plebs and peasants poorer. No, it has been promoted as a way of getting them to ‘live queerly’ and to make their psychological problems worse in order to generate the militant revolutionary consciousness needed for the violent overthrow of capitalism. One such essay, published in an academic educational periodical is the subject of a series of videos by one of the anti-postmodernist activists and critics. How many people involved in Drag Queen Story Hour are aware of this activist fringe, let alone support it, is a good question.
There have been protests against it in America. An angry group of fathers turned up at a Story Hour event in Texas, where they harangued the drag artiste as a paedophile and groomer. A day or so ago a similar event in Reading here in Britain was stopped after a similar protest was staged. Now there’s this article from Bristol Live, reporting that a Story Hour at a library in the suburb of Henleaze was also cancelled today following protests. The article by Ellie Kendal, ‘Drag Queen Story Hour UK protests: Bristol City Council says discrimination and abuse will not be tolerated‘ begins
‘Bristol City Council has today issued a statement to say it will not tolerate any discrimination or abuse aimed at any community, following protests at a library event for young children in the city. Drag Queen Story Hour was scheduled to begin a series of library appearances in Bristol today, starting at Henleaze Library, however the event was later cancelled as protesters against the event gathered outside.
Drag Queen Story Hour began its national summer tour on Monday, July 25, in Reading where its founder and performer Aida H Dee, who grew up in Bristol, had her reading interrupted by protesters, two of which organisers said had “gained access to the story hour by using their own disabled autistic child as a ‘human trojan horse’.
The police had to get involved and Aida herself had to be escorted out of the event, with officers having to form a ‘human wall’ to protect her from an assault, or a ‘citizen’s arrest’ – something even protesters here in Bristol today said they were planning on doing. Police also attended today’s Bristol event in Henleaze, acting as a barrier between two opposing groups of protesters.
Meanwhile, parents and their young children queued up outside the library mere metres from the protesters – some fearing for their safety. They were let inside, however the event was later cancelled. The next event is due to take place at another library in Bristol at 1pm.’
I think the Reading Drag Queen event was part of a national tour organised and begun by Bristol libraries service. The event got the attention of the American right-wing internet pundits a few weeks ago when there were protests about the ‘family sex show’, advertised as suitable for children as young as five, staged by a group at the Tobacco Factory theatre in Bristol.
Thomas Sowell is a Black American conservative. I’ve started reading his Race and Culture, whose title suggests it should be some wretched Nazi screed, but which isn’t. Sowell believes that peoples are shaped by their history and the environments in which they were formed, and thus different people can develop different skills and attitudes to education, commerce and so on. These may be retained by those peoples when they immigrate to a new country. In the chapter on ‘Race and Migration’, he describes how various immigrant groups came to dominate particular areas of the economy in places like Latin America, Africa, and Australia. For example, European immigrants came to dominate trade and industry in many South American countries because the indigenous landowning elites looked down on those sectors. Their preferred occupations were in the profession, such as law or medicine, or in government. He discusses how the Lebanese similarly became important in trade and industry in West Africa, and the Indians, particularly Gujaratis in East Africa. He notes that immigrant success in these areas is often resented, as if the industries the immigrants create somehow happened naturally and the immigrants somehow seized control of them over the indigenous peoples. This was the mentality of the Ugandans when they expelled their Asian population in 1972.
Sowell doesn’t believe in ‘political correctness’ or multiculturalism, and states that often the association between an immigrant group and higher crime rates or poor sanitation really isn’t one of perception and stereotype. He is also critical of multiculturalism as it can seal ethnic minority groups off from the skills, education and values of the mainstream society, skills and attitudes that would allow them to successfully integrate and compete. But he also makes the point that immigration does not necessarily mean that immigrant groups take jobs away from the indigenous or host society. Indeed, the may actually create them. He writes
‘In addition to real costs entailed by immigrants, there are often also false charges that they are a burden to the native-born population, in situations where they are not. However, sometimes there are hidden costs which may be different from what is charged, but significant nonetheless. A common charge against immigrants, for example, is that they take jobs from native-born workers. But there is no fixed number of jobs, from which those going to immigrants can be subtracted. More producers coming into an economy mean more output and more demand, which in turn creates more jobs.
