British Ethnic Minorities Abandoning Left-Wing Identity Politics for Values of Family, Faith and Flag

Rakib Ehsan, Beyond Grievance: What the Left Gets Wrong About Ethnic Minorities (London: Forum 2023).

I first came across this in an interview Ehsan himself gave about it on YouTube. I can’t remember now what channel it was on, but I think it may have been the SDP’s as Ehsan’s politics seem similar to theirs – left-wing economically but conservative socially. He also says at the outset that he tries to bridge the gap between Blue Labour and Red Tories. I have very strong issues with both of those groups, as they cloak their Thatcherite economics that disenfranchise and exploit working people in the language of the left. See Philip Blonde’s Red Tory. The book is directed very firmly at the Labour party. Ehsan sees the party as having abandoned class based activism in the wake of the BLM movement for divisive identity politics imported from America. This is a country that has a very different history and political culture from the UK, and this is going to cost them the votes of the very ethnic minorities they seek to court.

Contrary to identitarian propaganda, Britain and its people aren’t racist, although racism still exists and needs tackling where it does. The supposed privilege Whites enjoy over people of colour disappear when examined in detail. Some ethnic minorities are surpassing Whites in school grades, pay and employment. There are also differences in achievement between White demographic groups. Working class White English males are nearly at the bottom, with only Irish Travellers below them. Chinese and Indians outperform Whites. Black Africans are also outperforming Whites academically. There is no overarching ‘BAME’ community, as these are very different peoples who have different levels of achievement. Black Africans, for example, are much more successful than Afro-Caribbean peoples. The success and growing achievements of people of colour is being obscured by the grievance narrative that they are all being held back by systemic racism. As a man of mixed Bangladeshi-Uttar Pradeshi heritage, he felt particularly insulted when Jeremy Corbyn declared that only Labour could unlock the potential of Britain’s Black and Asian communities. This attitude, he warns, is going to cost the Labour party the votes of Britain’s non-White communities. Rather than being obsessed with racial grievances, these communities value the two parent family, religious faith and are patriotically British. It is these values, that are despised by the woke left, that produces their increasing academic, economic and social successes. This success should be celebrated, and the White population, which is trailing behind in many instances, could, he dares to suggest, take a leaf out of their book. At the last election, one million people of colour abandoned Labour for the Tories.

Brexit Not Fascist Project of Nostalgic White Supremacists

He is also a Brexiteer and is at pains to argue that Brexit wasn’t the project of Fascist, backward-looking Whites. Many of the Whites who voted for it did so because they came from communities who believed the country had been harmed by the EU, not because of immigration. And a large proportion of the non-White population also voted Leave. One in three Asians did so. They feared the immigration to this country of large numbers of people from parts of Europe which were much less tolerant of non-Whites. They also wanted Britain to establish greater contact with the Commonwealth.

Ethnic Disparities Based on Other Factors Apart from Racism

As for the disparities between ethnic groups in sport, jobs and education, some of this is down to class, and differences in culture and job expectations. For example, Bangladeshis largely do better than Whites at school, but come from a very traditional culture that sees women’s place as being in the home. There is thus a relative lack of Bangladeshi women in the workplace. He also discusses the question of the absence of British Asians in cricket played at the county and national level. This comes from the allegations of racism at Yorkshire CC. He states that this was clearly a case of racism, and that the club was racist hellhole. But he quotes several British Asian cricketers that there are particular attitudes in British Asian culture against playing cricket professionally. Asian parents want good, secure jobs for their children – jobs like doctor or dentist. Professional cricket is very insecure, and so their parents will try and steer their kids away from it. As for the police, in many instances it’s a matter of family tradition, with children following parents and relatives in the force. Thus, White people tend to predominate simply because of family tradition. And on the subject of the cops, he cites evidence that shows that most people of colour are satisfied with their local police forces. Indeed, more non-Whites trust the cops more than White British. This does not include the Metropolitan Police, who are distrusted because of their proven racism, misogyny and other forms of bigotry. He believes that this could be tackled by breaking it up into smaller, local forces, and letting local forces also run the parts of the Met that extend into surrounding counties like Kent.

Regarding Islam, he cites the statistic that three-quarters of Muslims believe that Britain is a good place to be one. This is much more than the general British population. More Muslims are also concerned about the threat of Islamism than Whites. He also criticises the Labour MP Naz Shah for claiming that the Prevent programme was resented by Muslims for demonising them when the stats showed that 53 per cent of Muslims weren’t aware of it.

Black and Asians Patriotic Brits

The Black and Asian communities were also generally more patriotic and had a greater trust in British democracy, although this was much less so in the younger generation. 78 per cent of older Asians had faith in British democracy, but only 58 per cent of the younger generation, just a bit lower than Whites at 62 per cent. He put this down to the older generation coming from countries which were unstable with very repressive regimes, tracing the history in particular of the British South Asian community. This began after the War with Sikhs from the Punjab, who had been displaced from Pakistan and given poor quality land in India. They were then followed by Gujuratis seeking employment in the NHS. And then came the ethnic cleansing of the Ugandan Asian community by Idi Amin and his policy of Africanisation. The South Asians in Africa were employed as middle ranking officials and businessmen between the White colonial officials at the top and indigenous Africans at the bottom. There were already immigration restrictions in place, but they were admitted by Ted Heath. I’ve heard again and again, including from Asian speakers at our local church, that the Ugandan Asian community is still grateful to Britain because of this.

He also has immense respect for the Queen and King Charles. The Queen had a strong sense of duty to the Commonwealth, while our current liege lord is strongly multicultural. He said in his coronation speech that Britain is a ‘community of communities’ and that he wanted to be known as ‘Defender of Faith’, meaning all Britain’s religious communities, not just the Anglican church. On the subject of which, he notes the strong contribution made by Black Africans to keeping it alive in the face of the massive secularisation of the White population. He states that you are far more likely to get a sense of the deep antiquity of Christianity in Britain in an African cafe eating Jellof rice in London than in many White communities. It is ridiculous to blame the Queen for the evils committed under imperialism and colonialism, and Britain’s non-Christian religions are certainly not resentful of Christianity. He takes issue with the secularists in the Labour party, who feel that religion is outmoded and dangerous. They are actively putting non-Whites off, because these cultures have a very strong religious identity. More Muslims see their religion as important to their identity than Whites. The Labour party has a strong tradition of Christian Socialism, and these non-Christian religious communities would like to see it revived.

Importance of Education to Indians and Chinese

He also puts the growing success of the Indian and Chinese communities in education and professionally to strong families and religion. He cites statistics showing that children from stable, two parent homes are less likely to join criminal gangs, are more emotionally stable, and do better at school and in the world of work. Far fewer Asian children live in single parent families than Whites. They, and the Chinese, are also very aspirational. They want their children to do well, make sure they work hard at school and in the case of the Chinese make sure they keep away from bad influences. They also have the support of the wider community, with elders actively taking an interest in the welfare and progress of the young. He does not decry single mothers, recognising the immense hard work so many do to raise their children, and that the relaxation of the divorce laws were brought in for the very good reason of allowing women in particular to escape abusive marriages. But it has had a devastating effect on marriage and the family in Britain. 63 per cent of Afro-Caribbean children live in one parent families, and 43 per cent of Black African. 25 per cent of Whites also are being raised in families largely without a father. This is holding these groups back, and he dares to suggest that Whites could take a leaf out of the Asian communities in starting to value marriage and the family more. I am in complete agreement, and don’t think this is at all controversial.

On the subject of religion, he states that he has mixed views on the subject, wondering if it really is outmoded and dangerous, especially after the terrorist attacks of 7/7 and the massacre of schoolgirls by a suicide bomber at the Ariana Grande concert. But the stats also show that people, who have a strong religious faith are generally more mentally stable, more optimistic and with a higher degree of life satisfaction than atheists. He also believes that respect for the cultures of ethnic minorities should not be used as a pretext for avoiding tackling crime and extremist attitudes in those communities, which could be excused by their perpetrators as part of their culture.

Britain Not Racist Country

He also cites the statistics showing that Britain is not a racist country. A large majority of Whites -well above 70 per cent – believe that Englishness is a matter of values rather than colour. The number of people linking Englishness to White ethnicity is low, and fell markedly in the last decade. Britain has robust laws against racism and discrimination, and the level of real racism, including abuse and violence, is lower in Britain than in many continental countries like France, the Netherlands, Germany and Austria. This, he claims, shows the falsity of the Remain argument that views the continent as a paradigm of anti-racism in contrast with evil Britain. Anti-Black racism also isn’t confined to Whites. Eight per cent of Blacks in Britain have experienced discrimination at the hands of other Blacks. 84 per cent of Brits have no problem with a person of colour heading the government. Rishi Sunak, regardless of his wretched political policies, is an example of Asian success, who should be celebrated. His parents both worked in the medical sector – I think his father was a pharmacist. Sunak was privately educated, rising professionally and politically.

