Okay, I caught some American YouTubers discussing the possibility of a ‘national divorce’ in America the other night. I didn’t quite know what it was, but suspected it was about the dissolution of the USA. After all, it couldn’t be that all American domestic marriages had now become so terrible that a mass divorce across the Land of the Free was the only solution. It seems a congresswoman, whose name I’ve completely forgotten, declared that the political divisions in the nation were so bad that the red and blue states – those held by Republicans and Democrats respectively – should separate. This would, of course, mean the dissolution of America. One YouTuber posted a piece last night wondering if it would be possible.
Okay, I’m British. I haven’t been to America, and what I know about the country comes from books, TV, magazines, newspapers and radio, as well as talking to American friends and people who have lived and worked in the US. So, I’ve got no particular expertise. But it seems to me that the idea is totally mad. Firstly, I’m not sure that the political divisions are necessarily that deep or that pervasive to warrant states’ ceding from the Union. Yes, there always have been a far left strand in American politics, particularly regarding race and gay rights. We took over affirmative action from America, renaming it positive discrimination. Much of the Critical Social Justice movement, which is really just a postmodern twist on Marxism regarding Black rights, gender and feminism and gay and trans rights and other issues, is imported and influenced by American developments. This is particularly true of Black Lives Matter and Critical Race Theory. Nearly twenty years ago, when I was beginning studying archaeology at Bristol Uni, one of the American students on the course complained that we worse than her country. But some of the controversy in these and other areas just seems the result of really hysterical propaganda.
I remember what the bonkers American right said about Barack Obama. According to the nutters, Obama was a Black nationalist with a burning hatred of Whites, and was, depending on who you listened to, a Maoist Commie, a Nazi, a militant atheist and a secret Muslim planning to overthrow Christian America and make it subservient to Islam. One pair of Lutheran pastors in a church radio station went as far as declaring that he would be a dictator, who would kill more people than Mao. Alex Jones was prophesying that he would use an environmental catastrophe to seize power and force decent Americans into refugee camps.
The truth is Obama was none of these things. As people remarked at the time, he couldn’t simultaneously be a Marxist, Nazi, atheist, Muslim, Black nationalist subversive, and indeed he wasn’t. Despite the hoo-ha and the Nobel Peace Prize, he really didn’t do much for Black America. A few years ago, he said he always thought of himself as moderate Republican. He certainly acted like one, continuing Bush’s militaristic, imperial wars. Domestically he pushed through the charter schools despite community opposition in many areas. I think these are like the academies over here. Even Obamacare wasn’t the radical assault on private healthcare the Republicans screamed it was. It wasn’t a single-payer system, like the one advocated by Bernie Sanders. It simply made private health insurance more affordable to more Americans. It wasn’t even a Democrat policy – Obama took it over from Newt Gingrich, a Republican politico who proposed it in the ’90s.
And the same people are screaming that Biden is ‘far left’, when they aren’t suggesting he’s too old and doddery to hold the office of president. That accusation to me holds far more water. Biden is a bog-standard corporatist Democrat. He got in because the powerbrokers in the Democrat party didn’t want Bernie getting the nomination. Or somebody like the good senator from Vermont. But Biden pushed trans rights, and so he must be a communist.
I’ve read the Communist Manifesto and other bits and pieces by and about Marx and Engels. You won’t be surprised that neither of them wrote very much, if at all, about gay rights. I think it was also illegal in Soviet Russia, punishable with seven years in a forced labour camp. I’ve also got the impression that it was illegal generally in much of the Communist bloc. Contemporary gay rights are very much a western, post-War development, and not confined to one side of the political spectrum. Margaret Thatcher voted for the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1968 or whenever it was, while Labour politicians like Jim Callaghan were opposed. Her former Personal Private Secretary, Matthew Parris, was one of the founders of the gay charity Stonewall. Section 28 was frightening, as it did look like the Tories wanted the mass imprisonment of gays, but it was brought in, so I’ve heard, because a school or schools in one London borough was teaching gay rights and there was a fear that this included paedophilia.
There are real issues with the contemporary trans movement. There’s been a devastating critique of the treatment of the children who came to the Tavistock Clinic in London. Many of them were just confused kids, often neuro-divergent. A very high percentage were autistic, depressed, in care, or came from families where one parent was a sex abuser. Eighty per cent of the boys were same-sex attracted, and ninety percent of the girls. Nearly all of these were nevertheless put on puberty blockers and progressed to surgical transition. It has been estimated that if the children had been treated properly, both medically and ethically, only two percent of them would have had done so. Gay opponents of trans militancy, like Barry ‘the EDIjester’ and Clive Simpson and Denis Kavanagh view this is a new form of conversion therapy, in which they gay is not prayed away, but dispelled with drugs and surgery. Many of the kids said they preferred to be trans rather than a gay man or lesbian woman. This is internalised homophobia.
There are also issues regarding women’s sports and privacy and dignity, as shown in the recent scandals about the incarceration of extremely violent, predatory, biologically male rapists in women’s prisons. But many of the critics of this aspect of trans militancy are socialist feminists. Left-wing ladies were against this long before Matt Walsh appeared and claimed it for the Republican right, demanding to know where all the feminist women were. They were there, just ignored. And people like Simpson and Kavanagh are worried about the absence of the left and ordinary people with just moderate political views from protesting this issue. They said in their recent Queen’s Speech video that the American right is the equivalent of our far right. If ordinary people don’t make themselves heard, they’re afraid it’ll be left to far right organisations like Patriotic Alternative, who’ll protest against Drag Queen Story Hour and there will be a backlash against gays in general. I fear this is happening already. Correct, Not Political not only protest against Drag Queen Story Hour, but against gay rights generally. And the ‘Terfs’ don’t necessarily hate trans people. The EDIjester talks about how he knew and partied the night away with trans people and drag queens back in the 1970s. In a recent video describing his experiences in Glasgow, Mr Menno, another gay critic of the trans movement, was moved to tears. So many of the trans people who came out to protest Kelly-Jay Keane and her women were trans-identified women, some of whom, despite their declarations that they were happy, seemed to be anything but. And J.K. Rowling, despite being a moron when it comes to Corbyn and the anti-Semitism smears, has never urged the hatred or murder, let alone the mass murder, of trans people. And to be fair, the book criticising the Tavistock, Time to think, also includes statements from people who transitioned, who were happy in their new gender.