It is an empirical question whether the additional jobs created as a result of the immigrants economic activities equals or exceeds the number of jobs the immigrants themselves take. It is by no means out of the question that native workers may have more jobs available after immigrants arrive. Studies of the large influx of Mexican immigrants into southern California, for example, showed no adverse impact on either the unemployment rate or the labour force participation rate of Blacks in that region, who might be competing for similar jobs. In fact, job trends for Blacks were more favourable in this area heavily impacted by Mexican immigrants than in the nation at large. But while there has apparently been an increase in the total number of jobs, there has been a correspondingly lower pay scale, as the large influx of immigrants has lessened the need for employers to raise wages in order to attract sufficient workers.’ (p,.43).
Which is all very interesting. You often hear the claim that immigrants are taking jobs, and the right are claiming that wages are lower because of foreign immigration. But you don’t hear that immigration can create jobs, and that’s an important omission.
Perhaps it should be made more often in response to the anti-immigration brigade.
Ketanji Brown is Biden’s new nomination for the US supreme court. She’s a Black woman of progressive views, and the Republicans have been giving her a right grilling over the past week. There are several objections to her taking up her position. One is that she has a history of giving very lenient sentences, frequently below the recommended length, to perverts possessing child porn. The second is that she is unable to define what a woman is when asked. One of the female Republican politicos asked her that very question, and she replied that, not being a biologist, she couldn’t answer that question. The common sense answer, and the one that nearly everyone would have given a decade ago, is the straight dictionary definition: adult human female. But such straightforward definitions based in biology have become intensely controversial since the rise of the militant trans movement. This instead seeks to define womanhood and masculinity through gender – social sex. A woman, in their view, is simply someone who identifies as one. This has major implications for women’s privacy, safety and sport. Lia Thomas’ victory over his biologically female competitors last week enraged many women because Lia is a biological male with all the advantages. He was able to compete as a woman because he identifies as one. The incarceration of biological men in women’s prisons, simply because they identify as female, is also a major issue. Many of these men are rapists and sex criminals, and there have been a series of assaults and rapes on the biological women they have been incarcerated with. But Brown isn’t the only politico, who can’t give a coherent answer to what a woman is. Jo Swinson, then leader of the Lib Dems, couldn’t when asked last year. Keef Stalin couldn’t when asked if women have cervixes, and declared that it was a question that shouldn’t be asked. Anneliese Dodds and Stella Creasy, also Labour, couldn’t answer it when they were interviewed about International Women’s Day. And Labour’s James Murray also couldn’t answer it when interviewed by Julia Hartley-Brewer on Talk Radio, but simply rejected the biological definition.
But what is also worrying is her attitudes to race. She seems to be a supporter of Critical Race Theory, which seems to me with its rants against ‘Whiteness’ to be simply postmodern anti-White racism. She was asked about a children’s book about raising an anti-racist baby. Aimed at children, this declared that ‘Whiteness is a pact with the Devil’ and shows a White person making just such a deal with Lucifer. I realise that this is intended as a metaphor and that it’s talking about ‘Whiteness’ rather than Whites, but it’s only a very short semantic step from one to the other, a step which critics like James Lindsey see as coming. And metaphorical it may be, but it is similar with how many Blacks really do believe that Whites are demonic.