This is where the book is really controversial. He takes these stats showing that Britain isn’t a racist country from a variety of reports, including those of CRED and Sewell. The last was commissioned under the Tories, and came under widespread attack for supposedly erasing the reality of racism in Britain. This was despite it being written by mostly Black and Asian academics. Various Labour MPs accused it of being Fascist, with one even Tweeting an image of a Klan meeting underneath. The Black and Asian politicians, who do not accept that Britain is racist, like Kemi Badenoch, are subjected to horrendous racist abuse as Uncle Toms and worse language. He himself has been attacked in these terms. His favourite has been that he is a ‘Muslim Mosley’. Well, I’d say that the Muslim Mosleys were the Islamists convincing lost and alienated Muslims to join Daesh, or march around our cities demanding sharia law while waving the black flag of jihad. The British left, and primarily the Labour party, has taken over dangerous and divisive identity politics imported from America. What many of the people of colour demanding these policies want is not equality, but preferential treatment. He is also suspicious of many of those attacking Islamophobia, as he suspects that many of those are Islamists using it as a strategy to introduce aspects of sharia law. I think he’s right here, as the mass protests against the autistic schoolboy for Islamophobia when he scuffed a Qur’an, a horrendous blasphemy under Islam, certainly shows. He is against the European Court of Human Rights ruling that businesses are allowed to discriminate against women wearing the hijab if this threatens to be disruptive. He points out that the hijab simply covers the face. It is not like the niqub, which covers the whole body, including the face. The ruling threatens to prevent devout Muslim women from finding work outside the home and bring them into contact with mainstream society.

Attacks on Corbyn

Naturally for a man of the right he gives Jeremy Corbyn a good kicking. He claims that Labour lost the 2019 election due to his inability to tackle the anti-Semitism crisis and the promotion of identitarian politics. But this wasn’t the case. Corbyn had very wide support and paradoxically a greater share of the vote than Blair and New Labour, regardless of the fact that it was the poorest electoral performance for the party since the 1930s. What brought him down was a very manufactured campaign by the British right and the official Jews of the Board of Deputies, Chief Rabbinate and various pro-Israel groups. They were alarmed by his championing of the Palestinians against the oppression and ethnic cleansing of the Israeli state, and so did everything they could to smear him as an anti-Semite. Corbyn has a long career of standing up for Jewish Brits, but this counted for nothing to people who regard any opposition or criticism of Israel as an anti-Semitic. As for the real anti-Semites in the Labour party, the true nature of the crisis was kept hidden from him by right-wing intriguers and traitors within the party. People like Margaret Hodge, who admitted she did everything she could to stop Labour being elected.

Rejection of Labour’s Proposed New Equality Act

He respects the Labour party for the anti-racist legislation it passed in the 70s as well as the Equality Act passed by Blair, but is firmly against Labour’s promised new Equality Act demanding affirmative action. The majority of Black and Asian people do not want or need it. Indeed, he claims that there is a suspicion that Labour will hold people of colour back in order to stop their success invalidating the claim that their lagging behind Whites is all due to racism. He is also critical of organisations like the Runnymede Commission pushing this narrative. Twenty years ago the Commission praised Britain for its multicultural tolerance. Now it claims that Britain is marred by deep structural racism. But British society isn’t racist and hasn’t become worse. It is just that the Runnymede Commission, in order to keep itself relevant, has joined BLM and the other grievance mongers. Labour’s embrace of these groups and individuals, such Shola Mos-Shogbamimu, is putting voters, including those of colour, off. And they may well abandon the party because of it.

The Trans Issue

He also has controversial views on the trans issue. He states that trans people should enjoy the same protection from abuse, discrimination and violence as other protected groups. However, transwomen should not be allowed to enter women’s private spaces such as prisons, toilets and changing rooms. In many ways, this is common sense as trans identified biological male rapists have been put in women’s prisons in California and Scotland, and there has been an outcry against it. The SNP lost much of their support when they also placed these dangerous men in women’s prisons. It does conflict, however, with the view that ‘trans women are women’, even if they are not biologically, and so trans activists and supporters will naturally find it very offensive. And he is also not afraid to call divorce parties degenerate as part of the collapse of marriage and the nuclear family in the west.

Radical Attacks on Marriage and the Family

This is a controversial but necessary book. Controversial because it overturns the received wisdom about British ethnic minorities as the victims of systemic racism needing aid and allyship from mainstream White British society. The statistics about the beneficial effects of growing up in two-parent family are almost certainly correct. They’ve been reproduced several times before. This will jar with some on the radical left. There has been an attack on traditional European marriage since the time of the 18th century French philosophes. Free love instead of marriage was embraced by 19th century Romantics like Shelley and Byron. It has also been part of the Anarchist critique of capitalism as well as Marxism. Marx states in The Communist Manifesto that it degrades women and believed it was dying out among the working class in his own time. This was further expanded by Engels in his The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, which also drew on the Das Mutterrecht of the German antiquarian, Backhausen. Backhausen had believed that society had passed through several phases of development – a communal society without institutional marriage, followed by matriarchy and then finally patriarchy. Archaeologists and historians have since rejected this. Historical research has also shown that marriage very definitely wasn’t dying out among the 19th century working class. Nevertheless, marriage has been attacked by radical activists. I can remember the controversy about Pebble Mill, a BBC lunchtime magazine programme in the 70s, when they invited on a couple who very definitely believed that marriage was dying out, and that this was a very good thing indeed. Over the other side of the Channel, the Postmodernist Marxist Althusser attacked marriage and the family as part of the sociological infrastructure of capitalism and feudalism.

Benefits of Religious Faith

Similarly there is abundant evidence supporting the view that religion is beneficial to one’s wellbeing. A few years ago medical researchers claimed that having a faith in general added six months to one’s life. And back when the New Atheists were beginning their assault on religion neurologists found that people who had mystical experiences were generally in no worse mental health than the rest of the population. This obviously isn’t something secular and atheist activists want to hear. Nor do I think they really want to hear that in general, non-Christian minorities don’t have an issue with institutional, public Christianity. The claim that they do tends to come from secularist and atheist organisations like the Humanist Society as part of their project of removing Christianity and other forms of religion from the public sphere. The philosopher Bruce Trigger tackled this subject in his Religion in Public over decade. He claimed that many Jews did not want the bishops removed from the House of Lords because, so long as they were, it created a public space for religion in politics.

Ethnic Success Also Due to Differences in Culture and History

I also think that the stats showing that Britain is not an intrinsically racist country is likely to be true, even if the report that argued this was commissioned by the Tories. If it is untrue, then it has to be shown to be untrue through further sociological research and polling. The argument that it must be the case from ethnic disparities is false, because as Thomas Sowell has shown, different ethnic groups have different attitudes and economic and professional specialities due to their history and quite often geographical location. The Chinese and Gujuratis are, like the Jews, ‘middleman cultures’ strongly based on trade. They therefore tend to surpass other groups in business, as do the Lebanese in South America. Ehsan himself argues that the success of various ethnic groups depends on the cultural resources and the attitudes and material advantages they may have enjoyed when they left their country of origin. Ugandan Asians have prospered, despite having been robbed of nearly everything they owned by Amin and his thugs, because they were business and professional people. Afro-Caribbeans, however, generally speaking lack this entrepreneurial and professional background and so lag behind. And the idea that all White people are privileged is going to ring particularly hollow for White working class boys and the hollowed out coastal towns and post-industrial communities. The instant dismissal of the claim that Britain isn’t racist is based on prejudice rather than genuine scepticism.

Changes in Patterns of Racism Since the Experience of the First Afro-Caribbean Migrants

The attitude of the identitarian left that Britain must be intrinsically racist seems to come mostly from the experience of Afro-Caribbeans, who are generally more distrustful of the police and democracy than other groups. They have indeed, along with the first generation Asian immigrants, suffered real racism in the form of institutional discrimination – no dog, no blacks, no Irish – racist bullying and violence, particularly from real Fascists in the shape of the BNP, National Front and other lowlifes. It is Afro-Caribbeans in particular who lag behind Whites. This history has bred an attitude among many that Britain is racist and hostile, backed up with convoluted and contrived arguments from the Postcolonial set. This has become part of the general culture of the left, because of the long tradition of anti-racism and anti-imperialism. It looks plausible, because for over four decades now the received view has been that Britain is racist to a greater or lesser extent, even though the situation has changed and is now becoming much more complex. Diane Abbott didn’t want to discuss inter-ethnic minority conflict and racism, but this attitude is contradicted by rioting last year between Hindus and Muslims in Leicester. Ehsan points out that this shows that ethnic conflict isn’t just something confined to Whites. And there is now and industry of grievance mongers in academia and woke capitalism, whose careers are centred around portraying White Britain as innately oppressive, that Blacks and other people of colour are always victims and that Whites should feel guilty as racial oppressors tainted with the blood of the indigenous peoples they exterminated and enslaved.

Multiculturalism Pulling Ethnic Groups Apart, Not Together

Ehsan notes that while Britain may be more tolerant than other countries, there is still a problem in pulling the different ethnic groups together. He cites further statistics shown that a majority of Brits feels more needs to be done on this count, and argues that was is needed is a common set of shared values. But this is one of the problems of multiculturalism. Blair recruited as his community representatives people who very definitely not representative of their communities and determined to push their own sectarian or ethnic politics. And the attack on the welfare state has meant that different communities are competing against each other for government funding and aid. For all his faults, Corbyn did represent a return to class politics, which is another reason why there was such a concerted attempt to remove him. If the working class in general receives proper welfare support, there is less jealousy and resentment between ethnic groups, and so Whites in particular are less inclined to heed racists like the BNP.

Blue Labour and Attacks on the Welfare State

As for the position that government action is needed to strengthen the family, I agree. But this goes further than simply making it a matter of tax. And I am very suspicious of the right when they claim to strengthen the family. All too often it is based around the view that it’s declined due to the welfare state, and so the first thing they do is cut welfare support even further while loudly crying, like Thatcher, that it’s more self-help and will make people more self-reliant.

