A week or so ago a tranche of court documents on Jeffrey Epstein and his vile child prostitution ring were declassified and the names of some of the highly prominent people involved with Epstein, though not necessarily customers of his services, were revealed. They include Bill Clinton, Bill Gates and the late cosmologist and physicist, Stephen Hawking, as well as Prince Andrew. This has, not surprisingly, provoked considerable discussion on YouTube as well as the mainstream media. And one of the YouTube pundits putting his oar in was Paul Joseph Watson. Watson’s very definitely a man of the far right, but his video about it, on his ‘Modernity’ channel, did have some genuinely interesting things to say. And some of these suggestions should be seriously considered by people of more moderate view.
Surprisingly, one of the extremely wealthy and powerful men not on the list was Donald Trump. Who knew that Trump had some shred of personal decency after all his comments about walking through women’s changing rooms unannounced and grabbing the ladies by their private parts? Naturally, Watson was gleeful about this and the supposed disappointment among leftists at not finding the Orange Man’s name among the various pervs and visitors to Epstein and his wretched island. I can’t say Trump’s absence from the list bothers me at all, as there’s far more plentiful information elsewhere showing how exploitative his presidency was for the American working man and woman, its corruption and sheer, glaring, massive incompetence. Trump’s personal sexual morality in many ways is the least of his defects and flaws.
Epstein himself comes across as a weird eugenicist. He believed that he was genetically superior to everyone else, and wanted to open some kind of centre or home on his island to support 20 women he would get pregnant as part of his one-pervert campaign to improve the biological stock of humanity. This is very close to the Nazi Lebensborn experiment, a system of SS maternity homes for the racially pure Nazi elite. Or to go even further back, to the breeding farms some slave owners in America and the Caribbean ran to create a stock of superior slaves.
More important, however, is the suggestion that Epstein may have been spying for Mossad. This comes from a former Israeli intelligence agent, Ben-Menashe, and there is circumstantial evidence that it might be right. Ghislaine Maxwell was the wife of British newspaper magnate, Robert Maxwell, who drowned falling off his yacht nearly three decades ago after he was caught looting the pension fund of the workers on his Mirror newspaper. Maxwell was Czech, who had mysteriously turned up in the west with funding to start his publisher, Pergamum Press. After his death he was buried, I believe, on the Mount of Olives in Israel where the country buries its national heroes. There were rumours even before then that he was a Mossad agent, and indeed may even have been a double or triple agent.
And not least of all this circumstantial evidence, Epstein had cameras in every room of his squalid brothel. He watched what was going on from the security of a fortified room in the centre of his residence and recorded everything. There’s also something very peculiar about the FBI’s inability to seize these tapes as evidence. When they raided the house, for some reason they didn’t seize a stack of these tapes at the time. It may have been because they didn’t have a court order to confiscate them. I don’t know. However, when they came back to grab them four days later, they’d vanished. Were there people involved who would cause major embarrassment for the American government, politics and society, and which the establishment could not afford to arrest or even have the incriminating material demanding it?
The American biologist Brett Weinstein also had a run-in with Epstein which he described on the Joe Rogan Experience. Epstein was posing as a financial wheeler-dealer, and Weinstein had been hired to do some work for him. Weinstein said he really wasn’t comfortable there. Firstly, Epstein had an American flag as his table cloth, and Weinstein wasn’t happy with the idea of dripping coffee over Old Glory. More than that, Epstein was late meeting him. When he did finally appear, he excused himself by saying that he’d been doing some financial securities investment or whatever. Weinstein found it odd, as it wasn’t the way somebody would normally speak in that circumstance. I think they’d probably just tell you they had some business to attend to, and leave it at that. It seemed to Weinstein that Epstein was acting, that he’d been put in place to play a role by somebody else. He also pursued a lifestyle that was well out of his income bracket. Epstein was extremely rich, but he behaved and had the tastes of the really phenomenally rich, and Weinstein pointed out that there was a real difference between the behaviour and expenditure of these two parts of the elite.