There’s footage on the web of a Black woman, Angela Shackleford, telling a class of Whites that they ‘were not born into humanity’, will always be the same and are ‘devils to me’. In the realm of religion you have the Nation of Islam, which holds that White people are albinistic mutants created by the evil Mekkan scientist Shaitan to destroy the purity of the Black race. I was told years ago that Rastafarianism also states that White people are devils. And then there’s the Ansaaru Allah Black Muslim sect, whose leader calls Whites ‘Amalekites’ after the Semitic people who warred against Israel as they were passing through the desert on the way to the Promised Land. Their leader’s writings in his text Message to the Blackman in America, is full of anti-White rants, including the remarkable claim that the antichrist has already been born and is a blue-eyed Amalekite. This language is dangerous, because it has been used to stir up real hatred and prejudice against religious and ethnic minorities. For example, in the Middle Ages it was believed that Jews were literally the children of Satan, and this helped foment the pogroms, violence and expulsions directed against them.
And the threat of anti-White racist violence shouldn’t be played down. In 2005 the Guardian reported that racially motivated murders of Whites were almost at the same level as Blacks. Around about the same time it was also reported that Whites constituted the majority of victims of racial abuse and assault. There was also the controversy over the publication of White Girl Bleed a Lot. This argued that there was more mass, communal violence against Whites by Blacks than the other way round. It was denounced as racist, not least because the author seems to have had connections to the far right and had written for World Net Daily. Other criticisms were that his reporting of various events were factually inaccurate.
I really don’t believe that such books and Critical Race Theory in any way help tackle racism. Rather they are intended to teach that all Whites are racist, and that all Blacks can expect from them is racism. Books like that have been around for a very long time. When Mum was a school teacher, she received along with her teaching magazines a list of what the NUT seemed to believe were suitable anti-racist books. There were 20 on the least, and with only a single exception they were all about Black children being racially bullied by Whites. The exception, and the only one I would want to use with a class, was about a young Sikh lad using his swordsmanship skills to survive after the collapse of civilisation. I feel that the proper way to tackle racism in literature and entertainment is to show people of all races cooperating and getting along, in situations that seem natural and unforced. Critical Race Theory does the opposite. It promotes hatred and division, and for that reason many Blacks also despise it. There’s a video online of angry Black father telling a school meeting that he doesn’t want his son taught it. The father hasn’t suffered racism, and he doesn’t want his son taught that it is something he will have to expect either. He wants his son to believe that in America there are no bars to him achieving on the merits of his talents alone. It’s the classic American dream, and although this has certainly not been the experience of everyone, and particularly not people of colour, it’s still admirable.
And definitely better than Critical Race Theory, which is simply anti-White racism with a postmodern twist. Like all racism, it should be discarded and its supporters severely questioned over their suitability to teach and legislate.
Even if, and especially if, they are being nominated as a supreme court judge.
I don’t know if this is true or not, but I caught a headline from the Torygraph yesterday that Rosie Duffield, the Blairite who claimed she needed protection at the Labour party conference because of threats from transgender activists, had been invited to cross the floor. In fact, as Mike showed in his piece about Duffield’s claim, it doesn’t seem to have happened. Duffield produced absolutely no threatening messages from social media or physical mail. It looked very much like she was following the example of a Jewish female MP, who claimed she had been sent anti-Semitic messages but didn’t produce any evidence of that either. But Duffield is right wing, with a record of demanding further cuts to welfare, punishing the poor for being poor. So it wouldn’t be a surprise if she had received just such an invitation. There have been stories that three Labour MPs are ready to defect, and I know some Tories would have liked Blairite MP Frank Field to join them.
However, even if those particular threats against Duffield were a product of her malign imagination, they’re all too credible because transgender activists can be threatening and violent. There have been a series of cases where TRAs (Trans Rights Activists) have physically attacked feminists demonstrators and beaten them. To add insult to injury, the same activists have then sued their victim for transphobia. Many women are extremely concerned and outraged at the trans ideology. Kelly-Jay Kean, for example, is particularly concerned about the way an increasing number of vulnerable children, particularly girls and young women, have become convinced they are trans or non-binary to the point they are taking up surgery. Other concerns are that the trans label has now become so broad that biological men are being allowed into women’s spaces, such as sports changing rooms, toilets, and prisons, on the grounds that they identify as women. Many of the men in women’s prisons have convictions for crimes against women and the result has been a series of rapes and sexual assaults to the point where the Californian prison service is giving out condoms and contraceptive advice to female inmates.