He is critical of the Tories as a corrupt group wrecking the economy for their own benefit and hope that Labour will put forward pro-working class policies. But this won’t come from Blue Labour any more than it will supposedly come from Red Tories. What comes from the Blairites and the other Thatcherite infiltrators is more privatisation, including that of the NHS, more cuts to the welfare state and more attempts to strangle the unions, all of which you can see in Stalin’s leadership of the Labour party.

This book is necessary as it argues against the current racial narrative from a man of colour, who clearly believes that such narratives are damaging the Labour party. Certainly racial attitudes have changed radically in my lifetime and it is time that the debate recognised this. But at the same time, as Ehsan is careful to state, racism still exists and needs tackling where it does.

A Study of the Ideology Behind 1960s French Revolutionary Radicalism

Richard Gombin, The Origins of Modern Leftism (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1975)

The late 1960s saw a wave of radical ferment and agitation erupt in America and France. In America, the Students for a Democratic Society and other groups campaigned against the Vietnam War and for a radical reform of American society, while Black civil rights activists like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X demanded the end of segregation and improved conditions for Black Americans. This radical agitation was marked by race riots and left-wing terrorism by groups like the Weathermen. I think that most people on this side of the Atlantic are probably more familiar with the American situation than the French through the close ties between Britain and America in the Special Relationship. But France also experienced a wave a radical unrest beginning with the occupation of the Sorbonne by radical students in 1968. These then established contacts with ordinary workers, who struck in sympathy, and there was a wave of wildcat strikes. By the end of the decade and the early 1970s, sections of the radical left were turning to kidnapping and terrorism. Although the French revolutionary activism of these years may be less-well known, it has nevertheless impressed itself on British memory and culture. The left-wing French director, Jean-Paul Godard, produced a film about the agitation and unrest around Jagger and the Stones preparing to record ‘Sympathy for the Devil’. The Sex Pistol’s manager, Malcolm McLaren, spuriously claimed to have been a member of the Situationists, one of the radical groups involved in the unrest. And the ideas of ideologues like Guy Debord have found a readership and supporters among the British left. Way back in the 1980s there was a volume of revolutionary texts from 1968 published, I think, by the Socialist Workers Party. And the radical unrest and its turn to terrorism is covered by Guardian columnist Francis Wheen in his book on ‘70s paranoia.

Gombin was an academic attached to the Centre de la Recherche Scientifique. His book isn’t a history of the revolutionary movement of the late 60s in France, but an examination of its ideology. He calls this ‘Leftism’ and contrasts it with ‘extremism’, which is how he terms radical Marxism. This is the extreme left-wing Marxism, often Trotskyite, which approaches or has some of the ideas and attitudes of the Leftists, but does not go as far as them by rejecting Marxism. And ‘leftism’ itself could be described instead as post-Marxism. Gombin explains that Marxism came late to France, and as a result the gap of a quarter of century or so until French intellectuals and activists caught up with the radical experiments and revision of Marxism carried out by the German, Hungarian and other eastern European Communists and radical socialists in the council and communist revolutions of 1919 and the early 1920s. The revelations of the horrors of Stalin’s brutal dictatorship in the USSR, the gulags and the purges, came as a shock to left-wing intellectuals in France and elsewhere. The Communist party had uncritical accepted the lie that the former Soviet Union was a workers’ paradise. In response to these revelations, some Marxist intellectuals like Sartre condemned the purges and gulags, but otherwise remained faithful to the Communist party. Others went further and joined the Trotskyites. But a few others were moved to use Marx’s critical methods to examine Marxism itself, and rejected many of its central doctrines.

The revolutionary movement was led by a number of different groups, such as Socialism ou Barbarie, Rouge et Noire, the Situationists and radical trade unions like the CFDT, which had originally been set up a social Catholic organisation separate from the socialist trade unions. There seems to have been no overarching ideology, and indeed the radicals explicitly rejected any ideology that sought to dictate the course of the revolution. Nevertheless, there were a set of key ideas and attitudes shared by these groups. This rejected all hierarchies, those of modern, capitalist society, the trade union leadership and the patriarchal family, as well as the education and university system. They adopted wholeheartedly Marx’s slogan that the emancipation of the working class should be done by the working class, while also creating new ideas responding to the new welfare state and affluent society.

The viewed Marxism and trade unionism as a response to the conditions of the 19^th century, when the working class had to concentrate on winning concessions from the capitalists and authorities in order to survive. However, the establishment of the welfare state had removed the threat of death and deprivation, and so the workers could now move on to the task of reforming society itself. The expanded Marx’s doctrine of alienation so that it didn’t just cover capitalism’s alienation of the worker from the goods he produced, and the latter’s fetishization, but also the alienation created by the affluent society. People’s real needs and desires were suppressed, and false needs created instead. Work should be playful, but instead the worker suffered boredom.

They also considered that there was a fundamental similarity between the capitalist west and the Soviet bloc, which resulted in them calling the USSR’s brand of state socialism ‘State capitalism’ in contrast to the ideal socialism in which society would be run by the workers. Communist rule in Russia had not liberated the workers, but instead created a new governing class. Unlike western capitalism, the Communist bureaucracy did not own the properties and industries they directed, but otherwise held the same power and privilege that in the west was held by the capitalist elites and industrialists. Changes in capitalism had also resulted in a cleavage between those who owned the companies, and those who directed and managed them. As a result, the struggle in the west was between workers and directors, not workers and owners. Soviet Communism was dubbed state capitalism as it was held the bureaucratic socialism of the USSR resembled that of western capitalism, the difference being that in the Soviet bloc all industries were owned by the state rather than private capitalists. One ideologue, Burnham, considered that Fascism and Communism were both examples of ‘state collectivism’, with the difference between the two being that private industry was retained under Fascism. Burnham was a vicious anti-Semite, and had previously urged the workers to unite with the Fascists against the Jews.

The radicals also rejected critical Marxist doctrines like dialectal materialism and its claim to have produced a science of capitalist development. In his later writings, Marx had believed that he had uncovered the sociological laws that would lead capitalism inevitably to give way to socialism. The Leftists rejected this because it was removed the voluntarist element from revolutionary activity. Instead of revolutionaries deliberately setting out to overturn capitalism and usher in the new socialist society, this attitude instead that all they needed to do was wait for it all to happen on its own. In their view, this attitude was closer to the evolutionary socialism of Bernstein than the Marxism of 1848. They rejected Lenin’s doctrine of a centralised party of active revolutionaries, because the workers on their own could only attain trade union consciousness. This, according to the Leftists, had resulted in a bureaucratic class that ruled over the workers, and was certainly not the vanguard of the working class as it was declared to be by Lenin. They did, however, believe in some kind of central party or organisation, but this would only be to guide and suggest possible ideas and actions, not to dictate a revolutionary programme. And all revolutionary ideas and policies should be subjected to the rigorous test of whether they worked in practice. If they did, they were true. If not, they were ‘ideology’, used in the same sense of Marx’s ‘false consciousness’. The revolutionary could only be carried out by the conscious will of the workers, as they became aware of their mission to reform society, independent of any ideas of social progress or objective historical conditions. There was therefore a radical subjective aspect to their conception of revolutionary activism in opposition to Marx’s ideas of historical progress according to object material conditions. Some of them also challenged Marxism-Leninism’s materialism, in which consciousness arose from matter and was merely matter reflecting itself. This got them attacked as ‘Idealists’ by the Communists.

They rejected the patriarchal family as an institution which brought up and trained the worker to accept hierarchical authority and his position in society as a worker, as well as the sexual repression that resulted from the prohibition of extra- and premarital sex. In fact, the student revolt that sparked the ferment started with a question about this by a student at the Sorbonne to a visiting government minister, who come to open the university’s swimming pool. The student also queried him about the university’s rules against male students entering the women’s halls. Well, as the poet once said, sexual intercourse was invented in 1963.

As for the institutions that should be used by the workers to govern politically and manage industry, there seems to have been a difference of ideas. Some, like the Dutch astronomer and Marxist Pannekoek, argued for worker’s councils like the German Raterevolution of 1919. Others refused to speculate, except to state that they should be created by the workers in response to the conditions of the time and the situations they were faced with. Regarding the conduct of the strikes, these were carried out through workers’ meetings on the shop floor, who would then elect a strike committee that would then take their grievances and demands to management. Some observers felt that this harked back to France’s native socialist and revolutionary traditions that predated Marx. The shop floor meetings were, in their view, related to that of the sections during the French Revolution.

Apart from these political and industrial ideas and aspirations, there were also a set of revolutionary ideas about the proper reform of the arts. These looked back to the attacks on official art by the Dadaists and Surrealists, but felt that they had failed in their mission to create an anti-art. They therefore looked forward to a new, revolutionary society in which everyone would be an artist or a poet.

Well, the revolutionary agitation passed with the sixties and first years of the 1970s. Wheen seems to suggest that it ended when one group was about to bomb a millionaire’s yacht but finally drew back. Nevertheless, the terrorism carried on over this side of La Manche with the IRA in Northern Ireland and in Britain by the Angry Brigade, an anarchist group. In France the anarchists, syndicalists and Anarcho-Syndicalists were largely excluded from the revolutionary movement. Some of this was due to the antagonism between anarchists and Marxists and to the isolation of the anarchist groups themselves. By 1968 these had declined in membership and largely confined themselves to keeping the flame alive and commemorating great anarchist revolutionaries of the past, such as the Ukrainian Nestor Makhno.

