I hope this isn’t too controversial a post, because I know many of the great commenters here are strong supporters of trans rights. But I hope that whatever our differences, we can agree on this issue: the fear going around the trans community that there is a holocaust either underway or about to come is a toxic myth that may have played a role in the tragic shooting of six people at a Presbyterian school in America on Monday. Audrey Hale, the perpetrator, was a trans-identified woman, who believed she was a transman. She walked into the school with an assault rifle and proceeded to shoot the children and staff before she was shot in the head by the cops. It’s not really known what her motives were, and she is unusual in that while I’ve heard and seen YouTube footage of violence by transwomen, transmen have not, as far as I know, been personally violent. Hale did, however, leave a manifesto, the contents of which have not been disclosed to the public. Right-wing American commenters have claimed that the authorities won’t because they don’t fit the narrative of transpeople being an oppressed minority.
Several YouTubers and other commenters on the Net have made the point that part of the cause of the tragedy lies in the very militant, violent rhetoric among trans militants. I am not going to deny that there is prejudice against transpeople, but there is a real culture of violence amongst the trans militants. Gender critical feminists like Maria MacLachlan, who was herself assaulted by an angry transwoman, have posted a number of videos showing the very aggressive counter demonstrations by trans activists. There is also footage on YouTube of feminist campaigners being beaten to the ground by trans activists in Spain. There is also a feminist site on the Net which regularly posts examples of such violence. Kelly-Jay Keen, a leading trans activist, was mobbed and feared for her life when she spoke in Auckland, New Zealand. Maria MacLachlan has posted video footage of the various aggressive militant trans who greeted her when she spoke in Bristol. The militants were also supported by Antifa, dressed in black bloc, and Bristol Anarchist Federation. They tried to storm the police cordon around the demonstration. Wheeen n she spoke in Bristol the trans militants were supported by Antifa, dressed in black bloc, and Bristol Anarchist Federation. There were similar scenes when she spoke in Brighton, when the counterprotesters let off smoke bombs and one of them, a young guy, was dragged off because Brighton’s finest had found 12 knives in his bag. Similar, highly aggressive displays have been staged by trans rights protesters over the other side of the Pond. In one such instance, a young woman speaking at university was ushered by a cop into a cupboard to hide her from the angry mob chasing her.
And trans militant rhetoric is similarly violent. There are any number of posts on Twitter where the activists display guns with slogans like ‘I Kill TERFs’. Nicola Sturgeon caught flak the other week because, when she was trying to pass the Gender Recognition Bill in Scotland, she stood in front of a flag saying ‘Behead TERFS’ or some such. In their discussion of the recent shooting, the Lotus Eaters have used as their thumbnail a picture of someone standing next to a sign saying ‘Trans Right… Or Else’ with multiple pictures of AK47s.
Many trans activists seem to sincerely believe that gender critical feminists and their supporters are real fascists. This is nonsense, which MacLachlan has also disposed of in another of her videos. My own experience of simply reading their blogs and watching their videos is that far from being any kind of allies of Stormfront and the rest of the jackbooted horrors, real ‘TERFs’ tend instead to be respectable, middle-aged ladies, and that they largely come from the political left. That’s the direction MacLachlan comes from, and KJK started out as a left-wing socialist before she got censured from her Labour feminist group simply for asking why transwomen were women. They seem to be largely women, who marched against real fascism in the shape of the BNP, NF and apartheid South Africa. And they have not, to my certain knowledge, posted anything demanding the murder, let alone the mass murder, of trans people. Not MacLachlan, not the feminists at Redux, not gender critical gays like Clive Simpson, Dennis Kavanagh or the EDIjester, Barry Wall. Not even J.K. Rowling, for whom I have a fair degree of contempt because of her support for the libellous accusations that Mike was an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier, simply because he supported Jeremy Corbyn.
Part of the problem is, I believe, the myth of the trans holocaust. There have been trans days of remembrance held in Britain and Scotland, but the numbers of trans people killed over here has been low. In Scotland they were about three, and no-one was killed last year. This should obviously be a source of pride. The figures are higher in America, but as a section of the population they’re still low. The stats the activists use to show that there is a trans holocaust underway come from Latin America. These are desperately poor countries, and some of them, like Brazil, have horrifically high murder rates anyway. And it’s unclear whether the murdered transpeople were killed because they were trans, or because they were sex workers.
But despite the lack of death camps or paramilitary mobs going from house to house looking for trans people, as happened to the Jews during the real Holocaust, this myth is spreading. The right-wing, anti-trans YouTuber, Arielle Scarcella, who is herself a lesbian, put up a piece in which she reported many trans people are joining the Pink Pistols. This is a network of gun clubs set up by the gay community in America and Canada to teach gay men and women how to shoot in order to defend themselves. I sympathise with the reason for them. There has been a violent hatred of gays in America and Britain, and in a culture like America which supports gun ownership as the citizen’s right to defend him- or herself, it’s natural that gays should also want to own them for their defence. Just like the Black Panthers decided that if the White man had guns, they wanted theirs too. But it means we’ve entered a very dangerous climate where scared, volatile people, afraid of Nazi-style persecution, are taking up arms amid angry rhetoric that calls for and legitimises the killing of their opponents. One internet commenter has even said that, given the circumstances, the shooting was entirely predictable.
This is where I hope genuinely liberal people, people concerned about the deteriorating state of social discourse over this matter can help, and particularly academics. Because we’ve been here before, folks, but from the other political extreme. I have a strong interest in folklore, and was for a time a member of the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research. This was set up by academic folklorists to investigate contemporary urban folklore. You know, vanishing hitch-hikers, UFOs, and other weirdness. But this was in the 1990s when the was another spike in American and western paranoia. It was when anyone and seemingly almost everyone with a computer was producing small press magazines or pamphlets ranting about THEM. President George Bush Senior sparked some of it after the Gulf War by talking about his New Order, which harked back to the Nazis’ rhetoric about their new European order, and even further back to the 18th century and the Illuminati and the words printed on dollar bills: Novo Ordo Saecularum – ‘New World Order’. Looking for an underlying explanation for the Gulf War, people found it in the old conspiracy theories about Satanist freemasons. And there were real fears of a resurgence of the militant extreme right following the rise of the Militia movement and Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing. Morris Dees, one of the major figures in the Southern Poverty Law Centre, published a book about their threat and links to the wider American Nazi movement. It’s been widely criticised, not least because one of the captains of one of the militias was actually Black. There were calls from someone who styled herself a militia commander for them to march on Washington DC. But the other militia members smelt an agent provocateur, and wisely kept to running around training in the hills.
The Society also covered some of the weird conspiracy theories going around America. The American far right at that time hadn’t taken in the fact that real, existing state communism in eastern Europe had collapsed. There was a paranoid fringe that believed it was all a ruse. Thus there were bonkers theories that held that the Russians had established secret bases in Canada and Mexico, from which the tanks would roll into America at the given signal. And God-fearing American Christians believed that they would be targeted for extermination under the One World Satanic state. There was a rumour going around Christians in Pennsylvania that the coloured dots on the state’s road signs indicated the sites of the concentration camps in which they were to be interned. It was all false. The dots were part of a code telling state highway workers when the signs had last been painted, so that they knew when they needed another coat. It had nothing to do with concentration camps for anyone.
And then, with 9/11 came the stories about the destruction of the Twin Towers, and the rise of Alex Jones. Jones has become infamous for his wild conspiracy theories. In one of them he claimed that Barack Obama was going to use an environmental emergency to force Americans into refugee camps and seize power to become an eco-communist dictator. And there were other weird attacks on the former president, in which it was claimed that he was secret atheist/Muslim/Communist/Nazi filled with a hatred of White America and planning its extinction. In fact, Obama was in many ways a bog-standard conventional American politician. He saw himself, as he’s said recently, as a moderate Republican. And there’s a very strong continuity between his bombing of Libya and continuation of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, with Neo-Con foreign policy.
