Bigots Now Blaming Trans People for Uvalde School Shooting

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.

Here’s RuinedLeon’s video:

And this is Maximilien Robespierre:

Hope Not Hate Infiltrates the Alt Right

The anti-racist/ anti-religious extremism website and magazine, Hope Not Hate, has posted up a piece by their contributor, Patrik Hermansson, describing his year-long mission to infiltrate the Alt Right both in Britain and in America. Mr. Hermansson is a young, gay and very anti-Nazi Swede. During his year amongst the assorted Nazis and Holocaust deniers, he met and became close to the far right London Forum and its leaders, Jez Turner, Stead Steadman and Mick Brooks. He also encountered smaller, associated Nazi groups like the Extremists Club and various Nazi Odinist groups, which worship the Norse gods.

He also met the Traditional Britain Group and its founder, Gregory Lauder-Frost. This has links, as has the London Forum, with the Nazi publisher, Arktos Media, and has hosted meetings, whose speakers have included other members of the international New Right such as Alex Kurtagic and Tomislav Sunic, John Morgan, formerly of Arktos, now working for Greg Johnson’s Countercurrents, Marcus Willinger of Generation Identity, and Richard Spencer and Mark Tait of the Alt Right. The Traditional Britain Group has also had links to Breitbart. The TBG has also hosted events attended by the UKIP MEP Gerard Batten, and Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, who later apologized for attending.

Johnson has also set up groups like the London Forum in New York and Seattle. Guests and speakers at these events have included the anti-Semitic editor of the Occidental Observer, Kevin MacDonald, and the British Alt Right vlogger Colin Robertson, who vlogs under the monicker ‘Millennial Woes’. In Seattle, he also met the infamous Nazi ceramicist, Charles Krafft. Amongst other things, Krafft makes teapots of Adolf Hitler, one of which is shown. The Seattle Forum is Whites only, and is attempting to purchase land on which to found an all-White colony, Cascadia. He also met Jason Reza Jorjani, the co-founder of Alt Right Corporation and editor of Arktos Media, who later resigned his position at both to concentrate on overthrowing the Islamic Republic of Iran. Jorjani’s middle and surname suggest that he’s of Iranian heritage, so it’s no surprise that he wants to destroy the Islamic Republic and create an Indo-European world order. Many of the Iranian languages, like the majority language, Farsi, are Indo-European, the same as the Indian languages derived from Sanskrit. The father of the former Shah decided on renaming his country Iran, instead of Persia, following a suggestion from the Nazi ambassador in the 1930s. ‘Iran’ is derived from ‘Aryan’.

These groups attempt to offer a complete, parallel society to that of the mainstream, so that the people within it not only attend political events with their fellow Fascists, but also socialize and go to and organize cultural events with them.

They also have links to the White House, and its current denizen, Donald Trump.

The article also includes a diagram of the various groups and organisations making up the Alt Right, and the links between them.

Hermansson also describes how he found the year within the movement emotionally numbing. These are viciously racist groups, with a violent and genocidal hatred of Jews, non-Whites, gays and feminists. They deny the Holocaust and joke about the murder of the Jews by the Nazis. They also cheered at the new of the Orlando shooting, when a sexually repressed and conflicted gay Muslim took out his anger and self-loathing by murdering people at a gay nightclub, many of whom were Latinos/Latinas. Hermansson describes how meeting and immersing himself in this milieu every day has the effect of normalizing their extreme and disgusting views. He states

I learnt a huge amount about how people and groups are connected, how the movement operates and what it was planning. I found out how the movement interacts internationally and how important the social aspect of activism is in radicalising and retaining members. These groups attempt to become all-encompassing organisations that go far beyond politics, into art, religion and social life making them incredibly difficult to leave. Tragically I’ve seen how social pressure inside these groups can make ordinary people support genocide.

The far right is often treated with complacency. Should we let them into the public debate? Their views might be different, but aren’t they just other opinions

What’s obvious after a year inside the alt-right is that we cannot become complacent. These are not just opinions. These are organisations that actively foment hate and promote violence towards large groups of people. They are dangerous and their dangerous ideology must be confronted, wherever it appears.

The article concludes with his description of the events in Charlottesville.