Looking at all this, it really wouldn’t surprise me if Epstein was spying for Mossad. Running brothels and spying on and filming the encounters between the prostitutes and their clients is a very old trick of the intelligence services. The Gestapo were doing it with Salon Kitty in Berlin during the Third Reich. The Soviets were doing it during the Cold War, and it wouldn’t surprise me if Putin and cronies were still doing it today. International conventions prevent allied countries from spying on each other, but that hasn’t prevented Mossad from doing so. They were caught doing this a few years ago, but nothing happened. They were also caught spying on us under Blair, but he also let them get away with it. Margaret Thatcher caught them spying, and told them that if they didn’t clean up their act she’d close them down and throw them out. They cleaned up their act. It therefore seems to me to be more than plausible that Epstein was spying for them.
Where I think Watson is wrong is when he strays into ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ and occult conspiracies. He cites one of the coffee table books you could get on the occult and witchcraft down the ages to claim that at various times throughout history there have been cults of very rich men using sex magic to try and gain immortality. He is right in that there have been various occultists and occult groups that have incorporated sex as part of their rituals, seeking to harness its power. Alister Crowley is a case in point. There have also been any number of conspiracy theories circulating since the 1980s about how the world is secretly run by an elite group of Freemasons or Satanists. The paranoia on the American right about supposed pagan child sacrifice by the ultra-rich at Bohemian Grove in California is one part of this. But I haven’t heard anything about the various people abusing the girls at Epstein’s dressing up in weird robes to perform bizarre magical rituals. As for Bohemian Grove, the ritual at the centre of these suspicions is a playlet called ‘The Sacrifice of Dull Care’, in which an effigy representing Dull Care is burned at the conclusion of the gathering. While Alex Jones claimed it was a child when he filmed it with Jon Ronson when they infiltrated the ceremony when making Ronson’s documentary Secret Rulers of the World, it looked very much to me and to a number of viewers that the effigy was just a bundle of rags and nothing more sinister. If some of Epstein’s sordid clientele were dressing up in robes and going through occult rituals, it was probably to add an extra piece of dubious fun and theatre to the proceedings, rather than because they really believed in it.
Not that the absence of any occult shenanigans makes this at all better. Young girls were still being abused by the extremely wealthy and powerful for their own pleasure. That’s bad enough. But I still suspect there was an intelligence aspect there. And if it exists, it may well remain hidden. For security reasons, you know.
This is depressing. Once upon a time, back in the 1980s, there was a genuine countercultural point to Pride. Homosexuality may have been decriminalised, but there was widespread prejudice against gay men and women, who were subject to abuse and violence. The Pride marches over here, I gather, weren’t party political, but they did include gays with strong left-wing opinions and morals, who frequently marched and protested against the devastation Thatcher was inflicting on Britain and its great working people. Gay organisations and people also formed alliances with parts of the working class that were under particular attack from the Leaderene. They gave their support to the striking miners, an alliance that has been portrayed in the British film, Pride. That alliance and support is still greatly appreciated by certain sections of the Labour party, though probably not Starmer’s. Now it seems Pride marches are losing this radical edge and political relevance.
A number of gays are becoming disenchanted with Pride. Gender critical gays like Clive Simpson and Dennis Kavanagh of the Queen’s Speech said in their latest YouTube broadcast that they really don’t want to go to or see another one. Some of this is because the marches have increasingly turned away from gay representation to promoting trans. The result has been that many gays now feel that the gay movement as a whole has become hollowed out and no longer represents them. Events and workshops staged by local councils in partnership with gay organisations like Stonewall, it is claimed, concentrate on trans and gender issues to the extent that these dominate the proceedings to the near exclusion of gays. This is particularly acute in the case of lesbians, who may find themselves without any representation or dedicated events of their own. They also objected to the kink on display, which really isn’t suitable for a public event. There was, apparently, a spoof article in the Onion about a Pride parade that set the gay community back ten years, as before then everyone thought gay people were normal. Others, or so it seems, just don’t like the corporate aspect of it, with Pride events sponsored by big business, and including local authorities, government agencies and the police. In short, it’s become very establishment.
Paul Joseph Watson made this point in a video he put up yesterday. It began with a float at an American Pride march proclaiming that it was sponsored by Lockheed Martin. That’s the arms manufacturer. Speaking with deserved sarcasm, Watson made the point that this company was telling the world that it made weapons to kill people across the globe, but nevertheless it supported gay rights. This was followed by an official statement by the CIA on a recruiting document that it also supported gay and trans rights. This was, as Watson then said, the Agency that overthrew governments and assassinated people across the world. But again, that’s all right, because it’s a caring organisation that supports gay rights.