Well, Obama’s been and gone. he was succeeded by Trump, who was succeeded by Biden. There are no concentration camps for anyone. But the ideas of a trans holocaust are merely an extreme left-wing version of the right-wing American fears about a holocaust of Whites and Christians. And it needs people to point this out. During the ’90s and after there were a number of academic books published about the paranoid fringe in America, sometimes as part of wider examinations of conspiracy theories like the infamous Jewish banking myth that inspired Hitler and the Nazis. This new myth of the trans holocaust needs putting in the same context. The fact that it comes from the left, and a minority group that sees itself as vicious marginalised and oppressed, should make no difference. It’s a myth, a dangerous myth, that does seem to be inspiring militant trans activists to violence. And the internet platforms should be helping as well. Nobody should be allowed to post material genuinely calling for the murder of others. It should be immediately struck down. Protests that it’s all a joke should not be tolerated. Since the rise of political correctness in the 1980s people find racist jokes genuinely distasteful. I cannot imagine decent people finding anything funny in jokes about killing Blacks and Jews. And the so-called jokes about killing TERFS shouldn’t be tolerated either. As for masked individuals turning up in black bloc threatening violence, that could be solved by invoking the legislation passed in the 1930s that outlawed paramilitary uniforms. It was aimed at Mosley and the British Union of Fascists. I think it may have become a dead-letter because of the paramilitary violence in Ulster. But there’s a strong case for enforcing it over here.
We have to fight the poisonous myths and paranoia in the militant trans community.
Before someone else with serious mental issues and anger against society because they fear they’re going to be put into a concentration camp because of their gender identity goes on another killing spree.
Katie Hopkins has raised her head again. There was a video posted on YouTube last night of her talking to an ‘entrepreneur’ of some sort, which promised its viewers that she would reveal who was really controlling the world. Yes! We’re back to raving conspiracy theory paranoia of the time John Ronson explored a decade or so ago in his Channel 4 series, Secret Rulers of the World and accompanying book, Them! Adventures with Extremists. So, who did Katie think was secretly pulling the strings to establish the One World Satanic Communist superstate? Was it Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum at Davos? The Bilderberg group? The Trilateral Commission? International finance capital, in other words, the Jewish banking conspiracy? Reptoid aliens? I’m afraid I can’t tell you, because I didn’t get that far into the video before I’d had enough.
Hopkins started off by attacking the Covid lockdown, claiming that it was an opportunistic exercise in totalitarian social control using the Wuhan virus as a pretext. It was a test to see if they really could isolate people in their own homes. The NHS and socialised medicine was part of this conspiracy, because everyone’s concerned with their health. And this is why Joe Biden is so keen on introducing it in America. Really? I had no idea. It always struck me that Biden was a bog-standard American corporatist. The only trace of radicalism I’ve seen in the old boy is his support for the trans ideology through the appointment of Rachel Levine, a transwoman, as Surgeon General and a non-binary chap as head of the programme to dispose of nuclear waste. That’s it. I’ve seen no evidence he wants socialised medicine in the US. I’d have more respect for him if he did.
As for the NHS as an instrument of totalitarianism, this is pure Reaganite, libertarian twaddle. Way back in the 1970s Reagan gave a stirring speech about the need to defend freedom against state totalitarianism. This sounds all very well, but it was an attack on Medicaid, the state programme that provides medical care to elderly citizens that can’t afford it. I’ve also had American commenters state that the NHS must be against human freedom, because doctors are employed by the state, therefore they must have the same power as other state officials like the police or the government, and so you have to do exactly as they say. Um, no, you don’t. They don’t have that power. You don’t have to take their advice, and for serious treatment, like long term cancer care, you have to sign consent forms. Of course, you’d be daft if you ignored their advice, especially when it comes to serious illnesses like cancer. But you’re still a free individual.
This is, of course, the kind of crass stupidity Alex Jones peddles with his rants against the globalists, when he isn’t maligning bereaved parents of the victims of school shootings as crisis actors, screaming that the government is about to take away Americans’ guns, and that the government is about to call an environmental emergency and force everyone into refugee camps in order to establish a totalitarian state. Despite having been dumped by various media companies for her toxic views, particularly about race, Hopkins is still going the rounds. She was doing shows with Alex Belfield, the ‘Voice of Reason’, now doing time for internet stalking.
Despite her poisonous views, I don’t want to see her banned. There’s too much internet censorship, particularly of those on the left. I just want people to realise for themselves how nasty and toxic she is. I think she’s still making a nice living for herself, because she reflects some peoples’ fears of immigration and, like Belfield, attacks the bonkers part of the woke ideology. But beyond that there’s a general contempt for working people, regardless of colour. And it doesn’t matter how much they might agree with her about the threat of illegal immigrants, gay policemen and the transgender ideology, if she had her way the people, who go to see would be deprived of proper medical care. It would all be privatised and they’d be unable to afford it. Just as they wouldn’t have any employment rights or unemployment benefits, because she’d remove all the welfare legislation that they think is being exploited by chavs and benefit scroungers. If enough people realised that, hopefully stop supporting her and she might have to do a real job for once.
Things aren’t looking good for Alex Jones, the mad Texan conspiracist theorist behind Infowars. Jones has been using his YouTube channel and website to push some very nasty conspiracy theories about how the world, and especially America, are under attack from ‘the globalists’. These are evil Communist, feminist, trans businesspeople determined to set up some kind of global one-world totalitarian superstate on behalf of evil aliens or demons or whatever. He’s pushed often dangerous nonsense about various prominent and not-so prominent politicians, organisations and ordinary people. He claimed that Barack Obama was the anti-Christ, and was going to use the laws providing for government action in emergencies to force everybody into FEMA camps to enslave Americans. Hilary Clinton was also Satanic, and was some kind of cyborg or robot, at least from the waist down. She was also impregnated with the spawn of some demon or alien or mixture of the two. Quite often this stuff was just so over the top that it’s the subject of ridicule and laughter rather than alarm, as when he claimed that they were putting stuff in the water that was turning the frickin’ frogs gay. But often it wasn’t, and the effects of his rants were dangerous and distressing to their targets. One example is when he claimed that a Boston pizza parlour contained a dungeon, in which children were being kept, to supply to leading Democrat politician to abuse. It was a complete lie, but it resulted in a gunman walking in to free the captive children. After being shown round the business and persuaded that there was no dungeon and no abused children, he put down his gun and gave himself up to the cops. It’s a mercy no-one was killed. Jones has been hit by a judgement for $1 billion in damages for libelling the parents of the schoolchildren killed in the Sandy Hook massacre. Jones had claimed that the school shooting hadn’t really occurred and had just been staged in order to provide a pretext for the government to deprive Americans of their precious guns. The grieving parents were just ‘crisis actors’. The result was years of harassment by people, who had bought this offensive nonsense. They sued, the beak has found in their favour, and now Jones is crying that he’s bankrupt as a result. ‘Oh dear. How sad. Never mind’, as Sergeant-Major Shutup from It Ain’t ‘Alf Hot Mum used to say.