In addition to the diagram, there are also numerous photographs taken by the author.

https://alternativeright.hopenothate.com/my-year-inside-the-international-alt-right

Omar Mateen: Islamist Warrior, or Just Angry Nutter?

Omar Mateen, the Orlando shooter, apparently phoned up ISIS and swore allegiance to the murdering scum, before going out to commit his own horrendous atrocity. He had been investigated by the FBI before, as one of his friends had been a suicide bomber. They’d let him go. Now questions are being asked about the investigation and the soundness of their decision.

My guess here is that the FBI probably did have to face a genuinely difficult decision. Many people know someone personally who is a ‘bit dodgy’. For most people, it’s low-grade criminality, nowhere near the level of mass murder. The problem with looking at networks of people is that just because person X knows Y, who might be a known crim, or be a member of an unpleasant political or religious organisation, doesn’t mean that person X is either. Of course, ISIS are bound to claim him proudly as one of their own, because they are, after all, a gang of cut-throats with a twisted sense of morality and a need to kill and maim. But that doesn’t mean that Mateen joined them out of any deep religious or ideological reasons. He could just have joined them because he was an angry, nihilistic thug with a need to take out his rage on innocents, and ISIS gave him a pretext, a rationale for his atrocity.

Way back in 19th century France, Paris was rocked for a time by a series of bombings committed by Ravachol, an anarchist. Yet when Ravachol himself was caught, his self-declared ideological reasons for blowing up cafes and their patrons looked less than sound. He has no connection to other anarchist groups, and far from attacking the ruling classes, his bombings were of working class bars and cafes. He might have been genuinely motivated by the ideas of Bakunin and the other advocates of ‘propaganda of the deed’. Or he might simply have been a maniac with a need to kill and maim, and seized on anarchism for his rationale. Just as Mateen used ISIS.

After all, if Mateen was a dedicated Islamist, it looks like he left it rather late. Rather than phone them up before going out and shooting people, you’d have thought he’d have done it long ago. And then there’s his choice of venue. He had a very specific hatred of gays. I think this is remarkable, because in previous Islamist atrocities, they target the general population indiscriminately. They’re just interested in killing Western unbelievers, which includes those Muslims, who don’t share their warped views. You think of the 7/7 bombers. They targeted public transport. They didn’t target gay pubs. I’m not saying that they didn’t hate gays. It’s highly likely they did. But specifically targeting one particular group wasn’t their aim. They wanted to kill all infidels generally. The same with the Boston bomber. He targeted a marathon in order to kill the maximum number of people in a public place, irrespective of their sexuality.

Now it could be that Mateen was a genuine Islamist, and that from killing the patrons of the nightclub, he would have moved on to other sections of the population, apart from gays. But I wonder. At the moment, it looks to me like he was a nasty homophobe with a specific desire to kill gay people, rather than being a warrior for Islam.

Trying to Make Sense of the Senseless in Orlando

Yesterday, the world was shocked by the news that Omar Mateen from Afghanistan had gone into Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, and opened fire with a gun. 50 people were killed and another 50 were injured before the thug was finally shot by the cops. Today, people have been lighting candles in remembrance, and sending their hopes, prayers and best wishes to friends, lovers and relatives of the victims and the people of Orlando. People around the world, whatever their sexuality, are standing with the gay community to show their hate and disgust at the crime.

Unfortunately, some morons over here have chosen to learn the wrong lesson. Mike put up two posts yesterday about the effect this would have on the Vote Leave campaign. In the first he expressed his fears that they would seize on it to promote more fears of immigrants. And in the second, he expressed his disgust at finding them realised. Some idiots in the ‘Leave’ campaign had stuck up a piece warning that if Britain didn’t leave the EU, something like it would happen here.

See: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/06/13/will-misunderstanding-of-orlando-shootings-give-brexit-campaign-a-xenophobic-boost/

No, you numbskulls! The message of Orlando is that the US needs to ban guns, not that the UK should leave the EU!

This last piece has an eye-opening, and eye-watering list of the stupid reasons some people gave for shooting others. These include domestic arguments in which one spouse has grabbed the gun, so the other grabbed it and shot the other one.