The revolutionary movement of 1968 is now over fifty years in the past, overtaken in Britain and America by Reagan and Thatcherism. These two started a political counterrevolution aimed at preventing such a situation ever happening again. The right-wing, if not reactionary philosopher, Roger Scruton, said in an interview in the Spectator that he had been a socialist. But he was in France during the revolutionary movement, and was horrified by their ‘anti-civilizational rage’. The ideologues of the period still have an influence in the radical left. People are still reading and gaining inspiration from Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, for example. I think they also exerted an influence on the anti-capitalist movement of the ‘90s and noughties. Their protests had a deliberate carnivalesque aspect, with costumed marches, puppets and so on, which seems to have drawn on the ideas of the Situationists and other revolutionaries.

I strongly believe, however, that the leftist rejection of the family has had a profoundly negative effect on western society. The Tory right loathes Roy Jenkins because of the socially liberal legislation he introduced in the late 60s Labour government. This decriminalised homosexuality and made divorce easier. Jenkins was certainly not as socially radical as the revolutionaries across the channel. In 1982 he, Shirley Williams and David Owen left the Labour party to form the SDP on the grounds that the party under Michael Foot was now too left wing. Still, the Daily Heil once denounced him as the man who had ruined Britain. Jenkins probably had completely different motives for his legislation than the Revolutionaries. In Britain the movement for the legalisation of homosexuality had started, or at least had the support, of Winston Churchill. Churchill had been worried about the danger of gay ministers, civil servants and others establishment figures being blackmailed by the Soviets because of their sexuality. As for divorce, I think this came from the humane desire to stop people being trapped in unhappy, loveless marriages, especially to brutal, violent partners. John Mortimer in his one-man show in the ‘90s recalled that before Jenkins’ reforms, the only cause for divorce was adultery. There was one man, who was so desperate to divorce his wife, that he came home in different hats so that people would think she was being unfaithful.

Unfortunately, there were radical activists, hostile to the institution of marriage and the traditional family. I can remember a pair who turned up on an edition of the lunchtime magazine programme Pebble Mill in the 1970s to present their views, much to the disgust of many of the programmes’ viewers. The result has been a rise in fatherless families. I am very much aware than many unmarried mothers have done an excellent job of raising their children, but the general picture is grim. Children from fatherless homes perform less well at school and get poorer, lower-paid jobs. They are more likely to turn to crime, do drugs and engage in promiscuous sex. Many Black activists are particularly concerned about this and the way these issues are especially acute in their community.

As for workers’ control, I would love a degree of it introduced into industry, but not to the exclusion of parliamentary democracy. And while the radicals have a point in that trade unions hierarchies have frequently acted to stifle revolutionary activism by the workers, trade unionism as a whole was tarnished by the wildcat strikes that broke out against the wishes of the union leadership. It’s resulted in the caricature of union activism presented by the Tories in which Britain was held hostage to the union barons and its economy and industry weakened by their strikes. We desperately need a revival of trade union power to protect workers, especially with Sunak and the rest of them preparing to scrap the EU legislation protecting workers’ rights.

And with an ever-growing number of people in Britain relying on food banks to stave off starvation, because the Tories have wrecked the welfare state, we’ve gone back to the early conditions of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, when trade unionism and other forms of working class activism are very much a matter of survival.

On the plus side, I think the revolutionary movement has left a tradition of radical working class activism, which is no longer confined to either left or right. French working people seem much less willing to put up with government dictates than Brits, as shown in the Yellow Vest protests and the marches and riots against Macron raising the official retirement age. This has been admired by many Brits, including YouTube commenters and people on talk show phone-ins. We really need some of that spirit over this side of the Channel.

There is no doubt, from the position of democratic socialism, that the radicals went too far. Nevertheless, the continue to inspire members of the radical left with rather more moderate aims now protesting against predatory, exploitative capitalism, the exploitation of the environment, and racism, although this is not an issue that the book considers. Nevertheless, it was there, at least in the views and campaigns of post-structuralist Marxist activists.

History Debunked Suggests We Need Nazi ‘Heroic Mother’ Policies to Halt Demographic Decline

This is a response to a video Simon Webb put up some days ago. I meant to review it earlier, but there’s only so much fascism you can take, especially in today’s miserable economic situation and the Tories telling one lie after another. Webb’s video was prompted by a speech from the Japanese premier declaring that there was an existential crisis facing the Japanese the people. If they didn’t have more babies, they would die out. Webb notes that in the Beeb report about this, they stated that it could be solved by the Japanese importing people like other countries, but that the Japanese were firmly against this.

The Japanese have been worried about this for a very long time. Back in the 1990s the-then Japanese prime minister announced that if the country didn’t halt its declining birth rate, then they would be extinct in a thousand years’ time. That really is looking at the long term picture. To solve this problem, successive Japanese governments have suggested and embarked on various policies. One was that husbands should spend more time with their families in order to develop a closer relationship with their wives, with the unspoken implication that this would lead to more babies on the way. This provoked sharp criticism from one housewife, who complained that marital relations wouldn’t improve simply because the husband was at home more. The Japanese government has also set up a state dating agency to bring men and women together.

I suspect Japan’s demographic problems are partly due to particularly Japanese problems. There is, or was, a high rate of divorce among Japanese pensioners. This is caused by the Japanese work ethic, in which men work all the hours that God sends in order to support their families and make their country prosperous. The result is that they barely see their wives and families. When they retire, they find out that they have nothing in common and divorce. It’s a theme that was reflected in Japanese business novels. These featured loyal, hardworking sararimen, whose lives fall apart. They’re laid off by the companies they’ve loyally served and their families break up until they end up left behind running a small shop somewhere, lamenting that they’ve missed out on seeing their children grow up.

There’s also a trend among young Japanese not to date and have children. There was a Radio 4 programme, which I sadly missed, discussing this issue. It reported that this aversion was so severe that many young people even find the act of love itself repulsive. I wondered if this was a reaction to Japanese sex education and whatever Japanese youth is taught about sex outside marriage. If the attitudes against it are too harsh and the insistence on purity so strong, then it’s possible that this could lead to some impressionable people developing such a strong revulsion to sex. I remember from my schooldays that the sex education we were exposed to, with its clinical description of physical development and reproduction, as well as fears about the rising divorce rate, could almost have been calculated to put kids off sex. I also wonder if it’s due to the unavailability of contraception in Japan. This isn’t due to moral scruples, as in Roman Catholic Ireland. It was demanded by the Japanese medical complex, in order to protect the doctors that made money from performing abortions. Buddhism and Shinto have a series of three gods or kami, who preside over the souls of dead children. According to the anthropologist Dr Nigel Barley in his study of cultural attitudes to death and the dead across the world, Dancing with the Dead, the shrine to these gods are particularly supported by women, who’ve had abortions. I’m not criticising women’s right to abortions here, just noting that in previous decades over here the lack of contraception and the strong societal disapproval to births out of wedlock was a very strong disincentive to people, and especially women, having premarital sex.

In fact birth rates are declining across the world, mostly significantly in the developed west, but also elsewhere. One demographer interviewed a few decades ago in New Scientist predicted that in the middle years of this century the world would suffer a demographic crash. This is in stark contradiction with the 70s fears about the population explosion and ‘population bomb’. In many European countries the birth rate is below the level of population replacement.

Webb suggested that we might try to copy the Nazis, who gave medals to women who had large families. There were different medals award according to how many children they had. In fact, all the totalitarian states had similar policies. The Russians had their Heroic Mother awards, duly covered by Pravda, and Musso had a similar policy in his ‘Battle for Births’ campaign. If reproduction is a battle, it means people are doing it wrong. And if it’s a real physical battle, then it’s rape. But I think Musso meant it metaphorically, as everything was a battle in Fascist Italy. The campaign to increase cereal yield in agriculture was labelled ‘the Battle for Grain’. But Musso included in his policies to increase the birth rate various welfare benefits to make it easier and support women, who chose to have large families.

Webb has been followed in this by Laurence Fox, who gave a sermon on GB News yesterday, about his instinct that society was coming to an end because of the low birth rate in the west. This was breaking the social link Edmund Burke had said existed between the past, present and future generations. Of course, as a man of the right he has no sympathy for people demanding expanded welfare rights, accusing them of being ‘entitled’. They’re not. They’re people on the breadline demanding not expanded welfare provision, but proper welfare provision restored to adequate levels.

Plastic priest Calvin Robinson similarly discussed demographic decline in another piece for GB News. He was much more open about the provision of proper welfare support for families, arguing that Britain should follow the lead of Poland and Hungary. And then comes the element of racism. Because if we did this, like those countries we would not have to import people from outside.

And this is part of the problem.

Underneath these fears of demographic decline is the particular fear of White demographic decline. Other ethnic groups have larger families. Hence the stupid, malign conspiracy theories about ‘Eurabia’, that Muslims would outbreed Whites in the west and so eventually take over society. The French National Front let the cat out of the bag in the 90s. This was the mayor of one of the southern French cities, who had set up a system of welfare payments to encourage his citizens to have more babies. Except that this was a racist policy that applied only to Whites. Blacks, Asians and Muslims not allowed.

It’s why such a system would also have severe problems being introduced over here. And rightly so, as while I dare say that some members of ethnic groups don’t want to integrate or adopt British culture, others identify very strongly with it and see themselves as English, Welsh, Scots whatever. Such people shouldn’t be excluded from receiving these welfare payments simply because of the colour of their skin, whatever else one thinks of race relations and immigration.