Jones has published a book, in which he attacks the World Economic Forum and its leader, Klaus Schwab, now the target of right-wing conspiracy theories about shadowy organisations trying to create the one-world superstate. Private Eye reviewed it in last fortnight’s edition for 18th November to 1st December 2022. And they very definitely weren’t impressed. This is what they had to say about it
‘Toxic Schlock
The Great Reset and the War for the World
Alex Jones
According to Alex Jones, the gravel-voiced US conspiracy-monger, the world is facing a “Great Reset”. That reset is, he writes, an attempt by a shady cabal of internationalists “to achieve an unprecedented amount of control over your daily life.” To make sure he has the reader’s undivided attention, Jones warns that the whole thing “is a war to control the future of human development and capture control of the human species.”
These evil internationalists are, according to Jones, a group of technocrats and money men who have swilled around the world stage for the last 80 or so years. These evil plotters have names such as Kissinger, Rockefeller, Yuval Noah Hariri and Soros (and yes, there is an unfortunate pattern to those names. Between them, these men have spawned and sustained a new global elite, at the centre of which is the World Economic Forum at Davos.
For anyone lucky enough to be invited, Davos is essentially as piss-up0 in a posh ski resort. Jones’ view is somewhat different. The man who runs the thing, Karl Schwab, may look like a common-or-garden egghead but, we learn, he is in fact a very evil egghead, bent on global destruction. “Schwab and his Davos gang are interested in wiping out every one of the previously existing social structures that have guided the development of countries and nations,” says Jones.
He quotes from one of Schwab’s books, singling out a passing reference to “more agile forms of governance”. The phrase sends Jones into a horrified tizzy. “What are these ‘more agile forms of governance’?” he demands to know. “Summary execution by firing squad without the demand of a trial?”
The globalists have no moral centre, says Jones, and seeing as “God was the original insurrectionist”, it is up to every decent, freedom-loving citizen to stand up to the evil Davos cabal. They will take away your cars and your petrol, restrict your food supply, invent fake pandemics, lock you in your home, turn all money into digital tokens so your bank accounts can be frozen and — oh but this book is just so exhausting. So, so exhausting.
If you have not heard of the author, lucky you. A preposterous, ranting fatso, Jones is from the internet’s nether regions. Essentially a man with a website – the idiotically named “Infowars” – he’s made his reputation by parping out a vast, toxic guff-cloud of paranoid nonsense about lefty plots. This book is a distilled version of his bizarre world view, in which every government employee is a Hitler, anyone who wants to improve society is a fascist and our future will consist of “Karl Schwab, or his downloaded brain, giving us all orders from his laptop.”
Jones, then, is a maniac. As nice as it would be to pull the lever and flush him into the septic tank of history, he is not so easy to dismiss. A glimpse at the back cover of this book reveals a set of glowing endorsements. “If Alex Jones is just a crackpot,” one reads, “why are the most powerful people in the country trying to silence him?” It continues: “Maybe Alex Jones is onto something.”
That glowing endorsement comes from Tucker Carlson, the star turn on Fox News (prop: Rupert Murdoch). Jones, you see, has powerful fans who’ve noticed the sizeable, Trumpy audience he’s built. They want to keep him onside.
The quote now looks somewhat embarrassing for Carlson – and Murdoch. For years, Jones promoted a vile conspiracy theory that the Sandy Hook shooting, during which 26 people were murdered, most of them small children, had been faked. The grieving parents were actors, he said, and the whole thing had been staged to justify a left-wing attack on people’s gun rights. The parents sued and won. The court ordered Jones to pay damages of $1bn. That amount could rise farther.
So Alex, it turns out, is not “onto something”, and no one in their right mind should touch him, his website or this book with a bargepole. But this deranged nonsense does serve one purpose. It is a warning. The Americans are in the midst of a culture war, stoked by odious loudmouths like Jones and his buddy Carlson. The results include an increase in social division, the 6 January Capitol riots and a delusional young man attacking Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer.
There are people in the current Westminster government and on Fleet Street, who have flirted with the culture war – some even whipping off their undies and hopping straight into bed with it. But as this book makes clear, culture war, with its “us-and-them” rhetoric, is an attack on the stuff that holds societies together. As someone once nearly said: trying to win a culture war is like to trying to win and earthquake. Britain should stay well clear.’ (p. 30).
The problem is that there are real issues threatening freedom in the west and around the world. This includes governments and big corporations harvesting personal information from the internet, including our purchases, and using electronic banking to track the way we move our money. Corporations and clandestine interest groups really do exist and attempt to lobby governments to their own ends. The conspiracy magazine Lobster has been documenting all this for years.
Jones and his nonsense points people away from these real threats and replaces them with dangerous fascistic nonsense.
I feel I’ve got to put this up. I’ve said in my videos and blogs about trans issues that I don’t hate trans people, and utterly condemn persecution, discrimination, abuse and violence against anyone because of their sexuality and gender presentation. I criticise and attack the trans ideology because of the dangers it poses in falsely persuading vulnerable people, including children, especially autistic individuals and the mentally ill, that they are really members of the opposite sex, who need to be placed on the pathway towards medical transition involving drugs and surgery which can damage their health. I also attack the trans ideology because of the dangers it poses to women’s safety and dignity by allowing biological men into women’s spaces, such as changing room and prisons, simply because they claim to be female. I am also concerned about the attack on language and the attempt to separate ‘men’ and ‘women’ from biological reality. But I also recognise that there are people who really are alienated from their biological sex and for whom transition is an entirely appropriate and necessary treatment. And I also agree with the great commenters on this blog, who have pointed out that the transpeople they’ve known are otherwise normal, decent people who want to live their lives in peace.
Last week there was the shocking news that there’d been another school shooting in America, and immediately everyone put in their own take on it. It’s reignited the debate about gun control in US. Liberals, including Joe Biden, are recommending once again the outlawing of at least certain types of weapons. Meanwhile the gun lobby and the Republicans have circled the wagon to defend them. Well, I realise that in some areas of America gun crime actually went down when they legalised firearms and that there are areas where guns are very widely owned, but have a low rate of offending. I’ve also heard that the greatest drop in the incidence of such crimes was the passage of legislation back in the ’90s mandating a three-day cooling off period for people purchasing guns. That meant people had to wait three days between buying their gun and picking it up. It cut down on shootings because, by the time the purchaser could legally take possession of his gun, he’d calmed down enough not to want to blow away whoever it was who’d annoyed him. I’m aware that over here despite the ban on the public ownership of certain firearms and gun licensing, people are still being shot by criminals with guns. I’m also aware that culture may also play a part in these shootings. Michael Moore in his documentary Bowling For Columbine, which took its title from the Columbine school shooting, remarked on the colossal difference between the US and Canada on shootings. America’s a much larger country than Canada, with 350 or so million people compared to Canada’s c. 22 million. But Canada’s a much less violent society. At one point Moore looked across the Great Lakes from one American town to the Canadian city just across the water. The American town had been hit by several hundred shootings. Over in Canada, there were hardly any. This is despite Canada having much the same gun laws as the US and watching the same kind of violent action movies. People have been puzzling over this difference for a long time. Some have put it down to differences in the countries’ history. The expansion of Canada across the continent and its absorption of the Indian territories was largely peaceful in contrast to the violent displacement of the Indians in the US, although there were wars and Indian uprisings in Canada, such as that of the French-Indian metis Riel. And the treatment of the Amerindians in the boarding schools was every bit as horrific and genocidal as the comparative treatment of the First Nations in those in the US.
And the Republicans have also fallen back on the refrain that the root cause of such shootings is the mental health of the perp. The American leftist Robert Reich destroyed that argument. While the Republicans are now calling for more and better mental healthcare, nationally and locally they’ve cut mental health services when they’ve been in power.