Underneath this is the concern that natal, biological femininity is being erased to accommodate the expansion of femaleness to include transwomen. The NHS has published medical literature referring to chestfeeding, instead of breastfeeding, and ‘birthing bodies’, instead of women/mothers. Yesterday Kean and her comrades demonstrated outside the offices of the Lancet because the prestigious medical journal had published a piece about how women’s disorders and diseases had not received the proper attention they deserved. This would be a fair comment, applauded by feminists, apart for one fact. It didn’t refer to women except by the reproductive organs natal women possess but not transpeople. Equally incendiary has been Keir Starmer’s refusal to say that only women have a cervix on an interview on television. Instead the Labour leader got angry and said it was a question that shouldn’t be asked. To anti-gender activists, this showed that Starmer was opposed to free speech. Which he is. But then, Jo Swinson of the Lib Dems couldn’t answer what a woman was when asked and posters with the dictionary definition of woman as ‘adult human female’ have been judged hateful and transphobic.
I am very definitely not trying to stir up hate here against genuine transpeople, who do need careful therapy and surgery. I do not want to see anyone persecuted and subjected to abuse and violence because of their gender identification. But there are reasonable concerns about the trans ideology and the extension of the concept of femininity to cover everyone who claims to identify as a woman. One of the maddest things I’ve encountered in this direction is a book published by a trans rights activists about sex between a biological man and a lesbian, and how that should be embraced by the lesbian. The argument is that, as the man identifies as a woman, he is therefore a lesbian, and should be embraced as such. The book then claims that as he identifies as a man, his male genitalia are therefore female. Which is utterly bonkers.
The gender critical movement has been attacked as right-wing, but very many of its members actually come from the left, such as Kean and Linehan. Last week Linehan said on his weekly video about the transgender craze, The Mess We’re In, that he was surprised at the silence in the Tory party about all this. This was in contrast to the state of the Labour party, which is tearing itself apart over the issue. He believed that they were waiting to hoover up women, who felt disenfranchised and marginalised by the trans movement.
If the invitation to Duffield to join the Tories is real, then it proves this is starting to happen.
And while liberal feminists support trans rights and initiatives to counter transphobia, this is increasingly rejected by gender critical feminists as well as ordinary women and their male supporters, who have been peaked by seeing just how extreme the trans ideology is becoming.
Duffield herself is a noxious individual, and her departure from Labour would be no loss. But it would be hugely damaging to the party as a whole if they alienated ordinary women just to cater to an extreme gender ideology.
Readers of this blog will be very aware of my position on the trans ideology. I believe the ideology is immensely harmful, causing psychologically vulnerable people to believe falsely that they are of the wrong sex. The process of medical transition is long, expensive and very often difficult and there may be serious complications that permanently impair the life of the person undergoing it. At the same time the idea that anyone can validly claim to be a member of the opposite sex simply by saying they identify as that gender has made biological women vulnerable to sexually predatory biological men, who have gained access to female-only spaces. There have been a spate of rapes and sexual assaults in Californian women’s prisons, thanks to legislation backed by Biden granting trans-identified men the right to be housed in them. At the same time transwomen may still retain biological advantages over born women in sport which makes them competing with them unfair. And Trans Rights Activists can be violent and abusive. They do post abuse and threatening imagery against their opponents online, and gender critical feminists – termed TERFS by their opponents – have been assaulted. At a recent demonstration in Spain by feminists protesting against their government’s self-ID bill there were three squads of riot police sent in to protect them against assault by militant pro-trans activists. Eventually so many of trans activists appeared in such a aggressive mood that the police advised the women to leave for their own safety.
Now Rosie Duffield has appeared in the Sunset Times to claim that she’s not appearing at the Labour party conference due to threats from trans activists and LGBTQ+ Labour.