I haven’t put the video up, because this is, after all, Paul Joseph Watson, Alex Jones’ little British buddy and the man who broke UKIP when he joined, along with Mark ‘Count Dankula’ Meacham and Carl ‘Sargon of Akkad’ Benjamin. And besides, the rest of the video was a rant against Pride as a whole. When he attacks the way Pride is being sponsored and used to promote the arms industry and the truly notorious elements of the American intelligence establishment, he’s made a good point, which left-wingers can get behind. But I disagree with the general anti-gay rights ranting.
But his initial point remains: there is something deeply wrong with at least that Pride march, when people are proclaiming they’re sponsored by one of the merchants of death, which sells its wares to despots and oppressive regimes across the world.
Carl ‘Sargon of Akkad’ Benjamin, is, of course, one of the men who broke UKIP by joining it, along with Mark ‘Count Dankula’ Meachum and Paul Joseph Watson. He’s also one of the Lotus Eaters, a right-wing YouTuber channel. Their politics are very much that of the Tory hard right – anti-immigration, anti-feminist, anti-multiculturalism and pro-privatisation and free enterprise. They used to describe themselves as ‘Classical Liberals’, meaning that they were Libertarians who looked back to the absolute free trade economics of the 19th century Manchester school. Now I think they would probably also describe themselves as standing up for traditional Britain, its culture and values, rather like Simon Webb of History Debunked. Webb, however, has also described himself in interviews as a reactionary, which I don’t think Sargon,, Callum and the others would.
Benjamin already had a noxious reputation before he joined UKIP, not least for a Twitter comment in which he said that he wouldn’t even rape a female Labour MP. I think he was talking about Jess Philips. He’s also been accused of racism. Hence, when UKIP selected him as their candidate for southwest England in the Euro elections, the branch in his native Swindon protested, the Gloucestershire branch resigned in protest and ordinary, rank and file Kippers who wanted to leave the EU posted angry videos on YouTube and resigned en masse. When he tried campaigning in Bristol, he was refused entry into one of the city centre pubs and restaurants, and in Cornwall they threw a bucket of fish over him.
The Lotus Eaters also hold the right-wing view that Fascism is a form of socialism, because it’s about state control and is supposed to have come from the political left. Mussolini started out as a radical socialist, but he and his party also took influences from the extreme right. They merged with the right-wing Italian nationalists and allied themselves with conservative industrial and agrarian elites to smash the socialist and Populist parties, trade unions, and peasant cooperatives. And while they proclaimed the primacy of the state, they also declared private industry to be the basis of society and the economy.
Sargon’s stance on Fascism is rather ironic, because in one of his YouTube videos last week the Lotus Eater’s plugged their current book of the week: Julius Evola’s The Revolt Against Modernity. To be fair, Sargon and his crew have also had as their book of the week one by the respected historian of fascism, Sternhell, who was a Jewish Frenchman and therefore definitely not like to sympathetic to the storm troopers. Evola is different. He was an Italian aristocrat and occultist, who founded the ‘Traditionalist’ movement. He was also strongly connected to Italian and wider European fascism and was a major intellectual influence on the neo-Fascists responsible for the Bologna railway station bombing in the 1970s. This atrocity killed and maimed over a hundred people. He was also bitterly anti-Christian, urging a return to the pagan values of antiquity. I can’t comment on whatever he says in his book denouncing modernity, but from what I’ve read he seems to have had some bonkers ideas about the origins of the Aryan race. I think he was teaching his Nazi disciples that the Aryan people first arose in the mythical northern continent of Hyperborea, where they had a strict caste system. From Hyperborea they spread across the rest of the world, where they were the true founders of civilisation. It’s completely bonkers, ahistorical stuff.
The material in The Revolt Against Modernity may not be Nazi or racist, or at least, not overtly so, but Sargon and his colleagues really shouldn’t be promoting the ideas of someone who really was a deeply reactionary fascist, who believed absolute racist rubbish about lost continents.
Okay, we all know exactly who Paul Joseph Watson is and what he stands for. He’s the far right YouTuber and conspiracy theorist who was fellow conspiracy nutter Alex Jones’ British buddy over on Infowars before he split with him and returned to Blighty. He, along with Sargon of Gasbag and Count Dankula, brought down UKIP when they joined at the invitation of Gerald Batten. All the genuinely liberal, anti-racist members, who just hated the EU but not immigration and people of colour, complained and left, and the party imploded. But here the old adage about stopped clocks being right twice a day is probably right. And I’m going to give him his due credit.