As for the National Rifle Association, they first appeared as a pro-gun control group, co-operating with the US government to make certain types of weapons illegal. 85 per cent of the Association’s grassroots members also want certain types of firearms banned. But the leadership is dead against it, not least because they receive funding and subsidies from the gun manufacturers. This was graphically shown a year ago when NRA leader Wayne LaPierra and his several other leading figures in the Association were banged up for corruption and receiving kickbacks from the gun companies.
And now the racist and other bigots have started spouting nonsense. Today a Black woman has claimed that the police didn’t act, because the ten year old kids targeted by the gunman were illegal immigrants. I doubt this is true, not least because a number of the kids and the teacher gunned down were White. The Black YouTuber, RuinedLeon, put up a video attacking other bigots. One set had decided that there needs to be more vigilance on the Mexican border, because the shooter was an illegal immigrant. In fact the shooter, although Hispanic, was born in the US and from what I’ve seen of his victims, most of them were also Latino. RL also attacked other prejudiced voices, who claimed that the shooter was transgender. This was based on nothing more than their seeing a similarity between the shooter and a photograph of a transwoman or a crossdressing bloke in a dress. A casual glance showed that they were certainly not identical. For one thing, it looked like the transwoman was White. Several of my commenters are afraid that the current attacks on the trans ideology and trans activism from right-wing politicians, YouTubers and broadcasters like Matt Walsh and GB News are being done to stir up hatred against a sexual minority. I don’t think this is entirely the case, as I believe that some of the Conservatives like Walsh oppose it out of conviction. That said, GB News is struggling with the viewing figures, and so I don’t think that it does them any harm to put up anti-trans stories to appeal to their intended audience of right-wingers. And unfortunately this shows that some people have got so caught up in the trans controversy, that they are falsely blaming transpeople for atrocities that have nothing to do with them.
RL recommended instead that people shouldn’t jump to conclusions, although he freely admitted he’d done so about certain issues. As for his own attitude to guns, he wasn’t in favour of gun control. Instead, teachers should have firearms to protect their classes. I’m not sure that’s a good idea, as people like Maximilien Robespierre said in his video attack Donald Trump when he weighed in on this subject, that there would be nothing stopping an aggrieved teacher from blowing away their class. I’ve heard that this has supposedly happened. The Boomtown Rats’ song, ‘Tell Me Why I Don’t Like Mondays’ was supposedly based on a real incident when a teacher did open fire on her class. When asked why she did, she replied ‘I don’t like Mondays’. Schools should be for learning. No-one should have guns in them. As for Trump’s other suggestion, that they should have armoured doors, Robespierre wonder what would happen in the case of a fire when people had to leave quickly. And besides, schools are too much like prisons already, at least in Britain. The gates are our local schools are locked and remote controlled, so that you have to buzz in to request to be admitted. It no doubt keeps children safe, but it’s a sad reflection of the way our society has degenerated.
And the chilling part of these massacres it that there have been so many of them. Reich produced a list of the various school and other mass shootings since 1970. It’s as long as your arm. It’s all too often, almost like a regular event, that some maniac walks into a school, mosque, church, synagogue, nightclub or wherever and starts shooting. Only a few weeks ago a Black man went off and shot the people on a New York subway. I’ve also heard that this year there’s been 200 mass shootings according to the FBI. They definite a mass shooting as one in which there were three or more deceased.
Changing the culture so that it becomes more peaceful takes time and intelligence. It may not even be possible, and would no doubt be controversial. And expanding mental health services would probably be opposed in practice by the type of people who hate big government and anything that looks like a welfare state, no matter how much it’s needed. Really, it seems the only sensible solution is a ban on at least certain types of guns.
So that murderously angry 18 year old kids can’t get their mitts on military grade weapons, at least.
Remember when Andrew ‘Brillo Pad’ Neil had Alex Jones on his programme years ago? This resulted in farce when Neil asked the right-wing, Libertarian Jones about guns and the high rate of shootings in America. I think it came in the wake of yet another crazed gunman going into a school, shopping mall, church, synagogue or mosque or somewhere and shooting innocents. The right to bear arms is sacrosanct to Republicans and Libertarians, and so Jones responded with a long rant about how Americans will never give their firearms up and that there’d be another 1776 if anyone like Britain tried. He then started screaming nonsense, including ‘metal shark!’ at one point. The camera pulled away from Jones to show Brillo making the ‘nutter’ sign behind his head.
It’s a debatable but fair question whether Jones is mad. He’s promoted some immensely stupid theories, like the Democrat Party operating a paedophile ring out of a Boston pizza parlour, that Obama was the Antichrist, Hillary Clinton a Satanist cyborg, and that the world is being run by ‘the Globalists’ intent on enslaving humanity and turning us all into dehumanised cyborgs to serve demons or malevolent aliens. He is most notorious for ranting about how ‘they’ were putting chemicals in the water ‘to turn the frickin’ frogs gay’. He’s been widely ridiculed for that, but as Blissex, one of the great commenters on this blog reminded me on another post about Jones, he does have a point. Frogs and other amphibians are suffering from industrial pollutants that mimic female hormones and so cause reproductive abnormalities in males. Jones pushes all manner of outlandish theories, but some people have said that off-air he’s calm and rational, and his bizarre antics on camera may just be to garner viewers.
Whatever the real state of Jones’ mind, Brillo is now no longer in a position to sneer at Jones for pushing whacky and dangerous conspiracy theories. Because now he’s done it himself. Yesterday Zelo Street reported that Neil had taken exception to criticism of his comments on a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Colorado, and retweeted the bonkers comments by Spectator USA contributor Andy Ngo. Nadine Batchelor-Hunt had responded to his approving comments about the demonstration in Colorado by telling him that as a White guy, he shouldn’t be telling Black people how to protest. This is essentially the same point some Black Civil rights leaders in America in the 1960s told their White supporters when they said they should ‘be in their own space’. The result was the formation of a radical, White, working-class identity movement, which was crucially anti-racist as some of the White poor turned to their own situation and demanded change. I can’t see Brillo, former editor of the Sunday Times, the Economist and head of the Spectator board, wanting to see that develop. He replied “Looks like most of the folks protesting are white. I’m not telling anybody what they should do; just approving of a particular form of protest. Why make an issue of my colour. I don’t take kindly to what people tell me I should or should not do”.
Zelo Street commented that this was a remark from his privileged perspective. I think however, that Neil has the right to make whatever comment he likes about the protest. It might seem condescending, but people have the right to their own opinions whatever colour they are. But then the great newsman went overboard, and retweeted this from the Speccie’s sister paper.
“‘We are witnessing glimmers of the full insurrection the far-left has been working toward for decades. The killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis was merely a pre-text for radicals to push their ambitious insurgency,’ writes [Andy Ngo]”.
Ngo is a member of the American far right, despite being Asian. He wrote a farcical piece about Islam in Britain, ‘A Visit to Islamic Britain’ for Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, and has hosted the infamous Carl Benjamin, the man who broke UKIP, on his podcast. Zelo Street commented that it was shameful for the Speccie to give Ngo a platform, and even more so for Brillo to retweet him. They also wondered if BBC News and Current Affairs would take a dim view of being linked with Ngo through Neil. And this is apart from some of the deeply unpleasant characters who write for the British Spectator, like the anti-Semitic supporter of the Greek neo-Nazi Golden Dawn, Taki.
The American far right is riddled with bizarre conspiracy theories. When Obama was ensconced in the Oval Office there were any number of loons proclaiming that he was an anti-White racist who would immediately launch a genocide of Whites. Or that he was closet Muslim, who would impose the Shariah. Or a Nazi, Communist or militant atheist. Jones ranted that Obama would become absolute dictator by declaring a state of emergency, suspending the rule of law and forcing Americans into FEMA camps. It didn’t happen. There are also loony conspiracy theories going around the American and British right about ‘cultural Marxists’ trying to create a new Communist dictatorship through destroying traditional, Christian morality and replacing it with multiculturalism and gay and trans rights. It’s a garbled misreading of Gramsci’s theories of hegemony, and ultimately has its roots in the Nazis’ denunciation of ‘cultural Bolshevism’.