Okay, this is the situation in Britain, but it also exists in America, where some of the most powerful opposition to the militant trans movement comes from left-wing as well as right-wing ladies. Helen Pluckrose, who is a staunch critic from the left of the Critical Social Justice Movement, holds the position that it should be possible to work out a compromise position between the trans rights advocates and their opponents, but she fears that this may not be possible considering how entrenched and intransigent the debate has become.
There have also been problems in America with rioting due to Black Lives Matter, as well the assassination, and planned assassination of various politicians by Antifa. Andy Ngo’s been putting up a number of videos about this, though considering his own record of falsifying reports sometimes a little scepticism might be in order. But that doesn’t mean that everyone who supports Black Lives Matter, or simply thinks more should be done to help impoverished Blacks and people of colour, is a Marxist revolutionary wanting to tear up the flagstones, raise the barricades and shoot cops. Similarly, despite well publicised cases, I don’t know how many school teachers in America, or even here for that matter, are draping the LGBTQ++ flags around their classrooms, indoctrinating kids in Queer Theory and taking them to inappropriate drag shows. Probably much fewer than the impression Walsh and his ilk would like to give.
And people don’t necessarily hold opinions that are uniformly right or left. Many Republicans now genuinely support gay rights, including marriage, as well as trans rights. And I can imagine that for some Americans it might just be a matter of differing priorities. For example, I’m sure there are some Americans, who vote Democrat because they approve of what exists of the American welfare state and some policies towards the poor, women and minorities, but aren’t necessarily in favour of the more radical social policies. Ditto for some Republicans, who may support, against the stereotype of the right, gay and trans rights, but are afraid of what they see as the left’s attack on personal freedom. Some of these people cross party lines on some issues, and how they vote may depend on what is of greater importance to them at that moment.
I can remember reading an interview with an American author, who said that America is a weird mixture of the radical and deeply conservative, often in the same individuals. Looking at it from outside, it seems to me that there’s far more that unites Americans – a common political discourse and tradition than divides them. Certainly not the point where the country’s dissolution should be a serious consideration. I really don’t think these divisions are so deep as the economic and political division over slavery that caused the American Civil War.
But I fear this is being pushed by the Libertarian far right. Way back in the early part of this century White Supremacists like Richard Spencer were and are calling for the creation of a White ethnostate. The extreme right-wing, anti-feminist YouTuber Theodore Beale, alias Vox Dei, was looking forward to the collapse of America and the emergence of such a Whites-only state. And others have been posting up pieces about the coming collapse of the US since. I also found a piece on YouTube ages ago, which featured an interview between one of the Libertarian intellectual leaders, who was looking forward to the creation of a Libertarian, low-tax, free trade, no welfare and everything privatised state in the American heartland. They didn’t have a name for it yet, but were provisionally calling it ‘Reagan’ after Ronald Reagan.
I’ve no doubt that if you’re a rich industrialist, who can afford private schooling and has no chance of being unemployed or needing Medicare or Medicaid to pay your medical bills, such a state would would be an absolute paradise. But if you’re poor and a member of the working class, you’d be a dirt-poor, exploited wage slave, just like the ‘factory slaves’ over here in the 19th century. They can fantasize about the benefits of competition all they like, but on its own it ain’t going to drive medical bills down, provide better schools or create better working conditions. As for the economy, one of the goals of the invasion of Iraq was to liberalise the Iraqi economy. This meant American multinationals seizing the country’s oil and state industries, and removing the tariff barriers protecting its economy. This was planned by the Neo-Cons to create a new, prosperous Iraq, as the kind of economic order they’d like in America.
It didn’t work. When the tariff barriers were removed, any country that could dumped its goods cheap in Iraq. Iraqi industry couldn’t compete. There was a massive wave of bankruptcies and unemployment shot up to astronomical levels. If a similar state is created in the US, then that’ll also happen there. Only big business could compete, and the small businessman or woman would go under.
This is what I’m afraid is really driving the call for a new national divorce between right and left-wing American states. It isn’t abou8t irreconcilable political differences, but about the weird fantasies of the Libertarian extreme right about a state of their own. A state that in reality would be a dystopian nightmare. The panic about Critical Social Justice is just a means to push this.
And I’m afraid that calls for the dissolution of America would also be echoed in this country. Carl Benjamin and the rest of the Lotus Eaters are Libertarians, and I think they’d love to have a similar type of government over here. Indeed, one of them actually said so in one of their videos. If the calls for the dissolution of America become stronger, I think the right-wing nutters would demand something similar for Britain, despite their hostility to regionalism and the fact that England has been a united country since the reign of Edmund Ironside in the 9th or 10th centuries.
‘E Pluribus Unum’. I think it means ‘Out of Many, One’. The motto of the American nation. Well, I hope it continues that way and ordinary Americans ignore the panics caused by the extreme right.
I spent some time Saturday evening watching a couple of videos posted by the far right YouTube outfit, Correct, Not Political. One was of their man Jim walking around the demonstrators and supporters at Drag Queen Story Time in Colchester asking them awkward, ‘Socratic’ questions. The other was an interview between Jim and another fixture of the British far right, Godfrey Bloom. Both were weirdly interesting, but only for the light they cast on these two men’s conspiracist views. I’ve already written about how Correct, Not Political has the classic paranoid idea that the Masons are behind a massive conspiracy. His interview with Bloom, and the comments he made talking to some of the people in Colchester confirmed it. It also revealed him to be a mad anti-vaxxer who thinks they’re putting something in it to kill people as part of the WEF’s goal to reduce the human population on the planet.