Remember the brouhaha last year when someone blew up the Northstream pipeline or whatever it’s called, carrying Russian oil into Europe? Fingers have been pointed very firmly at Putin and Russia. But according to Watson, the American investigative reporter Seymour Hersh has found instead that it was the Americans. The bombs were supposedly planted during a NATO exercise in July last year by divers, and then detonated three months later by a sonar buoy. The purpose was to increase Europe’s dependency on American oil and prolong the war in Ukraine.
I don’t believe in the conspiracy theories peddled by Infowars, stupid, tabloid tales of 4-dimensional aliens, or demons, and how Barack Obama is the antichrist and Hillary Clinton a cyborg, the Democrats are imprisoning children in pizza parlours to be raped and abused at their conventions and the rest of the nonsense. But real conspiracies do exist, and Lobster has been covering them since the magazine was founded in the 1980s. This has the ring of truth about it, especially as the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine which ousted the pro-Russian president was arranged by the American state department and the National Endowment for Democracy. And then there’s the story that the Ukrainian president was about to negotiate a peace deal until Johnson turned up to encourage them to carry on fighting. And it’s been confirmed that the Iraq invasion was about the West stealing the country’s oil. The information about the pipeline also comes from Seymour Hersh, who I think is a very well respected journalist rather than some kind of right-wing mouthpiece and fearmonger.
Watson’s therefore, in my opinion, right about this one, and also right about the way the story has been overshadowed by the reports of the Chinese spy balloons. It’s a pity that only people like him are noticing this.
This comes from a video by right-winger Mahyar Tousi on YouTube. UKIP has been trying to organise some kind of alliance with the other right-wing populist parties and splinter groups. They have said that if they join this alliance they can keep their leaders and independence under an agreement intended to bring all these groups an electoral victory which would be beyond them as individual, separate groups. To join this proposed alliance, all that was necessary was that 95 per cent of the parties’ views should be the same. Today UKIP’s deputy fuehrer, Rebecca Jane, announced that the only one of these smaller right-wing parties to have ignored the Kipper’s overtures was Reform. She stated that it because its Duce, Richard Tice, believed that he could challenge the other parties alone. This was a mistake. She also criticised him for criticising the Tory MP, Andrew Bridgen, who had been thrown out for attacking the Covid compulsory vaccination programme. Tousi himself declared that this was splitting the right, and that it was all a clash of personalities rather than any real disagreement over policies..
I was surprised that UKIP was still going. I thought it had absolutely collapsed and been wound up following the departure of Nigel of Farage, his replacement by Gerard Batten and the entry into the party of Count Dankula, Carl Benjamin and Paul Joseph Watson. I also thought that whatever remained of the party had been reconstituted as Reform, but that’s evidently not true. As for these parties remaining separate and splitting the right, I am more than happy to see that continue. From what I’ve seen, they’re all hard right, Thatcherite parties, who’d continue the Tories’ attack on the welfare state and NHS. The only difference I can see is that they’d be more overt about it. And that is quite apart from their aggressively anti-immigrant policies.
I therefore think it’s no bad thing that these right-wing, populist parties are divided. Labour’s not perfect, but I want them to gain power and overturn 12 wretched years of Tory misrule. And these parties splitting the vote between hopefully makes that easier.
And the Indian government is getting involved as well. A few days ago, Simon Webb of HIstory Debunked put up a piece about the ongoing riots in Leicester between Pakistanis and Hindus. When he blogged about it the rioting had been going on for 13 days and, although covered in the local press, had received scant coverage on the Beeb or the national news. Webb considered that this was because the rioting didn’t fit the narrative that only Whites can be racist. He also claimed that the police officers sent to quell the riots weren’t British because they had Asian names.