But I’ve got a feeling that the Spectator USA always was a haven for demented conspiracy theories. Way back in the 1990s a magazine with a very similar name, The American Spectator, and a group of Sunday Times journos, got it into their heads that Bill Clinton was at the heart of a vast criminal conspiracy. They believed that Slick Willy was importing drugs from Latin America through a secret airbase in Arizona. Anyone who crossed or otherwise displeased him was then executed by his gangsters. This theory was partly based on the real fact that about 19 of his aides had died, but investigations had shown that their demise had absolutely nothing to do with Clinton. The conspiracy theories were even later denounced and ridiculed by a former believer, one of the ‘Clinton Crazies’. Adam Curtis has discussed this bizarre affair in one of his excellent documentaries.
It looks to me that The American Spectator was a previous incarnation of The Spectator USA, and that, despite the Clinton Crazies having come and gone, there still is a paranoid mentality out there. And Brillo, as former editor of the Sunday Times, and head of the Spectator’s board, shares it.
You don’t have to invoke non-existent conspiracies to explain the protests and riots in America. They come from endemic racism, poverty and lack of opportunity, quite apart from the casual killing of Black Americans by the police. This has been simmering away for several years. Now it’s exploded again. What is needed is calm, rationality and justice.
What we don’t need is more stupid, inflammatory rhetoric by Trump, Ngo or Brillo.
Sargon of Akkad, real name Carl Benjamin, is a right-wing internet pundit, who puts up videos on YouTube attacking what he describes as ‘Social Justice Warriors’ – feminists, anti-racists, gay and trans-rights activists, as well as the liberal and socialist left. Benjamin defines himself as a ‘classical liberal’, which means that he’s all for the unfettered Manchester school capitalism of the early 19th century. For some reason, however, he considers himself ‘centre left’, despite holding what most people would consider to be right-wing, if not extremely right-wing, views. He’s also a nationalist, but of the civic kind. Which means that in contrast to the ethnonationalists of the Alt Right, who believe that only Whites should have citizenship in the majority White West, he believes that everyone born in a country should be equal citizens, regardless of their race or ethnicity. The Sage of Swindon has frequently debated this issue with the Alt Right. However, critics like Kevin Logan have pointed out that while he might disagree with them on this issue, he nevertheless seems to agree with them very much on others.
Kevin Logan, male feminist and anti-Fascist, put up this video on YouTube. It’s a mirror from another anti-racist YouTuber, Rational Disconnect, and it shows various examples of Sargon defending and supporting the real Nazis of the Alt Right and related movements.
It begins with a clip of Sargon telling a panel of other YouTubers on the Trainwreck TV channel that he stands up for people being bullied, including Nazis. This then fades into another clip of him talking to the Scots racist, Millennial Woes, in which they both agree that Heather Hayer, the young woman mown down and killed by one of the Nazi fanatics at the Charlottesville march really died of a heart attack. They then claim, contrary to the facts, that the Alt Right is being unfairly blamed for her death. There then follows a tweet from Sargon in which he tells a gay rights group that the election of the Fascist Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil is somehow their fault for forcing the issue of trans rights, or something. In another, he states that Bolsonaro is quite right to call out the left’s ‘Marxist baggage’. In another tweet about Bolsonaro, he declares that the left are going to get helicopter memes as Bolsonaro murders them. This is a reference to memes and jokes by Fascists and Nazis about General Pinochet’s favourite method of killing political prisoners: throwing them out of helicopters. Sargon goes on to say that he’s not going to shed a tear, because leftists are liars, scoundrels and cowards.
There’s then an audio rant from Sargon blaming feminists for the mass-murder, mainly of women, by Elliot Rodger, an Alt Right misogynist. Sargon rants that murders on this scale didn’t happen before the rise of feminism, because it has disenfranchised a large section of poor young men, who feel they have no options left. Yes, he actually says it’s the fault of a ‘feminist system’. In another audio clip, he states that the success of the Alt Right is less of a threat to him and his family than the success of the SJWs, and that the Alt Right should take this gambit. ‘Even if it means the end of liberal democracy’.
Sargon has a very large audience on YouTube for his extreme right-wing nonsense, which is bad enough, though not a threat to democracy. I doubt many people beyond his circle really know who he is. However, Sargon has also joined UKIP, along with other figures from the internet right. Like Mark Meechan, aka Count Dankula, who trained his girlfriend’s pug to make the Nazi salute when he yelled ‘gas the Jews’, and Paul Joseph Watson, formerly Alex Jones’ sidekick at the conspiracy internet site, Infowars. The organisation that, amongst other lies, has told its viewers that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are literally demons, or cyborgs, or satanic witches, and that Obama wanted to get rid of every American’s right to own guns and force people into FEMA concentration camps for the New World Order. And then there’s Batten’s own adviser on Islam and prisons, because he’s spent a lot of time in them, Tommy Robinson, the notorious islamophobe andformer head of the EDL and Pegida UK. These characters have brought several thousands more members into UKIP and dragged the party further towards the genuine Fascist right that Nigel Farage was so keen to distance it from. But while Benjamin shares many of their views, defends them and their murder of women, leftists, feminists and queer activists, Sargon’s not a Nazi.
He may not personally be a Fascist, but he is defending and supporting them, especially as UKIP look set to select him as one of their candidates for the European elections. His views are vile, and are a real danger to democracy and the safety of this country’s citizens.
Christmas and the New Year is the time when the media traditionally look back over the events of the preceding year. It’s in this spirit that left-wing YouTuber Antisocial Media presents this video of what he has judged to be the funniest Conservative and Far Right self-owns of the past year. As a run down of the right’s greatest fails, it naturally has the old Top of the Pop’s music, which was played when the programme went down the charts for that week. It also begins with someone who looks a bit like Trump, or maybe is Trump, dancing with a load of other businessmen. Antisocial Media says he’s had to leave many fails out, simply because there’s been so many of them and he doesn’t have time to fit them all in. But if there’s enough interest, perhaps he’ll do another video looking at other fails.
These fails are all attempts by the Conservatives and the Far Right to ‘own the libs’ by triggering them. These have repeatedly backfired to such an extent that Trump aide Nikki Haley has appealed to college Conservatives in the US not to do it. But like the Martians in H.G. Wells’ War of the World, ‘still they come’.
The first fails covered include Charlie Kirk, an American right-wing media voice, losing his temper and trying to start a fight with Cenk Uigur of The Young Turks at Politicon, a Conservative gathering. Kirk also made himself look massively stupid by posing outside a university wearing a nappy and with a baby’s dummy. Presumably this was done to try to suggest they were all sensitive crybabies. It didn’t work, and Kirk was just left looking stupid. These fails are all just shown in passing, before Antisocial Media goes on to give a more detailed look at particular instances of spectacular right-wing failure. These are
* The Trumpy teddy bear, that came complete with an American flag stuffed inside it.
* Canadian right-wing psychology professor Jordan Peterson, for saying in an interview that men and women can’t work together because of lipstick; and for publicly opposing pornography as harmful, then appearing – clothed, mercifully – in the pages of Penthouse, a pornographic magazine.
* A member of Fascist gang, the Proud Boys, trying unsuccessfully to rip up a placard he’d just snatched from left-wing Antifa protesters.
* Female YouTube gun nut Gun Girl trying to sell her fans T-shirts with the slogan that nothing would make feminists angrier than buying it. Because feminists are angry at the patriarchy, not someone trying to rip off their fans.