In fact, Britain already has had something like the mass killing in Orlando. This was 7/7, when four suicide bombers killed and maimed hundreds on a bus and in the tube. Those four butchers weren’t immigrants, however. They’d been born here, and were 2nd or 3rd generation. They certainly weren’t recent arrivals off the boat or plane. And many of the idiots, who’ve gone off to join al-Qaeda or ISIS, and so dedicate their lives to ending those of others in the name of a crazed misinterpretation of Islam, have been exactly like them: the British-born children of immigrants.

As for the crime itself, unfortunately there have been more than enough White Americans fouling the airwaves over the other side of the Pond with demands and exhortations for their compatriots to do something similar. One of the videos Secular Talk put up a few days ago was about a right-wing radio host – or politico – who asked why they didn’t shoot trans people anymore. Well, I guess there are a variety of reasons, but I would think that the main one was that people had sympathy with those, who felt they were of the wrong biological gender, because they had medical condition that was causing them distress, rather than that they were wicked or perverted.

Secular Talk also put up a piece from another right-wing talk radio programme, in which a frothing nutter ranted about how people should be rioting in the streets about gay marriage and the rise of gay equality in America. He seemed to think it was a cause for bloody revolution. My guess there is that many people have come to realise that whatever their own views on homosexuality, it’s with a consenting adult and doesn’t affect a person’s moral worth. Being attracted to one’s own sex does not mean that they don’t pay their taxes, support their local sports teams, give to charity and otherwise behave exactly like the rest of the population. One Christian American woman expressed her absolute lack of support for banning gay marriage by stating that she was in ‘a Christ-centred marriage’ with her husband. Now gays had the right to marry. So she had to check her own. ‘No,’ she said, ‘still in a Christ-centred marriage with my husband’. Another man from one of the Southern states put up a video in which he went poking around looking for any gays that might suddenly have fallen out of the sky, to inundate America with gayness. Nope, despite the passage of gay marriage, he couldn’t find any more gays suddenly materialising around the place. It was an ironic attempt to show what a non-issue it all was.

I’ve also no doubt that this atrocity would have delighted Jerry Falwell. Falwell was a right-wing televangelist with the usual hatred of anything to the left of Ronald Reagan. He also hated feminists and gays. When Orlando started holding gay pride marches, Falwell started frothing out the mouth and declared that they couldn’t shake their fists at God like that. Instead, the Almighty would punish them with an asteroid, or earthquake or tsunami. Or something. The local newspaper asked the town’s Roman Catholic bishop what he thought of it. The reverend gentleman opined that he thought, overall, the people of his fair city were decent, god-fearing folk. ‘If God was going to send an asteroid,’ he thought, ‘you’d think He’d start with Las Vegas’. Good point.

You can also bet that over the next few days and weeks you’re going to hear mass whining from the NRA and the gun lobby about how liberals are unfairly using this to deprive decent, law-abiding Americans of their right to have high calibre, military-grade firearms. When massacres like these have occurred, including those at schools, they’ve immediately seized on them to go on the offensive. Often highly offensive. Instead of depriving people of guns, more people should have them, including school children. Then the little mites could shoot back the next time a maniac walked in, or one of their fellows went berserk, and opened fire. We’ll probably here something similar now, with gun-nuts asserting that at least all the men in the nightclub should have been packing, ready to defend themselves and the women.

Given what human nature is like, is should be obvious that the last thing that makes places like schools and nightclubs safer is idiots coming in tooled up. Bullying and gang fights tend to be a fact of school life, which parents and teachers and school staff have to deal with. Now imagine what would happen if all of the little darlings involved had guns, and started blazing away.

It’s the same with nightclubs. Fights break out in pubs and nightclubs, when people have drunk too much, spilled someone’s drink, tried to move in on their partner, or simply looked at them the wrong way. People can get seriously hurt, but most of the time, they ain’t fatal. Now imagine what would happen if a boozed-up lout suddenly started to wave a gun around in a roomful of other drunken, gun-toting louts. You don’t have to be a genius to see how that could easily end in mass carnage, rather than the weight of overwhelming firepower forcing the other dude to put his gun away.

Quite apart from the fact that schools should be for learnin’, and nightclubs for dancing away the evening and generally having fun. Guns should have no place in either.