Now the Indian news channels are covering the riots. There have been reports by The Quint, the Hindu Times and WION, frequently using the same footage. According to them the riots started on the 28th of last month (August) when a fight broke out after a Pakistan versus India cricket game. Three men were arrested. The fighting broke out again this weekend as Muslims attacked Hindus due to a rumour that a mosque had been desecrated. The rumour was completely untrue, but it didn’t stop the Muslims from seeking revenge. An orange flag was videoed being torn down near a temple. According to the Muslims, this rioting was started by Hindus marching through Muslim areas chanting ‘Jai shri ram’. The Indian High Commissioner has sent the government a strongly worded message condemning the attacks on Hindus and demanding that the British government do everything possible to protect them.
Claudia Webbe, the local Labour MP, has written a message to the city’s people stating that the city is a wonderful example of diversity, and the way different peoples can live together peacefully. She urges people to be calm and not go out and so protect their community. This praiseworthy message has naturally drawn sneers from Paul Joseph Watson. As for the ethnicity of the police at the rioting, the videos show a number of White cops. So, the policing of the riots has definitely not been given over to foreigners. And the foreigners Webb mentioned were likely to be British Asians, whose families could well have been here for three generations or more.
I do believe that Webb has a point when he talks about the riots not being covered because of ethnic minority racial sensitivities. My own experience has been that Black and Asian anti-racist activists do not like crimes by ethnic minorities being reported because they see it as promoting prejudice against them. Hence when the Beeb did start covering the riots, they merely mentioned that it was by gangs of ‘youths’. I suspect another reason may have been to prevent the violence spreading if there was a danger that other Asian communities would also begin to divide and follow suit.
But it also seems to me that the rioting also corroborates a danger to social cohesion caused by the demographic decline of Whites, suggested by Thomas Sowell. Sowell, a Black Conservative, believes that America is in danger of balkanisation. White culture is currently the glue that holds America together. As Whites decline as a percentage of the American population and White culture is challenged by other groups, so there is a danger that America will become nothing more than a collection of different races and ethnicities competing against each other. The decline of White America will therefore result in more ethnic violence as these peoples directly confront and come into conflict with each other. There is some low-level violence between ethnic minorities already. For example, the attacks on Jews that occurred at Christmas weren’t done by White anti-Semites, but by members of Black Israelite groups. These believe that only Black Americans descended from slaves are the authentic Jews and despise White Jews as ‘Khazars’. See the section on the Black Hebrew Israelites in Donna Kossey’s 1995 Kooks: A Guide to the Outer Limits of Human Belief, published by Feral House for more information. In Britain I remember there being rioting between Blacks and Asians in Birmingham in the 1980s.
I think Sowell’s got a point about balkanisation, which is why I strongly believe that ethnic racism needs to be tackled as well as White, regardless of opposition from Black politicos like Diane Abbott.
Simon Webb today went full Mosley and put up a video asking, ‘What’s wrong with Fascism?’ He wanted to make a distinction between Nazism and Fascism. Fascism, he said, had been tarnished through its association with Nazism. But if you wanted to see a benevolent regime that was Fascist in all but name, he directed you to that of the Portuguese dictator Salazar.
But it isn’t just the association with the Third Reich and its attendant horrors that has turned decent people across the world against Fascism. It’s the fact that Mussolini’s fascists were also militant imperialists responsible for brutal atrocities in the nations they conquered, as well as those committed by the various Fascist juntas in Greece, Latin America and Indonesia.
Yesterday or the day before right-wingers like Paul Joseph Watson were also celebrating the electoral victory of the right-wing coalition in Sweden’s elections over their socialist party. This coalition included with the centre right party the Sweden Democrats, a far-right outfit. They’re obviously anti-immigration, but have a very unpleasant neo-Nazi past. According to Hope Not Hate, they used to wear Nazi uniforms as late as the ’90.
I didn’t watch Webb’s video about the Swedish election, whose title said that the Swedes had turned against immigration, the Italians were waking up and when would Britain follow? Mark Pattie did, and wasn’t impressed. He writes ‘Dear God! I did watch his recent video on the Swedish election result where he said “Why can’t we have a similar party here?”- and the anti-immigration party he mentioned? Ukip, 2015? No, he mentioned the bloody National Front getting 5% of the vote in 1974. Makes me think he would vote for Britain First in the next GE.’