Of course, the right blames the demographic crisis squarely on feminism and the way modern women are encouraged to pursue careers rather than raise families. Hence the Lotus Eaters put up a piece commenting on a report that half of all women are childless at thirty. To be fair, some left-wing feminists have also complained that feminism, for all its good intentions, has also denigrated the vital role of motherhood in society. But traditional attitudes towards gender roles may be part of the problem. In the New Scientist article I talked about earlier, it was noted that the countries with lowest birth rates had the most traditional attitudes towards childrearing, in which it was seen as primarily the responsibility of the mothers. This extended across cultures, from Italy in Europe to Japan. The countries which had the highest birth rates in the west were the Nordic countries, where men were being encouraged to help their wives with domestic chores and raising the sprogs.

That, and welfare policies designed to help working parents, seem far better solutions to the crisis than simply doling out medals based on the attitudes of totalitarian regimes.

Critical Race Theory, White Privilege and the Rhetoric of Ethnic Cleansing

As readers will have probably noticed, I have very strong objections to Critical Race Theory and particularly its concept of White privilege. Critical Race Theory is a postmodern revision of Marxism, dreamt up in the 1970s by Kimberle Crenshaw and a group of Black Marxist legal scholars in the 1970s. It replaces class as the instrument of oppression with race. ‘Whiteness’ is a bourgeois quality possessed by all Whites which guarantees them social, economic and political superiority to Blacks and other people of colour. Even if the individual White person is not racist. Racism, it also holds, has not declined, but is just better hidden. Whites must be made to know Black oppression and feel guilty about it. Much of the literature of Critical Race Theory and its activism is about deliberately humiliating Whites. For example, several years ago there were student riots at Evergreen College in Oregon. The college was very liberal, and there had been for decades since the 1970s an annual withdrawal of Black students during the summer months to mark the absence of Blacks during a critical phase in the civil rights struggle or so. By the middle of the last decade, this had changed into demands for the White students to absent themselves in favour of Blacks, in order to appreciate Black marginalisation. This was succeeded by a series of aggressive student demonstration in which Blacks and their White allies insisted on forcing Whites into inferior positions. At meetings, for example, Whites were required to sit at the back and not speak. Brett Weinstein, an evolutionary biologist with liberal views, describes it as ‘Black supremacy’. Not all Blacks supported this aggressive demonstration of racial vindictiveness, and one of Weinstein’s students, a young Black woman, shouted at the mob that she wasn’t oppressed. Students of whatever colour, who didn’t conform, were chased by the mob. Peter Boghossian, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay also demonstrated the irrationality and vicious prejudice of this woke pseudo-scholarship in the spoof papers they sent to various woke, postmodern journals, which were eventually collected up and published as Grievance Studies. In one paper, they argued that White male students should be forced to sit on the floor in order to teach them about marginalisation and persecution. They believed this would be too much for the academic journal to which they had submitted it. Alas, no; it was accepted with a reply complaining that they didn’t go far enough: the young men shouldn’t just be forced to sit on the floor, but should be chained up as well.

Part of what worries me about the concept of ‘White privilege’ is that privilege is something usually said of rich minority groups, who haven’t worked for their position, such as the aristocracy. Or the half of the British business elite that has inherited the ownership of their companies, rather than having worked their way up. It also recalls the legal privileges that accompanied the European class system, particularly under feudalism, and the legal restriction placed on Blacks in Jim Crow America and in the White-ruled colonies, like Rhodesia, Malawi and South Africa, until the beginning of Black majority rule. For example, until the establishment of democracy in the 1920s in Britain, women were barred from voting and there was a property qualification on the franchise, so that the majority of working class men did not have the vote either. I also believe that there was a property qualification on serving on juries, which was only abolished by Woy, sorry, Roy Jenkins in his socially liberal reforms of the 1960s. Much of the ire directed at Jenkins from the right comes from his decriminalisation of homosexuality and his relaxation of the divorce laws. One splenetic right-winger- from the Daily Heil perhaps? – once described him as a destroyer of British society comparable to Stalin or some other totalitarian monster. Really? Just Jenkins on his own? With his ‘good claret expression’, to use the words of caricaturist Gerald Scarfe. The last time I looked, Britain’s buildings were all standing rather than reduced to rubble by the rampaging hordes, and Jenkins and the Labour party following him had sent a precise number of zero people to concentration camps or re-education centres. But a certain type of high Tory does want all this back. The Financial Times reviewed one such book, which looked forward to the return of the property qualification for juries so they would protect property rights, and the restoration of the old order before anti-discrimination legislation.

In fact there are very strong arguments against White privilege. For a start, east Asian such as the Chinese and Japanese, perform much better educationally and economically than Whites in America and Britain. In Britain the proportion of Asians in management positions, for example, is identical to Whites. In America, they earn more and occupy superior jobs. And while Blacks are sacked before Whites, Whites are sacked before east Asians. This isn’t because east Asians are superior in IQ. It’s because they seem to work harder and have a particular set of cultural skills that allow them to succeed. And in many instances, they earned their position through very hard work against prejudice and discrimination. One social study found that the Japanese in Canada were the most ‘privileged’ ethnic group. But Japanese Canadians had had a long struggle against punitive discrimination which was worse than that experienced by people of Japanese descent in the US. And immigrants to the US from the British Caribbean earn more on average not just to native Black Americans, but also to Whites. For Black conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Blacks are held back not by racial discrimination in the wider society, though he doesn’t deny this exists, but because the majority Black culture hasn’t acquired the necessary social and economic skills to uplift themselves And he is fiercely critical of multiculturalism because he believes it isolates and ossifies different ethnic groups into separate enclaves and cultural preserves, thus preventing from learning from and acquiring the skills of other, more successful groups. As for White privilege, it is hard to see what privilege a homeless White man possesses compared to tenured and respected Black academics and radicals like Crenshaw.

To me, Critical Race Theory and White privilege tackle the problem of Black poverty and marginalisation from the wrong end. Instead of seeing Black poverty as the anomaly which must be tackled, it sees White success as the anomaly, which must be destroyed if Blacks and people of colour are to take their rightful place in society. Thus White people must be brought down and Whiteness abolished. The Guardian, which promotes Critical Race Theory, as claimed that this doesn’t mean White people but Whiteness as the social quality that gives them their exalted place. But one of the writers anthologised in the collection of papers, Critical Race Theory, states that there is no difference between Whiteness and White people. And one of the fears of CRT’s critics is that after attacking Whiteness, the radicals will indeed move on to attacking Whites.

It seems to me that the Critical Race Theory and White privilege are essentially a continuation of the mindset that Whites enjoy their superior social position through mechanisms of power long after those legal mechanisms had been officially abolished and the ideology on which they were based was discredited. It’s an attempted to explain why, after the victories of the Civil Rights movement, the majority of Blacks are still poor. And the rhetoric of decolonisation over here seems to be a direct transference of the bitterness felt by indigenous Africans to privileged White settlers to mainstream British, White society. And that worries me, because of the brutality of the ethnic cleansing of the White farmers in Zimbabwe by Mugabe’s thugs at the beginning of the century. I also have to say that I’m worried about the trends in Afrocentric and other Black pseudohistory that claims that Blacks are the original inhabitants of the British isles. Simon Webb of History Debunked yesterday put up a post about the claims in a book on African and Afro-Caribbean communities in the UK, that there are folktales of Africans invading Britain before the Romans. Webb has his own racial biases and some the historical claims he makes are also false. But if he’s right about this, then the author of the book, Hakim Adi, a professor at Chichester university, is talking pure tosh. I am aware of no such folktales, not even when I was a member of the Society for Contemporary Legend Research back in the 1990s. The closest I’ve come to it was in the long-running and sadly missed Celtic warrior strip, Slaine, in the zarjaz SF comic 2000AD. This included a race of Black Atlanteans, the Rmoahals, described as giant aboriginals. The strip’s writer, Pat Mills, based them on a legend that the standing stones of the isle of Callanish in the Hebrides were built by Black-skinned giants who dressed in feathers. Aside from that, the only other source for this curious assertion may be a garbled memory of one of the waves of colonisation that swept over Britain and the continent during prehistory. The Neolithic reached Britain from the fertile crescent over two routes. One was directly across Europe itself, the other was across North Africa and then up from Morocco through Spain. But this occurred so long ago that it was lost to memory for millennia. Archaeologists have only now been able to reconstruct it by using genetic data. Has Adi heard a garbled version of this from within the Black community, from people who mistakenly thought this was a Black African invasion? It also reminds me of the claim made a few years ago that the ancient Egyptians settled in Birmingham before the Roman conquest. This appeared in the Independent, but has, I understand, since been discredited. It also seems to me to have a certain kinship to another piece of Black myth-making, that sailors from Mali discovered America before Columbus, but didn’t enslave the Amerindians. If this happened, it would be truly remarkable, as I’ve seen claims that the Malians didn’t have any ocean-going ships. And the Malinka were a powerful slaving nation, so if they did discover the Amerindians, there would have been nothing preventing them from enslaving them as well.

My fear is that this rhetoric and pseudohistory will cause Blacks, or a minority of Blacks, to see themselves as the oppressed, true inhabitants of Britain and attack the White British as colonialist oppressors. Even if, at present, they claim otherwise. When the Black Lives Matter movement broke out, its Bristol branch stuck up posters claiming that ‘We’ve always been here’ – which is hi8storically very debatable, although some Blacks have been present in Britain at various periods from the Middle Ages onwards. Claims of Black presence further back, such as the supposed Black skin colour of Cheddar man, are more conjectural. Webb has claimed that this reconstruction was based on a false interpretation and has since been retracted, but I have not seen him cite his source for this.