The drag queen reading to the kids in Colchester was Edward Wilcox, who performs under the name ‘Ann Nemic’ or something similar. Talking to various members of the crowd, Jim said that ‘Nemic’ had been vaccinated twice, and given blood 92 times. He didn’t want to say too much, as he didn’t want his channel to be banned, but didn’t this tell you something. Er, yes. It demonstrates that he was like everyone else and did as the government and medical authorities advised. He got vaccinated to protect himself. As for giving blood 92 times, one of the women at the demonstration pointed out that it made him a good person and that surely you want people to give blood? His stage name also shows that he has a sense of humour: Ann Nemic/ anaemic. It doesn’t say anything more than that, unless you’re so paranoid you think he was actively trying to spread whatever it is in the vaccine which you think is a poison by donating his contaminated blood. Sadly, I think Jim really is that bonkers.
Looking at the crowd, he declared, ‘There isn’t half a lot of sodomy going on here!’ This was probably because they were quite a few gay people and people waving pride flags, not because gay men were having sex in the street. He then went round warning people that drag queen story hour was a plot to indoctrinate kids with gender ideology and abuse from paedophiles. Here he has a point. James Lindsay has read out a paper co-written by a drag queen and queer activist, which states that the purpose of these shows is to queer the children’s minds and upset gender norms. And yes, the founder of Queer Theory, Judith Butler, did support paedophilia and the breaking down of barriers between adult and child. But this doesn’t mean that every drag queen, library or school which stages these sessions holds such views or is even aware of their existence. They may just be doing it because they genuinely feel it is spreading tolerance towards gay and trans people whilst encouraging children to read. No more than that.
Walking around the demonstration was a bald bloke, who looked a bit like the Matt Lucas character George Daws, selling copies of the Socialist Worker. So Jim immediately called him a Communist, asked whether he was trying to get people to sign up for Communism, and then asked people to tell him if there was a country in which Communism had ever succeeded. Well, technically the man was a Trotskyite, which is a slightly different form of Marxism. And I actually agree with him in that there hasn’t been a country where Communism has been successful. China has been doing very well of late, but that’s also thanks to a capitalist component in its economy. But from where Britain stands at the moment, capitalism isn’t working very well either. Far from improving people’s living standards, they’re being lowered. However, the right haven’t given up the refrain that this generation has it far better than anyone else at any time in history, and capitalism has raised more people out of poverty than socialism has. The first part of that statement is utterly wrong, and the second needs serious qualifications.
The drag show, Jim said, was all about promoting equality. But this was equality under communism, where everyone didn’t have life equally good, but equally bad, except for those at the top. Again, this seems to come from critiques of the woke ideology from James Lindsay and the EDIJester. It’s certainly present in those ideologies, though its equity – equality of outcome – rather than equality of opportunity. There were a couple of examples of this in the American education system a month or so ago. One teacher, in the interest of equality, gave all her students an ‘A’. Another one just gave the average award to a series of excellent students, who actually deserved much higher marks to take them into one of the prestigious American universities to study science. This was eventually revealed after an inquiry and possibly legal action. I have yet to hear of a case like this in this country, however.
Jim also got shirty with the Trotskyite because the man called him a Fascist and a Nazi. Jim told him that was libel, to which the fellow rightly pointed out that it was slander, as he’d know if he’d actually had any knowledge of the law. As Jim has prefaced several of his livestreams with old footage of Oswald Mosley and the BUF, and that Mosley changed his benighted organisation’s name to the ‘British Union of Fascists and National Socialists’, it could be said that what the man said was fair comment.
When someone asked who was behind this plot to corrupt Britain’s kids, Jim replied that, again he didn’t want to say too much, but it was the Freemasons, citing a couple of 19th century authors, who, he said, were themselves 33rd degree members of the brotherhood. I’ve forgotten just who they were, but their names rang a bell among the sources cited by those convinced of such a conspiracy. Finally, after bothering the good burghers of Colchester for about an hour, and nearly being assaulted by some particularly angry LGBTQ+ rights demonstrators, he went off in search of something to drink. Going through the town’s back streets, he complained about the number of ‘weirdos’ there were and that it was all coffee houses. Quite what he has against coffee houses I don’t know. Perhaps he was afraid that if he went inside, left-wing intellectuals would all jump on him like the characters in Fraser all those years ago.
His conspiracist views became much clearer in his conversation with Godfrey Bloom. Bloom announced himself has having been an investment banker for 40 years and at one time a member of the defence council or something like that. He was thus well-placed to know that capitalism was about to collapse. Actually, there’s a Marxist economics professor on YouTube, Richard Wolf, who has being saying exactly the same thing. And if it hadn’t been for Brown in 2008, I’m sure it would have collapsed. The two then shared their views on the World Economic Forum wishing to depopulate the planet, set up Green Communism and make us all eat bugs. The WEF has captured all our institutions, including the monarchy. Prince Philip also believed there were too many people on the planet. Well, the late Duke of Edinburgh was the head of the World Wide Fund for Nature, so his views are hardly a surprise. The WEF are Malthusians, which means that they believe that population always outstrips the supply of available food, as suggested by the 19th century economist Thomas Malthus. Malthus and his followers believed that when this happened, starvation and war would inevitably result. In order to prevent this, they recommended birth control and were active promoting contraception. As did the Duke, who on one of his official visits to some tribe showed the men how to put on a condom using a spear. However, the WEF were going much further and planning to wipe out a sizable chunk of humanity using a manufactured disease or its vaccine. Those who survived would be under the WEF’s new communist order.