I remember the National Front when they goose-stepping about in the 1970s, as well as the various other Fascist and Nazi outfits like the British Movement. And they were overtly Nazi and extremely violent. Michael Collins in his book Hate describes one of the attacks he took part in on an anti-racist meeting in the local library. This had young Asian women leaping out of upstairs windows to get away from them. Monica Ali gives a fictionalised description of the gang fights between White Fascists and Asian self-defence groups in her book, Brick Lane. Just to remind people what British Fascism looked like in the 1960s and 70s, here are a few pictures from British Fascism, 1919-1985. and the W.H. Smith History of the World.
Colin Jordan, Fuhrer of the World Union of National Socialists, with his wife, the daughter of fashion designer Christian Dior.
Skinhead supporter of the NF in the 1970s
And this is what the Nazis did to the Jews, aided by their collaborators in occupied Europe.
The Survivors of Buchenwald Concentration Camp
I don’t know about Portugal, but Franco only kept out of the Second World War because of poverty. Even so, I think he wanted to send a few token Spanish troops with the Nazis in the invasion of the Soviet Union. Not everyone who wants to cut down on immigration is a racist or Nazi. And despite the rhetoric, the BNP and NF as Fascists have a trouble hanging on to members. Lobster published a piece in the 90s which I think quoted anti-racist researchers of the movement as saying that although they boasted of having 2,000 members or more, they actually had a very high membership turnover. In reality they only had 200 or so core members. The simple reason for this is probably that people aren’t interested or sympathetic to fascist ideology. People joined not because they wanted some kind of new British reich or dictatorship, but probably simply because they wanted an end to non-White immigration. When they were subjected to the Nazi or Fascist ideology, they left. And political scientists have noted that this common in other countries with Fascist parties as well. They do better when they get rid of the jackboots, the right arm salute and the calls for a dictatorship. The Alleanzo Nazionale was formed from the Italian neo-Fascist party, the Movimiento Sociale Italiano or Italian Social Movement. But they jettisoned the Fascist paraphernalia and became instead, so they claimed, a centre-right party. As such they joined Berlusconi’s right-wing coalition with the separatists of the Liga Nord and Berlusconi’s own Forza Italia party.
Whatever people’s feelings about immigration, the majority of normal people despise Fascism and its British parties. There should be absolutely no nostalgia for these brutal thugs.
Hat tip to Gillyflowerblog, one of this blog’s many great commenters, for alerting me to a Zelo Street article on this, ahem, ‘person’. Earlier today I put up a piece about Correct, Not Political, a right-wing group who protest Pride Marches, Drag Queen Story Hours and Climate Change demonstrations, posting that teachers are being incentivised to tell the government if their pupils believe in any conspiracy theories, what they are, and how they are combating these beliefs. Well, it seems that GB News, much touted as the antidote to the ‘woke, wet BBC’ has been platforming one of the worst of the conspiracy crew: Peter Sweden. Sweden was invited onto Neil Oliver’s little programme to talk about declining birth rates. Apparently there was a massive decline in them last year, so that the programme asked if we were facing population collapse.
I think I saw the title to the video posted of this on YouTube, but didn’t watch it. According to some scientists, birth rates all over the world are declining to such an extent that there will be a population collapse in the middle of this century. This means that there’s going to be a shortage of people everywhere on Earth. I assumed they were going to talk about this, and so didn’t watch it. Unfortunately I was wrong. Apparently they were talking about a massive drop in British fertility that occurred last year. Peter Sweden, real name Imanuelsen, reckoned it may have been due to Covid vaccinations.
As General Jack D. Ripper says in Stanley Kubrick’s cold war black comedy, Dr Strangelove, ‘We must keep our bodily fluids pure’.
If such a drop did occur last year, I can think of a number of reasons for it which have zilch to do with the Covid vaccination. As I understand it, when animals are under stress they don’t breed. This is one reason why zoos are keen to look after critically endangered animals and make sure they are well and happy. Humans are animals, and an increasing number of us are stressed and very unhappy. The Covid lockdown, necessary as it was, meant that people couldn’t go to work and many businesses had to close for the duration. People therefore lost at least a portion of their income. Add to this Tory cuts and the problems they’ve inflicted on the Health Service and I am honestly not surprised people aren’t having so many babies.
But that isn’t all. While Sweden hails from that country originally, he currently lives in Northallerton on this side of the North Sea. He’s also appeared on Paul Joseph Watson’s YouTube videos, which is an indication of how far to the right he is. That the same Paul Joseph Watson who was Alex Jones’ British buddy on Infowars, although to be fair he was never as raving nuts as Jones.