Despite my opposition to the trans Ideology, I have to be fair. It seems that no such threats have been sent to Duffield. She has not produced a single threatening tweet to support her claim.
As Mike points out, it seems she’s copying the tactics of Luciana Berger of smearing her opponents in the party with false claims of abuse. Berger a few years ago claimed that she had received anti-Semitic abuse from Labour party members. It was a flat-out lie. She had received abuse, but it all came from the usual source – the far right. Duffield is a right-winger, and so Starmer has taken the trouble to check her welfare, something I doubt he would do for anyone on the left who had suffered abuse.
Duffield, of course, has form when it comes to trying to get left-wingers and Corbynites thrown out of the party. She marched with Ruth Smeeth in the ‘lynch mob’ of right-wing female Labour MPs in support of the fake anti-Semitism allegations against Mark Wadsworth.
She also demanded that Chris Williamson should be found guilty and thrown out of the party when he was hauled before the NCC’s kangaroo court.
And Mike points out that she smeared victims of her own abuse.
She is deeply untrustworthy and this looks like another lie made up by a right-winger to smear the left.
But unfortunately it’s a lie that the right-wing press and media are all too keen to hear. Alex Belfield has been pushing it this morning.
Duffield’s behaviour not only shows the sheer mendacity of the Blairites, it also shows their complete absence of any positive policies. They say nothing to oppose the Tories, because they support Tory policies and want to steal their voters. They want to turn Labour into a second Tory party, and to do so wish to suppress and expel the left.
But having nothing positive to offer themselves, all they can do is smear and expel them with lies and falsehoods.
More evidence of the shameless treachery of Keir Starmer, David Evans and the Blairites in the Labour party. At one O’clock in the morning, Jess Barnard, the chair of Young Labour, got an email telling her that she was being investigated for transphobic tweets. Novara Media put up a video about this last night and Mike’s put up a piece about it this morning. The tweets are anything but offensive. One reads
‘Competition Time
Guess how many T%RT accounts I had to block today?
Closest guess gets to pick a charity supporting transpeople for me to donate some of cllr allowance to. (Voting closes in 24 hours).’
‘Expect better from a Labour representative. These accounts stalk, harass, incited hatred and abuse towards transpeople. Why on earth a Labour cllr would defend them is completely beyond me. There’s no fishing for anything I just won’t be giving transphobes energy.’
As Barnard pointed out in her reply to the Labour complaints team, there’s absolutely no personal abuse in the letter, nor anything really offensive, as far as I can see. TERF stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists. The anti-trans people themselves prefer to describe themselves as ‘gender critical’, and regard TERF as a term of abuse. Novara don’t agree, finding it almost too polite.
Barnard’s own reply to the NEC runs
‘Dear NEC members,
I write to you urgently seeking clarification regarding an email I received this morning giving me notice that I am under investigation for challenging transphobia online.
I dare say you will agree from the evidence and charges, this is absolutely astounding that the party resources are being used on this. There is no discrimination evident in this document, attacking trans people is not a protected characteristic. I haven’t identified any individuals, therefore I cannot see why I have been put under investigation from either evidence given or alleged rules broken.
I am also deeply concerned that this is being sent to me on your behalf at 1am, having a huge detrimental impact on my mental health. As a young member already facing hostility from some members of staff, this is starting to feel very much like harassment and intimidation.
I want to ask if this is being done in the name of the NEC and, if not, that this be overturned and there is an investigation as to why people who challenge discrimination against trans people or block abusive accounts are being put under investigation.’
I strongly disagree with Barnard’s attitude towards the transgender ideology. I don’t want to see anyone persecuted, denied jobs or abused and assaulted simply because they suffer from gender dysphoria. However, there are real issues and problems there. The massive growth of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria among teenage girls and young women seems more like a social panic, a mass psychological disorder than a real disease located in neurology. The treatment is highly difficult and the use of puberty blockers, then cross-gender hormones do have a detrimental affect on transpeoples’ health.