This made me wonder if Jim knew about the wretched views of the late zookeeper John Aspinall, best known for his big cats killing and mauling people. Aspinall also believed that there were too many people around. He said the British population should be only eight million. However, he definitely wasn’t a communist of any description. He declared that what the country needed was a ‘counterrevolution, Francoist in spirit.’ So his green views were closer to Hitler’s than the WEF. And almost certainly pretty close to Jim’s and Bloom’s.
Correct, Not Political’s Jim therefore seems to have read or watched much material about the woke ideology, especially Queer Theory, and mixed this up with old conspiracy theories about the masons. I also think there might be a touch of anti-Catholicism in their as well. When he was voicing his objections to drag queens reading to children as getting them used to nonces, one woman asked him about Roman Catholic priests abusing children. He didn’t agree with that, either, but said he didn’t agree with established religions as ‘they’re from Satan’. But some of the other things he has said, and they’re nothing I can put a precise finger on, suggests that he might have the same conspiracist views about the Catholic church, which is supposed to be doing the work of the antichrist, as some as the bigoted Protestant writers of the 19th century.
Correct, Not Political aren’t physically violent, and while Jim’s sneers about socialism are irritating, he personally has an affable manner. I can’t say that they present a physical danger, unlike National Action or the BNP, for example. What is dangerous is the mad anti-vaxxer views and the deranged paranoia about the WEF, which he also shares with the Lotus Eaters, Alex Jones and any number of others on the right. And these views are a danger to democratic politics, if only because the undermine proper democratic views in favour of suspicion and paranoia.
I got a notice on my phone this afternoon that ultra-right-wing nutters Correct, Not Political, are holding a livestream this evening on the subject of ‘Freemasons and Moneychangers’. As I’ve said, Correct, Not Political go around broadly left-wing protests and try to undermine them by engaging the protesters in conversation and trying to get them to question their beliefs. Usually. At other times, as when they protested against Drag Queen Story Hour outside the libraries which were holding them, they also chant accusations of paedophilia. At first glance they appear to be just right-wing, reactionary Tories. After all, sections of the Conservative party are against the militant trans and gay rights movements, as well as environmental protesters, pro-immigrant groups, socialist, ‘commies’ and the trade unions. You can find similar sentiments on GB News, TalkTV and mainstream, allegedly respectable papers like the Heil. But then they start their livestreams, and the mask slips. They’ve held a couple before, and they’ve begun with footage of Oswald Mosley and his wretched BUF marching, while exchanging fascist salutes with an adoring crowd. All while the Adagio for Strings from Platoon or is Full Metal Jacket plays. The impression is that the marchers are supposed to be some kind of ‘lost generation’, like the courageous men and women, whose lives were wasted in the battlefields of Flanders in the First World War. The BUF aren’t a lost generation. If Mosley had had his way, he would have destroyed our precious democracy and installed a totalitarian dictatorship similar to that of Mussolini’s Italy and Nazi Germany. And Jewish Brits would either have been expelled, barely tolerated or sent to the gas ovens. He also called for the indigenous east Africans to be cleared off their homelands so that they could be developed as White colonies.
I’ve always wondered if there wasn’t anti-Semitism lurking somewhere in the organisation. There are no blatant rants against the Jews, but the subject of this livestream is coming close. Fascists and other dictatorial groups and ideologies hate the Freemasons as subversive organisations. The Nazis banned them, they definitely wouldn’t be tolerated in the Communist bloc, and I think they’re also illegal in various Islamic states like Iran. As for ‘moneychangers’, well, fascism claims to be fighting the stranglehold of international finance capital. By which they usually mean the old nonsense about the Jewish banking conspiracy. This livestream seems to be taking it in the direction of religion and mysticism, as the subtitle was that Freemasonry was a form of kabbalah. The kabbalah is traditional Jewish mysticism. There was also the stupid Kabbala cult that Madonna got involved with, which involved people tying red ribbons to their wrists and buying massively overpriced copies of the Zohar. That cult seemed to be a money-making scam based on the older, and far more respectable Jewish tradition.
I’ve no idea whether Freemasonry is based on the Kabbalah or not. There were suggestions decades ago in books like Inside the Brotherhood that they worshipped a trinity of gods called Yah-Bul-On, who of whom was Baal. Or that they were Satanists, but unless you’re a very high level mason, you don’t know. And they’re not going to be telling. It’s possible that they were influenced by the Kabbala as it was taken up by a number of Christian mystics and occultists in the Renaissance, like Robert Fludd and John Dee, as the old Aristotelian philosophy was being questioned. Some historians of science have said that it was influential in the origins of modern science through being taken up by the first pioneers of the new natural philosophy. It therefore wouldn’t surprise me if Freemasonry wasn’t also influenced by it.
Correct, Not Political are, however, seem to be taking us back to the old conspiracy theories about a masonic plot to undermine the traditional Christian order, as when books like Proofs of a Conspiracy, published in the early 19th century, claimed that they were behind both the American and French Revolutions. Michael Pipes, in his book on conspiracy theories published in the ’90s, traces the origins of modern anti-Semitic ideas of Jewish plots to these early beliefs about the masons. At first the theories were only about the masons, then they included the Jews as the mason’s partners, and then finally it was the Jews who were the major forces behind these conspiracies. These ideas of Jewish conspiracies against the traditional, feudal European order have been around since the days of Nesta Webster and Rotha Orne Linton in the 1920s. Quite apart from better known works like the utterly fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And today’s fascist blame mass immigration on the Jews, who are trying to use non-White immigrants to enslave and destroy the White race.