* The Generation Identity anti-immigration group building a fence on the Franco-Swiss border to prevent illegal immigration. A fence so flimsy that illegal immigrants could knock it down or jump over it.
* Right-wing internet personality Ian Mile Cheong getting grumpy on Twitter because of a woman’s comeback to one of his tweets.
* James Wohl, a 20 year old MAGA troll and massive Trump fan, who was caught for his part in a massively inept plot to smear Special Counsel Robert Mueller as a sexual predator.
And then comes Antisocial Media’s top 3 greatest fails. They are, in reverse order
At No. 3, the NPC Meme. This is an internet meme of grey people all repeating the same empty slogans and phrases. It was supposed to show how the Left is all mindlessly alike. But instead, it’s popularity shows how mindlessly alike the Right are with their limited vocabulary of slurs and insults like ‘Soyboy’, ‘Cuck’ and so on.
No. 2, internet right-wingers Carl Benjamin, AKA Sargon of Akkad, Mark Meechan, alias Count Dankula, Paul Joseph Watson and Milo Yiannopolis joining UKIP. UKIP as a party are irrelevant and nearly dead. They campaigned for Britain to leave the EU, and achieved it with the referendum. There is thus absolutely no point to them. This section of the video also shows former Tory MP Neil Hamilton welcoming them into the party. Antisocial Media remarks that no-one really remembers him either. If they do, they’ll probably be like me, and remember him primarily because of the court case between him and Mohammed al-Fayed, then the owner of Harrods. Al-Fayed had bribed him to ask questions in parliament, which is illegal. Hamilton took the money without doing what the Phoney Pharaoh requested, so al-Fayed sued him for breach of contract. It was the kind of case you wished both could lose. And then there is was the instance where Benjamin, who believes he’s ‘centre left’ and a liberal, albeit of the ‘classical’ type, showed himself cutting up his Conservative party membership card and displaying his new, UKIP card. Obviously, he would have a Conservative membership card if he was really a liberal. Then the party put up a poster with Benjamin, Dankula and Watson on, proclaiming that it was ‘the party of British values’. This failed because they were all shown looking utterly miserable. And then there’s Gerard Batten’s utterly reprehensible appointment of Islamophobe Tommy Robinson.
But at No. 1 is the balloon satirizing Sadiq Khan. Antisocial Media says he chose it because it’s not just one fail, it’s thirteen all rolled into one.
The balloon was supposed to be a response to the Trump balloon, which showed the American president as a literal manbaby in a nappy clutching a mobile phone. This instead showed Sadiq Khan as an adult wearing a bikini. Here are some of the reasons it failed.
* It was changed from the initial design, which was a straight out copy of the Trump balloon design.
* It came two months after the Trump balloon.
* The balloon’s bikini has to be explained. It’s a reference to Khan’s banning of an advertisement telling women to get ‘beach body ready’. But everyone’s forgotten that. In fact, Khan banned the advert for a very good reason. He was afraid that it would promote an unhealthy obsession with body image in girls. And I think he was right.
* They gave the balloon a hooked nose, which Khan doesn’t have. Yanni Bruere, who organized it, was also caught tweeting anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. A law student told him online that he had just destroyed any chance he had of a legal career.
* It was a colossal failure to provoke Khan. He not only approved the balloon’s flight, but was entirely untroubled about people trying to send him up.
* Bruere himself lives in Spain, not London, so it’s a good question why he’s bother about the safety of Londoners.
* He also gave up a managerial job, because they wouldn’t give him the time off to organize his balloon and demonstration. So he made himself unemployed.
* It cost 60,000 pounds to make and organize, and hardly anyone turned up.
Antisocial Media concludes that the Right could cure depression if they put on a stunt like this every week, and calls for them to carrying on doing so!
He also attacks Piers Morgan for getting upset about the Trump balloon passing the statue of Winston Churchill. So Trump balloon had an added bonus for upsetting him. It’s always good to annoy Piers Morgan, now destroying Susanna Reed on ITV’s breakfast TV.
This obviously isn’t a complete rundown of right-wing madness and ineptitude, but it does include some of the best. There are some others, which weren’t in there. Like deranged conspiracy theorist Alex Jones coming on his show dressed as a gay frog. It also doesn’t have Tweezer dad-dancing onto the stage at the Tory conference. However, it does show some of the greatest, most ridiculous antics of the transatlantic right, which are well worth laughing at. And I’m sure this year will bring us many, many more.
The people of Britain, as I’m sure others were across the world, were shocked by the news of the terrible shooting yesterday at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. BBC News this evening reported that the gunman killed eleven people. He walked into this place of worship carrying a semi-automatic rifle and two handguns. I think the dead included two police officers. One of his victims was 97. What makes this even more heinous is that, as I understand it, it was done during a service for babies.
This, unfortunately, is only the latest mass shooting in the Land of the Free. There have been many, many, indeed too many others – at schools, nightclubs, sports events and other places of worship. A little while ago another racist shooter gunned down the folks in a black church. Another maniac attacked a Sikh gurdwara. And the Beeb’s reporter also stated that there had been another shooting in Kentucky, which had been overshadowed by the Pittsburgh shooting.
The alleged killer, John Bowers, is reported to have a history of posting on anti-Semitic websites. Yesterday, 27th October 2018, Hope Not Hate published on their website a piece about Bowers by their researcher Patrik Hermansson. Bowers had been a frequent poster on Gab, a social network associated with the Alt-Right. Hermansson states that Bowers’ name was removed from the network after it was published, but it still retained archived material posted by him. His profile banners in recent months included the number 1488. This is a White Supremacist code. The 14 refers to the infamous 14 Words of one particular neo-Nazi. I can’t quite remember the exact quote, but it’s something about creating a White homeland and securing ‘a future for White children’. The ’88’ bit is simply a numerical code. The 8 stands for the 8th letter of the alphabet, which is H. 88 = HH, which stands for ‘Heil Hitler’. on the 21st June 2018 he posted this prayer
Lord,
Make me fast and accurate. Let my aim be true and my hand faster than those who would seek to destroy me. Grant me victory over my foes and those that wish to do harm to me and mine. Let not my last thought be “If only I had my gun” and Lord if today is truly the day that You call me home, let me die in a pile of brass.
He also watched videos by Colin McCarthy, a far-right author of books claiming that Whites now suffer more racial violence at the hands of Blacks than the reverse, and that racial discrimination against Black is a hoax.
He has also posted messages expressing his disappointment that George Soros hasn’t been assassinated, presumably referring to the far-right Qanon conspiratorial movement. Another message supported the Rise Above Movement, a far-right ‘Fight Club’.
He also posted that ‘HIAS likes to bring in invaders that kill our people. I can’t sit by and let my people get slaughtered.’ The Beeb tonight said that he was angry at a Jewish charity for bringing Jews into the country. This sounds like the post they were referring to.
From this it appears that Bowers believed in all the stupid conspiracy theories about the Jews secretly plotting to destroy the White race. It’s foul nonsense which has been disproved again and again, but there are still people who believe and are determined to promote it.
The Beeb in their report also discussed whether anything would be done about the availability of firearms in America after this. Their reporter said ‘No’. On the other hand, he said that while Trump couldn’t be blamed for this outrage – he condemned it – there would now be pressure on him to retreat on some of the incendiary rhetoric, which appears to have had a role in encouraging another right-winger to post letter bombs to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. This would, however, be a problem for Trump, as this has occurred in the run-up to the mid-term elections, when the contrary pressure was on to increase the verbal attacks against political opponents.