Marx himself held some extremely unpleasant racial views. He’s most infamous for his anti-Semitism, as shown by him sneering at his German rival, Ferdinand Lassalles, as ‘the Jewish ni++er.’ But he also had strong prejudices against European ethnic groups. He held that the Celts, Basques and the Slavs were backward peoples who had no intrinsic right to exist and national independence. When the 1848 Revolutions broke out, he was afraid that their bids for independence would stop the class revolution he wished to promote. In a chilling passage, he looked forward to the class war becoming a race war. This recalls the horrific ethnic cleansing and deportations Stalin inflicted on the national minorities in the USSR, including the Holodomor, the artificial famine in Ukraine which killed 7 million people.

Thomas Sowell in his book Conquests and Cultures talks about the ethnic cleansing by Muslim mobs of the Ibo people by Muslims in Nigeria and the horrific bloodbath of the Biafran war. The Ibos had previously been a minor, poor tribe but had seized the opportunities presented by western, Christian missionary education, which the northern Muslims had rejected as against their faith. As a result, Ibos were better educated and held better jobs and positions of responsibility even in the Muslim north. This was naturally resented, and the resentment grew into violence. Sowell notes that these tensions were heightened by the language each side used against the other. He writes

‘The problem was not simply that there were differences of opinion, but that there were not established and mutually respected traditions for airing those differences with restraint and accommodation. Vitriolic polemic in the press and in the political arena became the norm. Epithets like “fascist” and “imperialist stooge” became commo currency, along with unbridled expressions of tribal chauvinism.’ (p. 127). In the West there are respected means of airing such differences, but the insults sound very much like the language used by the woke, radical intersectional left against its opponents.

And there is anti-White racism and violence. Two decades ago the number of Whites killed in racist attacks was nearly the same as members of Blacks and other ethnic minorities. There have been armed attacks by Blacks on Whites in the past few weeks and months. One was when a man opened fire on the passengers on a subway. Another was when a Black man deliberately drove his car into a parade in a White community. He left behind a manifesto which made it very clear that this was an act of anti-White terrorism. But this was not treated as such by the Biden administration.

I am very pessimistic about the success of affirmative actions schemes in creating a sustainable Black middle class. As I understand it, this was originally intended to be only a temporary measure. Once Blacks had gained entry into education, the sciences, politics and business on a level comparable with Whites, these schemes were to be dismantled as they would no longer be needed. But forty years after the Runnymede Commission recommended ‘positive discrimination’ in which Blacks are to be favoured by offering places with lower grades to universities and colleges, and preferential job offers if they have lower qualifications, the mass of Black Britain still remains poor and marginalised. I don’t, however, know how bad the situation would otherwise be if these policies had not been implemented. It could be they would have been much worse.

Nevertheless I do fear that these policies will continue to fail and that, in their anger and desperation, some Blacks will begin pogroms against Whites, encouraged by the rhetoric and arguments of Critical Race Theory.

Conservative MP to Attend Misogynist Men’s Rights Conference

Yesterday, Saturday 27th April 2019, the I carried a piece on page 11 reporting that the Tory MP Philip Davies was planning to attend a men’s rights conference in the US, alongside other far right notables like Mark ‘Nazi pug’ Meechan and Carl ‘Sargon of Akkad’ Benjamin. But he denied it was a misogynist event. The article, entitled ‘MP to attend ‘misogynist’ gathering, by Andrew Woodcock, ran

A Conservative MP has defended his decision to speak at a men’s rights conference in the US on the same platform as controversial figures.

Philip Davies said he intends to raise issues such as male suicides, boys’ performance in school, and the treatment of fathers in family break-ups at the Chicago conference in August. Other speakers listed for the International Conference on Men’s Issues include the Ukip MEP candidates Carl Benjamin and Mark Meechan, as well as Paul Elam, leader of the US group A Voice for Men.

Mr Benjamin has refused to apologise for tweeting “I wouldn’t even rape you” to Labour MP Jess Phillips. Mr Elam’s group, which once announced an “Annual Bash a Violent Bitch Month”, has been branded migosynist and male supremacist.

Confirming his plans to speak at the conference, Mr Davies said it was “nonsense” to suggest that his presence amounted to an endorsement of other participants’ opinions.

“I’m responsible for what I say. I’m not there to defend what anyone else says,” he said. “I’ve never heard of many of these people and I’m not responsible for their views.”

Philip Davies has been accused of misogyny himself. Apart from being a bog-standard, anti-welfare, tax the poor for the benefit of the rich Conservative, I seem to remember that a little while ago he caused controversy himself for his antics in parliament. If memory serves me correctly, he talked out a piece of legislation intended to protect women either from rape or FGM. Or both. As for the Men’s Rights Conference, one of them was held over here a couple of years ago, and was extensively critiqued by Kevin Logan. Logan’s a male feminist with a degree in 20th century history and politics, and puts up a series of videos attacking the denizens of the men’s rights movement, ‘The Descent of the Manosphere’. He states that the people – some of them are women, surprisingly – are attempting to reverse evolution and drag us all back into the sea. And it’s hard to dispute the fact.

These conferences aren’t really about men’s rights. Despite the accusations of activists like Paul Elam that men’s issues aren’t discussed by mainstream politicians, male suicide, boys’ performance in schools and so on have been debated in parliament. Logan even put up on one of his videos excerpts from the parliamentary journal, Hansard, to show that they were. He has also refuted Sargon’s claim that he sent his infamous tweet to Jess Philips because she was laughing at male suicide. She wasn’t. She was laughing at the claim that it wasn’t debated in the House, and replied to him informing him that she is consulting m’learned friends. Moreover, some of these issues could actually be solved by introducing left wing policies, that would benefit working people across the board. One of the issues is the low pay earned by certain types of male worker. But this could, as Logan states, be solved by strengthening trade unions and employees’ rights. But the people attending these conferences and those, who comprise the ‘manosphere’ generally, are on the right, very often the far right. And the mens’ rights movement itself will ignore these issues when it suits them. These conferences really are all about attacking feminism and trying to preserve the traditional male domination of society. Which can very clearly be seen by the hashtags used by Sargon when he sent his infamous tweet to Philips: #feminismiscancer.

Logan has also pointed out that some of the mens’ issues that Davies intends to present have even been discussed by feminists, citing a number of academic articles in feminist and gender-studies journals. I think part of the problem here is that most people have no contact with academic feminism, and depend for what they know about it from the press and public figures, some of whom are unsympathetic. I can remember reading a newspaper article a decade or so ago, where one of the female politicos – I think it may have been Baroness Blackstone or someone like her, but I’m not sure – was asked about boys’ declining performance in school. I can’t remember what her precise words were, but she more or less said that it was all the boys’ own fault. She simply wasn’t interested. Now it was probably unfair to expect the good lady to be concerned about this, as she had been talking about her campaign to improve girls’ performance in school and career prospects. But it and other comments like it leaves the deep impression that avowedly feminist politicians are deeply hostile to men.

Quite apart from changes in gender roles, and the demands for greater equality and opportunities for women in society, jobs and politics, the economic structure of society has changed so that traditionally male jobs in heavy industry and manufacturing have declined. The result has been an increased sense of threat and insecurity among some men, who have burned to the ultra-traditional, misogynist far right. The core support for the Republican party in America is angry White men, who feel under attack from women and ethnic minorities. This is the electoral base that turned to Trump and other politicos like him.

Issues like male suicide, the decline in boys’ performance in schools and greater access to children for fathers in marital break-up do need to be addressed. And there are some extremely violent women out there, as well. But the men’s rights movement and its members and activists behind this and similar gatherings aren’t interested in these issues so much as keeping women firmly in their places as subordinates to men. They are deeply misogynist, and deserve to be attacked and criticised. Just like Davies and the other politicos, who attend them.

Here are a few videos by Kevin Logan attacking the men’s rights conferences and some of the individuals mentioned above.

Carl Benjamin, alias Sargon of Akkad.

Paul Elam

The 2018 International Conference on Men’s Issues

Be warned that some of the views of these men’s rights activists are extremely unpleasant. Some of them do justify rape, or at least try to excuse it, and they also hold very racist views.

Woohoo! Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams Is Coming Back!

More good news for fans of mature SF. The bad news is that the new set of programmes, which continue from last year, is on Channel 4 at 10 O’clock in the evening, bang opposite the X-Files, which is on channel at the same time. Grrr! Better set your videos, peeps.

The new set of programmes begins with ‘The Father Thing’. The blurb for this on page 67 of the Radio Times runs

The sci-fi anthology series inspired by Philip K. Dick’s short stories returns. In this episode, the world is under attack as aliens quietly invade people’s homes young hero Charlie must make difficult decisions to protect his mother on the human race.

Another small article about it on page 65 states

The sci-fi anthology returns with a version of Philip K. Dick’s The Father Thing. That was published in 1954, the same year as the serialisation of the novel that inspired the movie version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers-and it you’ve seen that, or just know the premise of it, you can skip this.

Jack Gore and Greg Kinnear are both excellent as ayoung boy and his dad, shadowed by the threat of marital strife until the kid starts to have more serious concerns.

A possible theme about children fearing the loss of a divorcing parent never coalesces. Instead, as the boy’s mates get involved, we veer into a half-cocked Stranger Things homage. A well-performed, nicle shot dud.