Worse, Imanuelsen has some extremely unpleasant views about Jews and gays. He is apparently a Holocaust denier and that the concentration camps had swimming pools, theatres and cinemas. Which is very obvious grotty, horrible nonsense. He’s also said admiring things about the Third Reich and Hitler. And as well as having negative views of the Jews, he has also said that LGBT people should be put in concentration camps. Which is what the Nazis did to gay men. They didn’t imprison lesbians, apparently, because they thought they could or would eventually turn straight. Which is prejudiced, but fortunately it served to protect people rather than lead to their persecution.
Looking at this, Imanuelsen should never be allowed anywhere near a TV studio to give his views whatsoever. And Neil Oliver should never have invited him. As one of the commenters here has said, it’s a pit what has happened to Oliver as he was good on Coast. He was. And now he’s become a spokesman for the far right and bonkers conspiracy theorists.
Readers and followers of this blog know very well how I feel about Sargon of Gasbag and the Lotus Eaters. He and they are arch-Conservative reactionaries, fully in support of the Brexit that has wrecked British trade and the agreement that has so far kept the fragile peace in Ulster. They’re fully behind privatisation, but refuse to believe that the Tories are selling off the NHS – even though it’s right under their noses – because they don’t see how anyone would want to buy it. They’re also strongly anti-feminist, believing in traditional sex roles and that a woman’s place is in the home. Sargon himself did much to destroy UKIP, simply by joining it under Gerald Batten’s fuhrership. When he did so, a number of local UKIP parties either disaffiliated from the national party or simply dissolved, and a large proportion of their membership, who weren’t racists, walked away. When this happened, I put up an angry video from one such Kipper who was absolutely livid about Sargon and other figures on the populist right, like Count Dankula and Paul Joseph Watson joining. I also utterly despise their attitude. I find them smug, complacent, and resent the way they continue to push the smear that Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters are anti-Semites. Corbyn wasn’t, and we’re not. Especially not the Jewish brothers and sisters who have been abused, smeared and purged simply because the fanatically pro-Israel right hates them condemning Israel’s decades-long ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. As for the Lotus Eaters’ libertarianism, all their arguments in favour of this daft ideology were answer over a century ago by writers like T.H. Green, who supported the New Liberalism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
But I have to give Carl Benjamin and his mates credit where credit’s due. On some issues, such as the transgender debate, I think they’re right, or mostly so. Now I shall repeat: I do not support discrimination against, abuse, violence or persecution of people simply because of their sexuality or gender presentation. But there are very serious issues regarding trans ideology, the Queer Theory that informs it, and the medical-industrial complex that supports it. Quite apart from the dangers it poses to women’s sport, dignity and safety. Such as the danger to women in prisons when they are jailed with biological men, often brutal sex criminals, simply because the man identifies as a woman.
And one of the major issues is that there are powerful commercial and ideological incentives to push young people who feel dissatisfied or alienated from their birth gender towards transition. I believe that some people genuinely suffer from these issues, and have benefited from transition. My problem is not with that. My problem is with the attitude that has now emerged among gay and transgender activists that such problems are automatically a reflection of a permanent sexual identity among those suffering them. An identity which it is forbidden to question or to treat with anything but support and affirmation. According to academic research, 60%-85% of teens suffering from gender dysphoria grow out of it. The majority of them becoming gay men or women, but otherwise happy and secure in their sexual identity. And the process of transition itself also carries serious health risks. As has been admitted, puberty blockers like Lupron are not reversible, and their long term effects are unknown. The cross-gender hormones given to those making the transition can damage the heart and other organs, as well as reduce bone density. And the sex-change surgery itself may create complications that require additional surgery to correct.
Medical transition can be immensely profitable for the doctors, surgeons and clinics performing it. In Britain, I believe, there are only a small number of NHS clinics performing such treatment and so there have sprung up a number of private clinics to take over the slack. And private healthcare is all about profit. Decades ago the Beeb broadcast a documentary about the American private healthcare system, revealing the immense number of unnecessary operations that were carried out, simply because they made money for the private hospitals and surgeons. Something like this may be going on here as well.
There is a small but growing number of ‘detransitioners’. These are transpeople, who bitterly regret their decision, and are seeking as far as possible to return to their birth sex. I say small, but that’s in comparison to the people now deciding that they want to transition to the opposite gender. The online detransitioner community numbers about 20,000. Which to me is a lot.