Kevin Logan, a vlogger who attacks and refutes the misogynist Men’s Rights movement and various racist and Fascistic individuals on YouTube, posted a video last night arguing that Trump really was anti-Semitic. This was based on some of Trump’s comments, which appear to be dog-whistle remarks about the Jews. To everyone not a Nazi, they appear to be perfectly innocuous. But to the members of the Alt-Right, they’re clear expressions of his own racial hatred. And then there’s his support amongst the Alt-Right, and his foul statement equivocating the morality responsibility behind the violence at the ‘Unite the Right’ racist rally in Charlottesville last year. Remember, he claimed that there were ‘good people on both sides’. No, the violence was done by the Nazis and Klansmen who turned up. And it’s automatically true that people chanting ‘the Jews will not replace us’ are not good people. Trump also took a suspiciously long time distancing himself and condemning a nasty, anti-Semitic comment from David Duke, a leader of the Klan down in Lousiana. Who is, needless to say, bitterly anti-Semitic. Logan’s an atheist, so he doesn’t offer prayers, but states very clearly that he stands in solidarity and sympathy with the victims of the Pittsburgh shooter. And ends his piece with the Spanish anti-Fascist slogan ‘No Pasaran!’ – ‘They shall not pass’.
I don’t think Trump is an anti-Semite, as his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is Jewish and his daughter converted to Judaism to marry him. But his supporters are Fascists, and Trump does seem to have far-right sympathies. And he has rightly condemned the shooting. Nevertheless, he doesn’t condemn the type of people who support and commit these actions. Like the Alt-Right, like Richard Spencer, Sebastian Gorka and Steve Bannon, the far-right politicos, who served in his cabinet.
And the problem isn’t confined to Trump by any means. Some of the rhetoric coming out of the Republican party is extraordinarily venomous. I can remember one Republican Pastor denouncing Hillary Clinton back in the 1990s as ‘the type of woman who turns to lesbianism, leaves her husband, worships Satan and sacrifices her children’. Which is not only poisonous, but stark staring bonkers. Secular Talk a few years ago commented on the two hosts of a church radio station, who declared that Barack Obama was full of a genocidal hatred towards Whites and was planning to kill everyone with a White skin in the US. He would, they blithely announced, kill more people than Mao and Stalin combined. No, he didn’t. As for the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, he claimed that Barack Obama was possessed by Satan, Hillary was having a lesbian affair with one of her aides, and was a robot, at least from the waist down. Or she was an alien, or possessed by aliens. He also said something about her having sex with goblins. Oh yes, and she was also a Satanic witch. Back to Barack Obama, Jones claimed that he was planning to have a state of emergency declared to force people into FEMA camps and take their guns away. He also said on his programme that the Democrats were running a paedophile ring from out of a Boston pizza parlour. He also denied that the various school shootings that have tragically occurred were real. Instead they were government fakes, intended to produce an outcry against guns so that, once again, the government could take the public’s guns away. Leaving them vulnerable and ready to be slaughtered by the globalists.
I don’t know whether Jones is a charlatan or a nutter. It’s unclear whether he really believes this bilge, or just spouts it because it’s a money-maker and gets him noticed. Either way, YouTube and a slew of other internet sites and networks have refused to carry his material because of its inflammatory and libelous nature. Someone walked into the pizza parlour he named as the centre of the Democrats’ paedophile ring with a gun, demanding to free the kids he claimed were kept in the basement. There were, obviously, no children, and no basement. Fortunately, the incident ended without anyone being killed. The grieving parents of kids murdered in some of the school shootings he falsely claimed were fake took legal action against him because they had people turning up accusing them of being ‘crisis actors’ sent in by the government as part of the staged event. The shootings weren’t staged, and understandably the parents were angry.
Trump’s rhetoric is part of the problem, but it’s not the whole problem. It’s not just the political rhetoric that needs to be curtailed, but also the vicious demonization of those of other races, and the encouragement of Fascist organisations. In the meantime, my thoughts and prayers are with the victims, relatives and first responders of this latest killing. May they be comforted, and no more have to suffer as they and so many before them have.
Okay, I apologise for the crude nature of this post, but it’s weirdly fascinating and gives a bizarre insight into the mindset, not just of Alex Jones, but of much of the Republican party in America.
In this clip from Secular Talk, host Kyle Kulinski talks about a compilation video one of his viewers sent in, of the various times Alex Jones, the mad conspiracy theorist behind the Infowars internet show, defends Trump from the accusation that his manhood is of less than impressive size.
As Kryten said of Rimmer in Red Dwarf, ‘Oh for a world class psychiatrist!’
This all started with Ted Cruz telling the crowd during the campaigning for the Republican nomination that Trump had tiny hands, and that this meant that certain other areas of his anatomy were also correspondingly small. Mind you, Trump had just claimed that Cruz’s father was responsible for the assassination of J.F.K., which is actually a far worse accusation. My guess is that most people watching Cruz make the accusation probably took it for what it was – a particular low, ad hominem attack, and nothing more. But it’s clearly got under Jones’ skin. Hence the ranting in the video about how well-endowed Trump is, against the lies put out by the media.
Kulinski goes on to discuss how Jones has turned from a critic of the establishment, to its most fervent propagandist through his support of Trump. He likes Trump. It’s as if Trump has cast a voodoo spell over him, as Kulinski describes it. When Obama was president, Jones declared that he was responsible for all manner of conspiracies. Now Trump’s in the Oval Office, the president isn’t responsible for any of those. It’s always the people around him.
He points out just how much of an establishment shill Trump is. He’s doing exactly what his backers in Wall Street and big business want, and is impoverishing ordinary Americans for their corporate profit. He’s the enemy of the middle Class. But to Jones Trump can do no wrong.
Kulinski also discusses some of the other lunatic statements that Jones has made. Jones went on the Joe Rogan Show, where he raved about interdimensional demons and aliens, and claimed that there was a war going on in the political elite between paedophiles and real men, ‘who eat steaks, drink whisky and like women’. Kulinski makes the point of how ridiculous this is as the standard for judging who’s one of the good guys. It means that various truly repulsive Republicans, who have backed every war launched by the presidents, are good guys, merely because they’re heterosexual and have those tastes in food and drink. He also goes on to point out how Jones’ conspiracy theories are demonstrably wrong. Like Jones’ claim that Obama was going to declare a state of emergency, and have everyone rounded up and imprisoned in FEMA camps. Well, Obama’s been and gone, and it never happened. Even worse was Jones’ statement that the Sandy Hook massacre was staged at the pretext for taking Americans’ guns away. He doesn’t mention it here, but this did result in grieving parents being accused by Jones’ viewers of being ‘crisis actors’, and that their children weren’t really shot and killed. Kulinski points out that the legislation that was proposed in the aftermath of the massacre to prevent further outrages like it were a ban on certain types of automatic weapons, magazines of a particular size, and uniform background checks. But the ban on automatic weapons and magazines never got through, because the Republicans blocked it. As for the background checks, this was passed, but was watered down to the point where there are a million loopholes in it. So if Sandy Hook was staged as a ploy to deprive Americans of their firearms, it hasn’t worked.
In fact, Jones’ rants say something about the psychology of part of the Republican base, and the visceral fear of castration that some of them seem to have, associated with socialism, liberalism and feminism. The Republican party stands for a very traditional conception of the sex roles, in which men are expected to be aggressively masculine. The gun culture is part of this. Much of the rhetoric by the Alt Right is about how alpha male they are, compared to all the beta male cucks in mainstream society and the left. When Trump was campaigning for the presidency, Jones did a broadcast about how ‘alpha’ Trump was, and how he’d been having ‘transcendent’ conversations with him. Which, in addition to these comments defending the size of Trump’s genitals, add a kind of homoerotic undercurrent to his attitude to Trump.