I might be wrong, but this seems to be the underlying beliefs of the people behind Correct, Not Political. I wonder how long it will be before they come right out with it and the banhammer comes down. I do wonder if they were trying this in Germany they’d be rounded up on charges of violating the Basic Law. This is one of the cornerstones of anti-Nazi legislation and forbids all organisations that oppose democracy. It was used several times in the ’60s and ’70s against the National Democrat Party and other extreme right-wing groups. I don’t know if it was repealed after the Fall of Communism, but if it’s still around it’ll almost certainly be used to prosecute the 25 nutters, who were arrested for trying to set up a coup this week.
Correct, Not Political should be glad that, however diminishing genuine free speech is in Britain, they have far more of it than Mosley would ever have allowed them.
Many of the gender-critical activists state very clearly that while they’re against the trans ideology, they are not against trans people, and that many of them actually support what they do. Graham Linehan has stated that he has met more trans people campaigning against the transgender craze than before. Barry the EDIjester is a gay YouTuber, who’s stated several times that he was partying and dancing the night away with transvestites and drag queens long before the radical trans movement emerged. I believe Mr Menno, another gay gender critical activist, has said the same.
The gender-critical trans folk also have their own organisation, Trans Against Groomers, which is against the medicalisation and transitioning of children. Clive Simpson and Dennis Kavanagh, who are also gender critical gay men, describe them as ‘the old-fashioned sort of trans people you used to see in gay clubs.’ The group is on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Their Facebook has this mission statement:
There is a related, sister organisation, Gays Against Groomers. I think both have been predictably smeared as hate groups while all they are opposing is an ideology and radical activist which does prey on minors and which to many gay activists reminds them very strongly of the way Paedophile Information Exchange attempted to parasitize the gay movement in its drive for legitimacy.
They’ve done it again. The man behind the extreme right-wing vlog and group, Correct, Not Political, held another livestream this week. And once again they gave an indication of their true political colours by prefacing it with black and white newsreel footage of Mosley marching with his BUF storm troopers, all to weeping string music, of course. The group go around staging counter-protests against Drag Queen Story Hour, gay pride, environmentalists, pro-immigrant groups, and people they class as ‘socialists and commies’. They were out today at the ‘Solidarity with Postal Workers’ demonstrations, which they declared to be ‘commies’. Now to be fair to them, they aren’t violent and just try to catch their victims out with awkward questions. They are less fascist in that way than antifa and the militant trans rights protesters, who do threaten violence, scream abuse and hurl smoke bombs around as well as making death threats. But I wonder how well they understand or agree with Mosley’s ideology. For example, at one point their main man said he was a ‘free speech absolutist’. In that case, why support a monster like Mosley? He didn’t, and he tells you over and again he didn’t. It’s in his autobiography, My Life, where at one point he says that free speech is worthless if you’re starving on a park bench. If, God help us! – Mosley had actually got into power and become dictator, the only free speech he would have permitted is the freedom to agree wholeheartedly with whatever nonsense he was spouting that day. If you watch the Channel 4 series about him, there’s one scene at a political meeting where Mosley is expounding his fascist views. And the other politicians condemn it as an attack on traditional British liberties. He denies this, and says it is just marshalling all the forces of the state. But his opponents knew far better.
I also have doubts about their education and intellect. In one of their videos, they urge people to boycott Selfridges, Bella Freud and other stores, whose goods are well out of the price range of ordinary people. Their reason for doing so is because they’re selling branded goods supporting Allen Ginsburg. Ginsburg was a beat poet, and a friend of William S. Burroughs of Naked Lunch infamy and Jack Kerouac, the author of On The Road, a classic of mid-20th century American literature. Except their guy couldn’t pronounce ‘Kerouac’. He got as far as ‘Ker-, Kerw-‘, before giving up. In fact their attack on Ginsburg is actually quite reasonable. They didn’t like him anyway, ’cause he was a Commie, who kept getting thrown out of Communist countries for supporting gay rights. But he was also a paedophile, and the play a recording of him talking about his attitude to people enquiring about NAMBLA, the main American paedophile organisation. Ginsburg didn’t want members to reply, in case it was an attempt to entrap them. If that’s true, then Ginsburg isn’t someone to be celebrated. But I also wondered if lurking behind this boycott there wasn’t a bit of anti-Semitism as well. I don’t know, perhaps there isn’t, but it’s too much like the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses.
But back to Mosley. Fascism is a weird mixture of the radical left and capitalist, pro-private enterprise right. Mussolini believed, if the opportunist believed anything, that Italy should be governed as a corporate state. Industry was to be organised into corporations, in this case the successors to the medieval guilds, in which trade unions, management and proprietors represented their industries in a ‘council of fasces and corporations’ which replaced parliament. Mosley initially believed the same, before he rejected it as ‘too bureaucratic’. Under him, the House of Lords would be abolished and replaced with a similar industrial chamber. It’s an interesting idea, but if it was like Mussolini’s Italy, it wouldn’t have done anything except cheered and clapped Mosley and automatically pass every piece of legislation he proposed. But it’s a good question to ask Correct, Not Political. Would they want to replace the House of Lords with a similar industrial chamber following the theories of the corporate state. My guess is that they’d be horrified by the idea, because trade unions = commies. When one of the rival fascist groups wanted to ally themselves with Mosley, he asked them what their views on the corporate state were. They immediately denounced it as Communism. At which Mosley left them. My guess is Correct, Not Political have the same views.
Ditto Mosley’s views on Europe. After the War he turned up, promoting ‘national syndicalism’, his term for his version of the corporate state and calling for the formation of a united Europe, again along fascist lines, against the Communist threat. I think he later claimed to be a pioneer of the idea of the EU, which I’ve no doubt would have horrified the real founders. So, are Correct, Not Political also for the idea of a united Europe against the threat of plutocratic capitalism and Communism? As I’m sure they’re all Brexiteers of the racist stripe, that’s probably another one which would cause them difficulties.