While I have no doubt that many transpeople genuinely suffer from the disorder and need to transition, there is a problem with perverted men claiming to identify as women in order to get into women’s spaces. The Wi spa incident in California was a case in point. Female customers complained about a naked man in an area exclusively for women. It’s been claimed it was a hoax, but others have come forward to corroborate the account. It seemed that the accuse man has previous convictions for indecent exposure and burglary. President Biden has passed legislation allowing biological men who identify as women to be housed in women’s prisons. As a result, there have been incidents of rape and pregnancy from sex offenders identifying as women. This has also happened in Ireland. I don’t doubt that there are men who have feminine characteristics that do deserve to be placed in women’s prisons. Way back in the 1990s there was a case of a person housed in male prison, who believed that they were vulnerable because they were really female. This individual was a hermaphrodite who had breasts and been born without male genitals. This sounds like an intersex genetic disorder in which individuals who are genetically male are born without genitals and later develop breasts. There was a theory at one time that the Pharoah Ankhnaten suffered from this disorder because of his bizarre appearance in the art of his reign. Women’s safety should be paramount, and sex predators should not be allowed into women’s spaces, however, they identify.
Also, if you listen to the anti-trans activists, it appears that all violence and abuse comes from the trans rights activists. Anti-trans activists have been physically assaulted by their pro-trans opponents and have suffered real abuse and death threats online. These have been extensively described on sites like ‘Women Are Human’. Trans activists have posted pictures of guns on twitter with captions saying that this is what they’re going to do to TERFS. At one Pride rally a week or so ago, a man was thrown out because he turned up wearing the T-Shirt of the LGB Alliance, a gay rights group that has dropped the ‘Trans’ because they feel it is a separate issue that detracts from the fight for gay equality. Not only was his insulted and thrown out, he was also physically assaulted off camera.
But clearly, Barnard has not published abuse online. She did not post pictures of guns or tell anyone she was going to murder people. She just blocked them and expressed her surprise at Labour councillors supporting the anti-trans movement. She should not have been suspended for this. I have an anti-trans views myself, but perhaps I’m being oldy-fash here, as my gran used to say, but I want issues settled by rational debate. Not by people being suspended or silenced by authoritarian fiat.
And Starmer is especially out of order because a few weeks ago, he and Angela Rayner announced that they were firmly behind the campaign to remove transphobia. So that’s another promise this deeply untrustworthy leader has broken.
The real reason for the investigation, it seems, is one again Starmer’s determination to purge pro-Palestinian activists. Barnard didn’t back down on pressure placed on her to remove the Palestine Solidarity Campaign from the Young Labour annual conference. He tried to get the conference cancelled, but they are obliged to hold it by the Labour party constitution. No one defies Keef Stalin! Hence the trumped up charge.
It also seems it’s now common practice for Labour to email members and politicos late at night informing them that they’re being investigated. Mike’s put up a series of messages from long term Labour members who’ve received emails at 11 pm and 1 am in the morning.
The NEC has rescinded the investigation and the letter, claiming it was a mistake. But as Raphael Dogg points out, “An ‘error’ is when you press a wrong key. Spending a day sifting through someone’s social media, finding stuff that can be bent to appear rule-breaking, preparing a disciplinary case, sending it off at 1am: I think that’s called something else. Eh, @Keir_Starmer?’
Tom London said “This is what happens when the party machinery is in hands of people who see everything through the prism of factionalism and have no understanding of the rule of law, due process or simple decency and common-sense There are many other cases that should be withdrawn immediately.’
And Pamela Fitzpatrick, who is taking Labour to court over her suspension, wonder if the letters are deliberately timed to cause maximum distress. The answer, Mike states, is an unequivocal ‘Yes’. I agree absolutely.
Starmer is a disgrace. He’s an authoritarian incompetent with no principles and a hatred of the left and the pro-Palestinian movement. He has done next to nothing to present an alternative case to the Tories, because he hasn’t got one.
He needs to go before he destroys the party, and everyone he has purged should be immediately readmitted.
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