Several of Jones’ rants are about the threat to masculinity and biological gender posed by feminism, the UN, and the gay rights movement. In one rant, he declared that the gay rights movement was ‘a transhumanist space cult’ dedicated to removing biological gender and turning us all into genderless cyborgs. Which I’ve no doubt surprised an awful lot of gay people. He also claimed that UN doctors were going to come to cut men’s testicles off. One of the internet news commenters sent up this raging paranoia in one of their vlogs, stating that no, Obama was not going to have them castrated and put in FEMA camps, where they would be forced to carry around greased up lesbians.
Jones’ rants about the size of Trump’s manhood are ridiculous, but they do show the real insecurities about masculinity in the Republican party and the Alt Right. Jones and others like him really do see liberalism and feminism as emasculating movements, which can only be combated by powerful, aggressive alpha males. Hence their support for Trump, and the bitter anti-feminism within the Republican party itself. And not all of those, who hold such views are men. One of those, who has vociferously attacked feminism, and denied that women should have the right to vote is Anne Coulter. And Kulinski makes the point that these genital obsessions have also been played out in the theatre of international relations. Like when he told Kim Jong Un that his nuclear button was bigger. Trump’s concern, and those of his supporters, to show how ‘alpha male’ he is, aren’t just ridiculous, they’re an active danger to the safety of the entire world. As are the stupid conspiracy theories about aliens, paedophiles and FEMA camps promoted by Jones and his Infowars team.
Before I get to the serious stuff today, here’s some comedy from the TV lunatic asylum that is Alex Jones and Infowars. In this clip from Secular Talk, Kyle Kulinski comments on an unhinged rant from conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, in which he gives his well-thought out and deeply considered opinions on female sexuality, sexual violence and cannibalism. And like almost everything else Jones says, it’s as a mad as a hatter.
Jones rants that butch lesbians really want to be the macho bad boy, who beats women up. Women actually like macho bad boys, who beat them up, as shown by the success of the book 50 Shades of Grey. If women can’t get men to beat them up, they’ll turn to butch, lesbian women. Who are, of course, all liberals, and will then take them down into their basement, where they will cut open their skulls and eat their brains.
As Kulinski himself points out, no, they won’t. That never happens. He has never been to a meeting with other liberals, like Jimmy Dore, Ro Khanna and the like, where, after discussing politics, they have decided to retreat to their secret dungeon to eat the contents of someone’s skull. It might have been done once by an apolitical serial killer somewhere, but never by anyone on the Left.
But the rant does creepily reflect on Jones himself, as it is disturbingly too detailed. Listening to it, there probably isn’t a judge, who wouldn’t issue a search warrant for Jones’ own basement.
Kulinski also mentions the other side of Jones, that amongst all the nonsense and sheer, right-wing paranoia and lunacy, there were things that he had exactly right. He was right about America starting imperialist wars and the exploitative conduct of the multinationals. But he’s now gone on to pushing insane conspiracy theories and stupid rants like this. He emphasises just how stupid and ridiculous this particular diatribe is by comparing Jones to genuinely great thinkers like Bertrand Russell, Socrates and so on. Well, that’s how some of Jones’ followers perceive him, even though the absolute opposite is true, and the true dimensions of Jones’ tiny intellect are shown very clearly in the comparison.
It’s clear here that Jones has been watching too much Silence of the Lambs. And specifically the sequel in which Lecter escapes, captures the corrupt head of the FBI and eats his brain while the man’s still alive and conscious.
Even though it’s unhinged, the rant also says something serious about the American lunatic fringe’s attitude to female sexuality. They really do believe that women are biologically driven to strong male figures, especially men who treat them badly. You find that a constant source of complaint from the anti-feminist denizens of the Manosphere, like Davis Aurini. In one of his videos, Aurini rants about how modern women are ‘the most decadent sluts since the Fall of Rome’. Which is quite a claim, and not even remotely true. Many of these guys seem to be deeply sexually frustrated. They can’t get girlfriends, and so, rather than there being something wrong with them, there has to be something wrong with women.
There are women, who find bad boys sexy. And unfortunately there are women, who do go from one abusive relationship to another, and actively defend the men, who hit and maltreat them. It’s a real problem for those genuinely concerned about women’s welfare and safety, including the police officers, who are called in to sort the violence out, only to find that the victim does not want to leave or press charges against her abuser.
But clearly this is very much not true of all women. As for 50 Shades of Grey, the book’s a fantasy, and the violence and domination in that has its male counterpart in the pornography about whip-wielding dominatrices. And just because people like reading about such practices, doesn’t mean that they actually want such a relationship in reality, for the same reason that the millions of SF fans, who enjoy films about alien invasions really don’t want creatures from outer space to invade.
As for the ranting about butch lesbians, that comes from Jones’ anti-feminism and homophobia. In a previous rant, he sputtered that gay rights was a transhumanist space cult to create genderless human cyborgs. Jones does seem to be obsessed with castration and emasculation. There’s one rant where he declares that UN doctors were coming to cut men’s testicles off. And one of the left-wing commenters on YouTube remarked that he seemed to be afraid that liberals were coming to castrate men, and force them into FEMA camps, where they would carry around fat, greased-up lesbians. It’s a lurid image, and Jones hasn’t quite said that, but it’s a fair reflection of his views.
It’s massively distorted, but Jones’ rant does say something about the American Conservative attitude to sex and gender. Much Republican rhetoric and ideology is about defending traditional gender roles, in which women stay at home to raise children, while the men are the aggressive heads of the household. Liberalism, Socialism and feminism oppose this traditional family structure, or at the least state that women and men should be free to choose different roles if they wish. But to American Conservatives, this is a direct attack on masculinity itself. Hence Jones’ ranting about UN doctors coming to castrate American men. It also seems to form part of the hysteria surrounding gun rights. Americans have the right to own guns, which empower men to defend themselves and their families. Liberals want to take these guns away, or regulate them, and this is seen as another attack on traditional masculinity.
It’s debatable how much Jones actually believes in the really mad stuff he rants about. Sam Seder has said that he’s seen Jones at political and media gatherings, where he’s perfectly calm, lucid and reasonable. In a recent dispute with his wife over custody of their children, Jones’ lawyer stated that he was a ‘rodeo clown’, who didn’t believe any of the crazy nonsense that his ex-wife was afraid would disturb their children, who lived with Jones at his home and TV studios. Looking through the number of videos that are on YouTube, of Jones ranting and raving, which are actually posted by Infowars, and described as rants, it seems to me that Jones doesn’t believe in the really crazy stuff he rants about. But he is aware that it draws people into his show, and so acts up for the camera and his audience. Others have suggested that Jones really is that mad, but he’s just got enough self-awareness to realise how it looks to others, and to exploit that.
Even though it’s hysterically and grotesquely exaggerated, Jones’ rant does say much about the very real attitudes towards female sexuality and gender roles in American, and for that matte, British Conservatism. You can find much the same comments about the evils of feminism uttered by the Kippers, several of whom became notorious for their comments denying that women should leave the home and go to work. It’s a grim worldview in which women, despite decades of feminism and female empowerment, secretly hanker after strong, dominating men, who’ll keep them in line. It forms part of the misogynistic attitudes of the anti-feminist Men’s Right’s movements. And while Jones himself certainly doesn’t condone violence towards women, this attitude could legitimise the horrific levels of domestic violence against women in American, and for that matter, British society.
Jones’ rants are funny, but underneath the lurid stupidity, they express a very disturbing mindset, which in its fundamental attitudes, isn’t remotely funny at all.
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