I may well be misjudging them. Perhaps they do have a strong grasp of Mosley’s ideas, and could provide well-informed answers to those awkward questions. But perhaps not.
Here’s a really unpleasant development. I’ve blogged on here about a right-wing group and its YouTube channel, Correct, Not Political. They’re a bunch who go to various left-wing demonstrations and protests and attempt to argue the opposite case to the demonstrators. They turn up at gay pride parades, outside libraries presenting Drag Queen Story Hour, environmentalist demos by people like Extinction Rebellion, anti-racism and migrants’ rights protests, and they have a special part of their website devoted to ‘socialists and commies’. I thought first of all that might be just right-wing Tories with a few weird ideas. But no. This afternoon they’ve organised a livestream with a title quoting St. Paul about the ‘synagogue of Satan’ and ‘those who say they are Jews but are not’. St. Paul was a Jew himself, and proudly boasted that he was ‘a pharisee and the son of a pharisee’. As he believed that Christ came to save the Jew first, then the gentile, when he entered a town on his preaching mission he started by preaching in the local synagogue. The statement about false Jews and the ‘synagogue of Satan’, from what I understand, was about one particular Jewish community in what is now one of the Turkish cities, that strongly opposed early Christian preaching. I think they may have requested the local Roman authorities to clamp down on them. That’s the Biblical context of the quote, from a time when Christianity was a Messianic sect within Judaism. But passages like that from the New Testament tragically have an appeal to Fascists.
Intrigued by this title, I clicked on the channel. It was a few minutes before it started properly, but things definitely did not bode well. It showed an old B/W newsreel footage of people marching in a BUF rally, complete with the ‘Roman’ salute and the BUF banner. It also showed the cops forming up to police them. All this was set to the adagio for strings piece which gets played in films and TV programmes about the horrors of war. I think it comes from the end of Platoon or Full Metal Jacket when the film ends with its heroes being gunned down. After a few minutes of this, it began. It switched to some kind of studio with a quote from a rabbi to one side of the presenter, ‘Some call it Marxism. I call it Judaism.’ At that moment the presenter started speaking. I couldn’t hear him properly, so I have to admit I got bored and turned him off. Perhaps I’m being prejudiced, but I thought I’d seen enough.
I think the livestream was supposed to be about Israel, but it seemed to me to be a return to the old Fascist conspiracy theory that the problems of the western world, and particularly non-White immigration, all due to evil Marxist Jews. Well, to quote The Young Turks’ Ben Mankiewicz, if there is a Jewish conspiracy, nobody told him. Nor any of the other Jews I’ve met or had dealings with. As for the Biblical quote, it looks like an attempt to play down the anti-Semitism by doing what Oswald Mosley himself used to do: claim that they’re only talking about some Jews, but not all Jews. And those you’re attacking aren’t real Jews, of course.
It’s depressing and worrying that people are seemingly turning once again to the far right after the spectacular collapse of the BNP. I don’t know how many members Correct, Not Political has or how wide their audience. Probably very few. And to be fair, they also don’t seem to be violent. When they do speak to their opponents, the tone is quiet and reasonable and at a conversational level. When shouting and a bit of argy-bargy does occur, it’s more often by the left-wing protesters than them. They really don’t seem to be thugs and bruisers like the NF’s bovver boys.
But that doesn’t alter the fact that they have seemingly turned to real Fascism, which was based on hate and violence. And the really worrying aspect of this is the possibility that it might be part of a growing trend. To which there can only be one response:
This is another excursion into the issue of the trans ideology and specifically that of Drag Queen Story Hour. There have been many protests against it both here and in America. This has largely been done by right-wingers deeply concerned that the drag queens reading the stories are paedophiles seeking to groom children. Unfortunately, in some cases that seems to be very plausible, as when young children have been taken to drag performances in bars and encouraged to dance with the performers or in drag themselves, with the gay clientele throwing money at them. There is, however, an ideological angle to Drag Queen Story Hour that is significant, but rarely discussed. According to mathematician and staunch critic of postmodernism, James Lindsey, at least some of the drag queens involved in this are supporters of Queer Theory, a postmodern doctrine that seeks to exploit and promote people’s unhappiness with their gender identity or sexuality to create a mentally unstable cadre ready for Marxist revolution. It has absolutely nothing to do with, and indeed is deeply hostile to, the idea of creating a more tolerant society towards gay people, and gay youngsters comfortable with their sexuality/sexual identity and respected, functional members of society. This would be supporting a bourgeois order that the people who promote Queer Theory are pledged to destroy.
EDIJester is another gay critic of the trans ideology. He runs a warrior teachers programme training people from all walks of life in how recognise and combat the trans ideology. I’m not in agreement with all his pronouncements, as he has told people to vote Conservative in a recent video. This is presumably due to Keir Starmer and Labour defending the trans movement, refusing to give the LGB Alliance, a group of gay men and women to seek to promote gay rights without the inclusion of trans people, a place at the Labour party conference and the party’s stated intention of banning all conversion therapies. It is feared that this will mean that only treatments for trans people that affirm their condition will be legal, even if this is inappropriate and harmful. I profoundly disagree with Labour’s policy on the trans issue but feel that at the moment Labour is the best option for defending working people and the NHS from privatisation, welfare cuts, poverty and starvation. More Conservative government will be utterly disastrous for these issues.
I’m putting this video, ‘Let’s Talk about Drag and Queer Performativity – Drag Part One’ up here because it tackles Drag Queen Story Hour from a fresh perspective. This differentiates sharply between traditional drag and Drag Queen Story Hour. He begins by drawing a sharp distinction between British and American drag, as in RuPaul’s Drag Race. British drag was mainstream and not completely gay – straight men often did it, like the Bernard Breslaw in one of the Carry On films and the late, great Les Dawson. There was also the camp humour from gay men, who were forced into show business because of society’s intolerance. This created Kenneth Williams and the Polari language in Round the Horne, Larry Grayson and John Inman, for example. He states that there were no ideological motives behind traditional drag – all they wanted to do was to separate you from as much of your money as possible by the time you staggered out drunk. They also raise money for charity. He knows a number of drag performers himself, having carried one of them back to the performer’s own house at the end of an evening of alcoholic and chemical refreshment. He mentions approvingly a traditional drag act oop north somewhere, Funny Girls. He states that American drag has a heterosexual bias, in that in Mrs Doubtfire the hero cross-dresses so he can see his wife and children.