I’ve noticed that one of the perennial themes in Dick’s work is that the hero is always in a rocky marriage, and the wife, or one of the female characters, is always bitch queen from hell, to use the words of Arnie Rimmer. Dick’s was married several times, but he comes across as something of a misgynist.

Despite the Radio Time’s critic’s sniffs, The Father Thing is one of the pieces that’s been republished recently, and I look forward to seeing it. But we’ll decide whether it’s a dud or not, thank you.

Alex Jone’s Lawyer Claims Jones Doesn’t Believe Own Conspiracy Theories

There have been a number of pieces put up on the alternative American news programmes on YouTube about the latest bizarre claim by Alex Jones. Or in this case, Jones’ lawyer. Jones is a notorious conspiracy theorist with his own YouTube show, Infowars, where he repeats all kinds of extreme rightwing nonsense about ‘the globalists’, the elite – who are, of course, evil shape-changing Reptoid aliens, the United Nations and politicians, mostly leftwing. It’s real tin-foil hat stuff. Amongst the codswallop he’s inflicted on his viewers over the years are rants about juice boxes containing chemicals that turn frogs gay; Hillary Clinton is demonically possessed, as is Barack Obama, and that they are both part of a Satanic paedophile ring operating out of a pizza parlour. Clinton is also a cyborg and the Sandy Hook massacre was staged. This was another terrible school shooting. Odiously, it was seized on by Jones and other members of the same conspiracist right, as a piece of government psychological warfare, designed to make Americans willing to surrender their guns. And despite clear evidence to the contrary, he boosted Donald Trump during the election and after, claiming that he was successfully tackling ‘the globalists’. All when every piece of evidence shows the complete opposite. He also believes that those same globalists sacrifice small children when the American corporate elite meets at Bohemian Grove.

It’s crazy stuff, combining the long-term rightwing fears of the imminent arrival of a Satanic one-world global superstate, with a bitter hatred of the Democrats, particularly Barack Obama and Killary, mixed with David Icke’s bonkers theories about Reptoid aliens.

But now it seems, Jones, or at least his lawyers, are trying to tell everyone that he’s not mad enough to believe all this.

Jones is currently in the middle of a custody battle with Kelly Jones, his ex-wife. She doesn’t want him to have custody of their children, a boy and two girls, between 10 and 14, because Jones’ studio is in their home, and they see him ranting like a maniac. She particularly cites his statements that he’d like to break Alec Baldwin’s neck and would like to see J-Lo raped. She is afraid he’s urging people to take ‘felonious’ action. Which includes threats to a member of congress.

Jones has struck back. His lawyers have released a statement that Jones does not believe any of this, and that it’s just a piece of performance art. His fitness as a father should not be judged on the content of his show for the same reason that Jack Nicholson’s parental worth shouldn’t be judged on the basis of his character as the Joker in the 1990s Batman film.

In this clip from The Young Turks, Cenk Uygur and John Iadarola point out that this makes him a fraud, and a joke. But unfortunately, the joke’s on his viewers, who took him seriously. They also point out that even if he isn’t genuine, he’s still having a damaging effect on American politics and society, like Andrew Breitbart. After Breitbart died, people celebrated him as ‘a real player’. But as Uygur points out, this isn’t a game. Jones’ and Breitbart’s actions had terrible, real-world consequences. In Jones’ case, someone took his claims of a paedophile conspiracy in the pizza parlour seriously, and walked in with a sub-machine gun with the intention of freeing the children Jones had claimed were imprisoned in the basement. The grieving parents of children murdered at Sandy Hook were pestered by Jones’ viewers, trying to get them to admit that it was all false and that no-one had been staged.

And as distressing as those specific incidents go, there are worse in his support for Trump. Jones supported Trump’s expansion of Obama’s military actions in the Middle East, and these have had terrible consequences with the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians.

Against Jones’ present statements is another he made in 2015, that he was training his son to be ‘a good little knight’, who was going to carry on his struggle. And he has made another statement from a little while ago, which contradicts his lawyers. He once claimed that he believed in all of it.

Uygur and Iadarola state that this gets into the complex issue of whether he is a good father. They accept that he genuinely loves his children, but then, so do murderous religious fanatics and neo-Nazis, but this does not stop them objecting to the way they bring up their children either. Uygur believes that side of it – whether Jones is a fit father or not – should be left private between Jones and his ex-wife. Uygur’s wife is a divorce lawyer, and he’s seen how ugly and nasty divorces and custody battles can be.

Uygur and Iadarola also make the point that if you wanted to discredit belief in genuine conspiracies, then one of the ways you could do it is by creating Alex Jones or someone like him. That way, when evidence of real false-flag operations appeared, you could mock those, trying to alert the public to them by saying that they were just like Alex Jones, and his theories about juice boxes turning frogs gay.

They conclude with the statement that the irony now is that Alex Jones, who has been shouting about fake news for years, has now admitted to having been ‘fake news’.

Incidentally, Jones actually does have a point about chemicals in the water turning frogs gay. Scientists and environmentalists are concerned about certain pollutants, especially in plastics, that do harm the sexual development of amphibians. Frogs and amphibians are more sensitive to these chemicals than other creatures, and so the effects are more pronounced. Frogs are being increasingly found with genital abnormalities, such as male frogs with female characteristics.

This is not quite like the frogs turning gay, and it isn’t being put into the water to make humans homosexual either, no matter what homophobic conspiracy theory Jones or people like him have dreamed up about this. One of Jones’ rants is about how gay rights are a transhumanist space cult to make humans all asexual. Which actually sounds like Jones saw an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, in which Riker falls in love with a female throwback on a planet, whose inhabitants have no gender. However, the presence of such chemicals is causing birth defects in animals and possibly harming humans. And they are entering the water through industrial activity. So Jones’ is right about the presence of such chemicals, but completely wrong about why they’re there.

Anti-Feminist Pamphlets from Tory Free Market Thinktank

The pamphlets in question. Picture courtesy CJ.

This will annoy nearly every woman and also a very large number of men. Looking round one of the charity bookshops in Cheltenham yesterday with a friend, I found a whole load of pamphlets from the Institute of Economic Affairs. They’re a right-wing, free market thinktank connected with the Tory party. I think they were also trying to promote themselves as non-party political when Tony Blair was in power, as I think he was also very sympathetic to their message. Put simply, their pro-privatisation, anti-welfare, anti-poor – one of the pamphlet’s was Alexis de Tocqueville’s Pauperism, anti-Socialist – another was Von Hayek’s Socialism and the Intellectuals. And anti-feminist. Two of the pamphlets were anti-feminist screeds, intended to encourage women to forget any notions of equality, independence and a career, and return to their traditional roles as wives and mothers.

The two pamphlets were entitled Liberating Modern Women…From Feminism and Equal Opportunities – A Feminist Fallacy. They were collections of essays on individual subjects within the overall theme of rebutting feminism. The contributors seemed to be an equal number of men and women. Among the policies they recommended were measures to preserve the family from break up and end ‘no fault’ divorces. They claimed that men and women pursue different goals because of innate biological differences. And rather than being a patriarchal institution, the family was actually a matriarchy. They also attacked women working, because it meant that the household economy was now based on two people having an income, whereas before it was only the husband’s wage that was important. And, almost inevitably, there was an attack on single mothers. Left-wing welfare policies were attacked for taking them out of the jobs market and placing them into ‘welfare dependency’.

My friend decided to buy them to see how extreme, shocking and bonkers they actually were. Though he insisted that I tell the woman on the desk when paying for them that we we’re buying them because we agreed with them, which raised a smile from her. While walking round town afterwards he said he would have felt less embarrassed holding these pamphlets if he’d had something less offensive to put them in, to disguise the fact that he had them. Like one of the porno mags. I didn’t recognise most of the contributors to the pamphlets, but one name stood out: Mary Kenny. She had been a journalist for the Guardian or Observer, but moved to the Torygraph. My friend was also shocked, as the Institute of Economic Affairs has been on Channel 4 News several times. It’s one of the organisations they’ve gone to for ‘balance’ discussing particular issues. My friend’s point is that they’re policies are so extreme, they really aren’t providing any kind of reasoned balance at all, just more far-right opinion.

There’s an attitude amongst some Republicans in America that feminism really is a terrible Marxist plot to destroy Western civilisation, despite the fact that it existed before Marxism, and its campaigns for votes for women and equal opportunities cross party-political boundaries. Despite the institute’s arguments, there really isn’t one of their views that isn’t vulnerable to disproof. For example, it’s true that men and women tend to perform different jobs, and have different personal goals and attitudes. But it’s very debatable how far this is due to biological differences. A few years ago, back in the 1990s there was a lot of interest and noise about supposed sex differences in the organisation of the brain. Men’s and women’s brains were made differently, and this was why men were better at maths and parking cars, and women were better at language and communication, but couldn’t read maps. Since then, the situation has reversed slightly. One female neuroscientist, Cordelia – , wrote a book a few years ago arguing that any psychological differences and intellectual aptitudes that differed between the sexes weren’t due to physical differences in the brain. With the exception of individuals at the extreme ends of the scale – very ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ brains, brains are just brains, and you can’t tell their former owner’s sex simply by looking at them.