Here Sargon and his co-host read out their stories of deep regret, and as Sargon himself says, it’s harrowing stuff. Most of the stories come from women who transitioned to men, though there is one from a man, who transitioned to a woman. They were all very young when they started to transition, some about 18 and 20 years old. One former woman says that she was 16. All the detransitioners are repelled by their new bodies and regret the loss of their natural, biological gender. One detrans woman says that she is in mourning for it. And at least one of them has serious health issues, including having to sleep for 14 hours a day, because of the treatment.
Transitioning has worked for some, but not these. This is why I strongly believe that when it comes to such radical and life-changing treatment and surgery, the greatest care should be taken to ensure that this is genuinely and absolutely appropriate for the patient.
This is why I strongly oppose the affirmation model and the attempts by trans activists to outlaw conversion therapy for trans people. Because there is the real danger that it is an attempt to ban really appropriate psychiatric treatment for people, who will be harmed, not helped, by transitioning.
Paul Joseph Watson is another right-wing YouTube personality like Sargon. He used to be Alex Jones’ British sidekick on InfoWars on the other side of the pond. And like Sargon, he contributed to the destruction of UKIP by joining it. So, I make the same caveats and warning about his content as I do about Sargon’s. However, like Sargon and the ghastly Lotus Eaters, he also makes very good points occasionally. In this video he discusses the shock Alex Scott had on the genealogy show, Who Do You Think You Are?, when she discovered that one of her Jamaican ancestors, Robert Francis Combs, owned slaves in the 1820s. Scott is a Black woman, who was brought in as part of the Beeb’s diversity campaign to replace Dan Walker on Football Focus. Her ancestor was Jamaican, and I at first thought that he might have been a White planter, as many of them had children through their Black mistresses. But this was not so. Combes was Black. Scott was assured by an historian present that this actually wasn’t uncommon. Paul Joseph Watson goes on to make the point that slavery was found all over the world, and that it was Africans who sold the slaves to us. At the same time the Barbary pirates from North Africa raided Europe as far as Iceland for slaves. He asks why this isn’t taught in schools, and complains that only Whites are taught to feel shame about their ancestor’s past involvement in slavery.
Watson is exactly right. One of the problems faced by the Abolitionists was that slavery was found all over the world. In America and the Caribbean, free Blacks and those of mixed race often did own slaves. Black slave owners also received compensation for the emancipation of their slaves by the British government on abolition in 1837. One of the documents I looked at when I was working on the slavery archive at the former Empire and Commonwealth Museum contained a list of Maroons – the descendants of the runaway slaves, who succeeded in establishing free Black towns in the Jamaican interior – who owned slaves, with the recommendation that they should also receive compensation. Watson also points out in the video that so great was the involvement of indigenous African chiefs in the enslavement of other Africans, that it’s become a major issue in Nigeria with commenters stating that they can now no longer blame the Whites.
However, it does seem that Black involvement in the slave trade is being deliberately played down because of current racial politics. It is held that there is a direct line from slavery to the current underprivileged condition of much of the western Black population. This is true, but it’s also an oversimplification as it assumes that slavery is only something Whites did to Blacks. Real, undisguised chattel slavery has returned to Africa, apart from areas like Mauretania where it’s never gone away. The Islamists in Libya have opened slave markets there, and there are also markets selling slaves in Uganda. But anti-racist activists really don’t want to discuss this issues because, as I columnist Kate Maltby wrote, it is diversion from the main issue of tackling western racism and inequality.
But this issue has to be tackled, even if it complicates matters particularly when it comes to reparations for slavery. I’ve pointed out how the motion passed by Bristol council calling for reparations for all ‘Afrikans’ is actually unfair, because of the complicity of many African peoples in the slave trade. And Critical Race Theory and other forms of extreme anti-racist ideologies are also unjust for precisely the reason Watson points out. They do demand that Whites feel guilty for slavery while ignoring others’ involvement.
I have every sympathy for Scott. It was a terrible shock to her as a woman of colour, and she is not responsible for whatever her ancestors did. But neither are contemporary Whites.
This is why we need to be properly informed and educated about historical slavery, rather than accept the received, simplified view devised by well-meaning anti-racists.
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