Drag Queen Story Hour is different. And it isn’t about paedophiles preying on young children either. It’s about promoting Queer Theory, often mixed with Critical Race Theory by reading children’s books written from these standpoints. Like retellings of the Three Little Pigs where the pigs are black, brown and pink for gay, and the wolf is white. It’s this highly ideological, genuinely subversive literature he warns people about, not drag or drag queens themselves.
It’s an excellent perspective which draws a needed distinction between drag as a traditional form of entertainment, which boasted great and much-loved performers as Danny La Rue, the Two Ronnies, Lily Savage, and Les Dawson, and its contemporary abuse as a form of ideological propaganda.
This meme was posted on the community page of right-wing group Correct, Not Political on YouTube. I’ve talked about them before. They’re a bunch who protest Drag Queen Story Hour, gay and trans rights demos, also marches and protests by environmentalists, anti-racist and pro-refugee organisations, trade unions and people they categorise as ‘commies and socialists’. They’re also against our new, beloved monarch, King Charles, because he’s another tree-hugger and is clearly in cahoots with the World Economic Forum to bring about ‘green communism’ in this country, in which we won’t own anything but be happy anyway. I’m sure Charles himself has very strong sympathies with the ecological and conservation movements but foisting green communism on us? This is Alex Jones level bonkers. But it does seem that in the Tory party if you want high office, it helps to be an aristo. Dave Cameron was and had even worked for the monarchy at the express invitation of their office. Boris Johnson also toff. Thatcher used to spout nonsense about meritocracy. Supposedly once state management had been cleared away, it would allow people to rise to the top through their natural talents no matter what their previous station in society had been. Well, social mobility has stalled since the days of Tony Blair, and the current composition of the Tory party and its leadership shows that too many of them owe their position to inherited wealth. Precious few of them have made their way up from humble origins, with the exception of Sajid Javid, whose father was a Bristol bus driver, and Nadine Dorries, who I think grew up in a council house.
But Hunt did write a book about privatising the NHS and he supports all the Thatcherite policies that have led our great and wonderful country into the current state, although he’s not as extreme as Truss and Khazi.
And that’s all that matters. Get him out. Get her out. Get all the Tories out!
Sorry I haven’t been posting much over the last few days. I had a hospital appointment Thursday and although it wasn’t anything serious, I haven’t felt much like posting anything online afterwards. But I felt I had to post about this. I was watching one of the videos from the New Culture Forum yesterday. It’s the cultural offshoot of the Institute of Economic Affairs and has been set up to defend traditional British culture from left-wing ideas and ‘wokeness’. In this particular video, they were discussing various topics that had arisen over the past week. One of these was a video produced by biracial Tory Calvin Robinson about how British children’s education is being ruined by left-wing teachers pushing Critical Race Theory and so on. Now I do agree with them about Critical Race Theory. I think it’s just a form of militant anti-White racism based on a mixture of Marxist legal theory and postmodernism. It considers that all Black people are automatically oppressed because of their colour, while White people are privileged and should be made to feel ashamed and humiliated because of this. It’s divisive and I see absolutely no value in it whatsoever. But Critical Race Theory is only one of their targets. The broader target is the teaching profession itself, which they decided is far too left-wing and needs to be comprehensively attacked.
My mother was a primary school teacher, and I did my first degree at a teacher training college, which has since become one of the new universities. I realise that this is nearly forty years ago, and I honestly don’t know how much has changed or not. I did an MA in history in 2004 and then a Ph.D. in archaeology at Bristol university, graduating ten years ago. My experience of university is therefore dated and limited. But this contradicts some of the assertions that the New Culture Forum were making. They claimed that 85 per cent plus of teachers were left leaning. Perhaps they are. And so, the arch-Tories claimed, they wished to indoctrinate children with woke doctrines like CRT, Postcolonial Theory and so on. They also asserted that they were generally indoctrinating people with the left-wing attitudes that only people on the left support the NHS and are caring.
Now my experience is that teachers, whether left or right, go into the profession for the simple reason that they want to stand up before a class and teach. And what they want to teach is the traditional academic subjects – the three ‘Rs’, history, science, geography or whatever. They don’t want to push Critical Race Theory, Postcolonial Theory or Queer Theory. Issues of race, gender, sexuality, feminism and so on used be part of what was called ‘the hidden curriculum’, the set of values that the educational system sought to impart to its pupils. From what I can see, the overt teaching of issues like anti-racism was imposed from outside the school by the local education authority and involved outside groups. After the 1981/2 riots, for example, the school at which my mother taught was visited by such a specialist group to teach the children to be anti-racist. As far as I can make out, this came from above, from the council or LEA and that neither the school nor its headmaster had anything to do with it. Today there are concerns about schoolchildren in Brighton being taught Critical Race Theory, and one man has taken his child out of the local school there and was protesting against it. But the leader of Brighton council is a member of the Green party, and this seems to be part of Green party policy down there. The New Culture Forum, as could be expected from a group of high Tories, declared that it was the fault of the unions. Well, the National Union of Teachers, from what I can remember, is very hot on anti-racism and so on, but there were a variety of different teaching unions, and I don’t think they were all the same.