As for feminism itself, it’s probably fair to say that many women do feel caught between their careers and their families, and would like more time to spend raising or attending to their children. But their entry into the workforce, and pursuing jobs, hobbies and interests previously reserved for men are the product of profound needs and desires on their behalf. It isn’t a case that they have been somehow brainwashed or indoctrinated by some kind of feminist ‘false consciousness’. For example, you can hear from older women how they felt when they were young, when they wanted to play with boy’s toys, like train or construction sets, like Meccano, but were forbidden by their parents. Or wanted to try their hand at ‘boy’s’ subjects at school, like woodwork. Or join in with boy’s games like footie or rugby. This doesn’t mean that all women wanted to do all of the above, only that a sizable number did want to do some of those, and felt frustrated at the social conventions that forbade them to. When the feminists in the 1960s argued that women had a right to do traditionally male jobs and pursuits, they were articulating the desires of very many women. They weren’t just abstract theorists speaking only for themselves.

As for the statement that the entry of women into the workforce has made family finances more difficult, because mortgages are now based on a double income, that’s also very open to query. It might be that the change to women working has had an effect, but I’ve also seen the argument that women had to go out to work, because the income from the husband’s wages alone wasn’t enough to pay the bills.

As for the family being a ‘matriarchal’ institution, the status of women has changed over time. But in the Middle Ages, women were basically their husband’s chattels. And in the West, women didn’t automatically have a right to hold their property independently of their husbands until the Married Women’s Property Act in the late 19th century. One of the early feminist tracts from 19th century Germany was a polemic attacking the way women’s property automatically became their husband’s on marriage.

I’m alarmed by the break down of the traditional family, rising divorces and absent fathers. I always have been, ever since we did ‘relationships’ as part of the RE course at school, when the news was full of it. But part of the problem isn’t the ease of divorce, although it became more difficult and expensive when Blair was in power. It’s the fact that many people do find themselves trapped in unhappy relationships. Some idea how much of a problem this was can be seen in some of the jokes about how awful marriage was and quarrelling spouses. At a far more serious level, you can also see it in accounts of men, who walked out on their families, and took up bigamous marriages elsewhere in the days when divorce was difficult and all but impossible unless you were very wealthy.

The two pamphlets were published a little time ago. One dated from 1992 – twenty-four years ago -, and the other from 2005, about eleven. But they represent an attitude that’s still very present in the Conservatives, and especially in right-wing newspapers like the Daily Heil. A week ago the Tories elected Theresa May as their leader, and will no doubt be presenting themselves as the ‘pro-woman’ party. This shows the other side to them, the one that’s beyond and underneath Cameron’s rhetoric of flexible-working hours, and the Tories’ embrace of female leaders like Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May.

Vox Political: Labour MP Jess Phillips Accuses David Cameron of Colluding with Child Molesters, Doesn’t Apologise

Mike over at Vox Political has put up another piece, this time from the Independent, reporting that the Birmingham Yardley MP, Jess Phillips, has attacked David Cameron for block education on sex and relationships for school children. She has accused Cameron of colluding with child abusers. Even more frightfully, she has not apologised! Cue howls of Tory outrage! See

Labour MP Jess Phillips refuses to apologise after accusing David Cameron of ‘colluding with child abusers’

Mike states she’s absolutely right. She is. And I back her 100 per cent. This isn’t the first time Phillips has said something controversial about rape and sexual assault. The good Burghers of England’s second city, Birmingham, got very upset the other week when she said that every week there were incidents on one of the city’s streets like the rape of 200 women by immigrants in Cologne and other European cities at Christmas. There were howls of outrage and accusations of racism. But Yasmin Alibhai-Browne, in the Independent, defended her, and pointed out that what she actually said was very cautious and not at all racist or anti-Muslim.

Now if you read the papers, some universities are already holding classes for students on sex and relationships in order to keep their female students safe. It’s also done in America. I’ve got a feeling that it, or similar measures designed to keep women safe, have provoked outrage amongst the American Right. The American right-wing radio host, Rush Limbaugh, was ranting a little while ago how anti-rape legislation meant that men would have to get written permission from a woman before having sex with them, even though the legislation he objected specifically said that wasn’t necessary so long as the woman had made it clear she consented to sex, either verbally or through her body language.

Now I can imagine that some blokes will be sceptical of such education on the grounds that it seems to be based on the assumption that all men are rapists. I’m sure this isn’t the case. But there is a problem in that young people are under increasing pressure to have sex, and this pressure can lead to date – and outright rape. I also have to say that the thought of sex and relationship education would have traumatised me when I was at school. What we were taught in the fourth year at senior school when we did ‘relationships’ was depressing enough, covering as it did teenage orgies and marital break up, but not in any way that was at all titillating or alluring. Quite honestly, given how depressing the material is, I’m surprised there aren’t more people in this country, who haven’t gone the same way as the Japanese and sworn off sex and dating for the joys of computer games. Perhaps there are, but British machismo demands they lie about it. Either way, it seems education like this is needed. And however controversial Phillips’ claims about sexual assault in her constituency are, if they’re being made by her constituents, they need to be taken seriously. She’s only doing what a constituency MP should do – listen to the people she’s elected to represent, even if what they’re saying is uncomfortable and not something we want to hear. Just ’cause the truth hurts, don’t mean it ain’t true.

Donald Trump’s Horrendous Contempt for Family Values

The Republican party are very big on ‘family values’. They’ve been so ever since Ronald Reagan brought the Christian fundamentalists in from the political cold in the 1980s. Before then, many of what is now the Religious Right did not vote on the grounds that American society and politics were too decadent and fallen for good Christians to become involved with. Reagan and his party machine changed all that by explicitly appealing to them and campaigning on politically and morally Conservative Christian issues. These are now so much a feature of the Republican political landscape, that they’re practically stereotypical of the American Right-wing mindset – abortion, homosexuality, and the family.

Most Christians, and in fact probably most people, regardless of their religious beliefs or absence thereof, were alarmed by the massive growth in divorce and the apparent collapse of the traditional family in the ’70s and ’80s. I can remember the various grim children’s books and adult dramas on the TV dealing with the issue of family break up. In RE at school, one of the subjects covered was ‘relationships’. The textbook for this part of the curriculum included discussions of burgeoning teenage sexuality as well as divorce. This depressed me no end. Instead of the ‘happy ever after’ myth of traditional marriage, it presented a grim world of broken homes where confused children wondered why their mummies and daddies weren’t living together any more. It was a prospect almost calculated to put any romantic or vaguely idealistic young person off the idea of getting hitched altogether by showing them the terrifying prospect of the lifelong-relationship burning out after a few years into a domestic hell of hatred and despair.

Modern Britain has since come somewhat to terms with this. The divorce statistics still cause some concern, especially amongst Tories, but they’re much less in the news than they were. Most children in this country are born outside of marriage, but the ideal is still some kind of committed relationship. Where once neighbours dropped their voices when it came to mentioning ‘cohabiting’ couples, now hardly anyone takes any notice whatsoever. Instead of referring to them as ‘spouse’ or ‘husband’ or ‘wife’, those in a committed relationship not blessed by either the church or the Record Office are simply referred to as ‘partners’.

But family values remain very big in America. There’s a hilarious video by one of the current Republican candidates – I think it might be Ted Cruz- in which the politico steps forward to declare that he believes that the bedrock of American society is a solid family. It’s so stereotypical of Conservative rhetoric that it’s almost unintentionally hysterically funny. Trump, however, will probably not be pursuing that approach to appeal to Conservative American voters. I’ve no doubt that Trump would probably like to appeal on that point, but his own family values and relationships are horrendous.

Mike over on Vox Political has posted up an obituary by Thomas P. Trump, The Donald’s cousin. This Trump, who passed away aged 88, is described as a brilliant chemist and philanthropist. He also insisted that the obituary included a plea for people not to vote for his ‘mucus bag’ cousin. The older Trump was afraid that if The Donald became president, he’d be responsible for a ‘holocaust-level’ atrocity. See Mike’s article at http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/02/08/obituary-leaves-mucus-bag-donald-trumped-by-his-own-late-cousin/.

The Young Turks also reported on a feud in the Trump family over the in heritance left by Donald Trump’s father, Fred Trump snr. When Trump pere died in the 1990s, he cut one of his sons, Fred Trump jnr, out of his will on the grounds that the man was an alcoholic. This was done at the instigation of his other son, yes, you guessed it, Donald. Fred junior’s children therefore took the issue to court to contest the will. At which point, the Tyrant of Trump tower really wigged out and decided he wasn’t going to play ball any more. One of his nephews was a small boy, who suffered from seizures. Trump had generously been paying for the child’s treatment. Once the lad’s parents and their siblings decided to defy him about the inheritance, he decided that he wouldn’t pay for the lad’s medical care any more.

In the video below, the Turks’ anchor, John Iadarola, discusses this family affair, and comes to the final judgement that Trump’s family values are horrible. Most people would probably agree that it is horrendous for him to withdrawal vital medical care from an innocent child, simply because he couldn’t get his own way with the parents.

And if you take the rhetoric about family values seriously – that a man’s private affairs are also a good indication of whether he’s morally suitable for the high office for which he’s campaigning, then Trump is manifestly unsuited for something as absolutely important as the presidency. Not that anybody needed to know the details of Trump’s family affairs to realise this. He could have had an absolutely model relationship of perfect harmony with his siblings, and it still wouldn’t change the fact that he’s a walking monster, who shouldn’t be let anywhere near high office. This just confirms what many people know, or have guessed already.

But if Trump has absolutely no scruples about so effectively screwing his own family over for money, including a terribly vulnerable little boy, it also shows that he will have absolutely no remorse about destroying the lives, families and children of others if he becomes president. And certainly not if they’re Hispanic, Muslim, or indeed, ordinary blue-collar American worker.