As for universities, some lecturers are admittedly very left-wing. Others are, or used to be, Tory. And others keep their political and religious opinions out of the classroom. With some of the ‘woke’ courses that are being made mandatory at certain universities, such as anti-racism awareness for freshers, the impression I get is that they are being imposed by the administration. This seems to be largely a response to criticism from the Black community. Blacks tend to get lower grades than Whites, and so universities have been under pressure since the 1980s to implement affirmative action programmes to admit more Black students by lowering the grades required. And it’s also being done in response to complaints that Black and Asian staff and students also suffer from racial abuse and so on. This aspect does indeed come from the Black sections of the unions, as reported by the Guardian.
The impression that teachers have been indoctrinating vulnerable little minds with Communism has been around since the days of Thatcher, when her government started a moral panic about Peace Studies. I think this latest round of political suspicion and witch hunting is partly a result of concerns across the Atlantic about the promotion of Critical Race Theory, Black Lives Matter and Queer Theory in schools. There have been a number of videos put up on right-wing YouTube channels commenting on TikTok videos by gay/trans teachers informing the world about their sexuality and how they’re trying to teach their class about it, as well as news stories and controversies about Drag Queen Story Hour. But while this goes on, I’m really not sure how widespread it is. I’ve watched videos that have claimed it’s near uniform because of the influence of these doctrines and left-wing staff on the American teacher training courses. But I’m not American, and my contact with the American education system has been limited to American exchange and other students at the universities and colleges I attended.
I am also unsure how far the local authorities can be blamed for the schools in their area teaching left-wing doctrines like Critical Race Theory. I was at school just before the National Curriculum came in, when schools had far greater freedom to teach what and how they chose. This freedom has been limited by the National Curriculum. Also, schools have been part-privatised by being transformed into academies. This system was intended to take them out of local authority control. But if schools are teaching subjects like CRT and Queer Theory, it has to be due to the wishes of the academy chain itself. These are private companies, which makes it difficult for Tories like the New Culture Forum to blame the state or left-wing local authorities. It’s no doubt why they’re blaming the teaching unions instead.
So, what are their solutions to all this? They discussed home schooling but rejected that on the grounds that working class parents have neither the time nor the books required to do it. They concluded that if the education system could be rescued at all, there had to be a battle with the unions ‘like the miners’ strike’.
This is very ominous.
I’m not in favour of anyone imposing their own personal political opinions schools. But I’d say that the most pressing issues in education aren’t about Critical Race Theory and so on. They’re the constant issues of underfunding and poor pay for teaching staff, lack of resources and teaching materials and inability to retain staff. There are concerns that children’s, and particularly boy’s personal development and educational performance is being harmed by the lack of male teachers. But one solution to that would be to raise salaries to a level where they would be attractive to men, where they felt that it was worth their while economically to go into teaching rather than a better paid profession. Or launch a campaign that would otherwise attract more men in the same way that other, traditionally masculine professions, are trying to attract women. As for universities, the main issue there in my opinion is the extremely high tuition fees. As far as I can see, the money from these isn’t going to teaching staff, who can be quite poorly paid. One of my friends was an assistant lecturer for a time in the ’90s. It all seems to be going on the bloated salaries of university chancellors and administrators. These seem to me to be the real issues, though I’m not discounting the harm done by the introduction of specifically woke courses. And whatever the New Culture Forum may say, no, the Tories do not support the NHS.
Their talk of attacking the teaching unions is frightening, because it means another Tory assault on state education generally, at a time when education is in crisis because of Tory privatisation policies.
Get the Tories out, renationalise schools and get rid of tuition fees!
More Alex Belfield. Well, he’s due to be sentenced tomorrow, and just to remind us how nasty he really is, the Truth Checkers channel on YouTube have created this video of his ten worst moments, which they subdivide into the following sections:
Belfield shows himself in these incidents to be callous, manipulative, bigoted and actually dangerous. He mocks people with genuine mental health issues, going on about how they’re weak and should pull themselves together and making the old mock crying actions about them. When it comes to the subject of suicide, he thinks it’s funny to cut off one woman who has reasonably objected to his sneering comments about it because her boyfriend took his own life. He then posts pictures of nooses. As regards racism, Black and the ‘dinghy divers’ are dangerous, feral savages. And he really is homophobic. He rants about transpeople and when a transman calls in to challenge him, he cuts him off. Now some of his views on some of the trans issues aren’t unreasonable. I think the gender-neutral toilets in the Barbican were installed to help trans identified people. And some of the criticisms of Drag Queen Story Hour are also quite valid, in my opinion. Modern drag is highly sexualised, and so it is highly questionable whether it is suitable for children. A few weeks ago, a video made by a drag queen, who said that it wasn’t suitable for kids, went viral among the right-wing YouTube channels. But Belfield here is extremely rude about it all. Helen Pluckrose, who’s a critic of postmodern theories like Queer Theory, which is behind some of Trans ideology, believes that there’s a middle ground on which Trans people and gender critical feminists can agree on. And many gender critical feminists complain that they have a problem debating the trans rights activists because they refuse to appear with them, sometimes making the excuse that they don’t feel safe. Well, Belfield had the opportunity to have a respectful dialogue with a transperson, and threw it away with snide remarks. Which makes the gender critical side look bad. Quite honestly, I can’t blame some transpeople not feeling safe if that’s the response they get from Belfield and people like him. The contempt he has for his audience is astonishing to behold. He shouts at them, tells them to hurry up with what they’re saying and generally insults them.
I dare say that Belfield probably sees himself as some kind of shock jock, provoking his listeners with his abrupt and outrageous behaviour. Well, he ain’t Howard Stern, who was genuinely shocking and outrageous, but wasn’t homophobic. Belfield, by contrast, is just rude and nasty. And watching his behaviour here, including the sneers about women’s football and his creepy behaviour towards his female fans, you can see why Radio Leeds sacked him after a year.
Beastrabban\'s Weblog 