I think many, probably the majority of people believe that the current expansion of trans identification among the young is an organic development and that the movement for trans rights comes from grass roots activism. At least some of the massive increase in young people, particularly young women, identifying as members of the opposite sex seems to be a psychological contagion like the rise of anorexia and eating disorders among girls and young women back in the 1970s. Gender critical feminists have also suggested that natural feelings of awkwardness and fear of the degrading sex acts in contemporary pornography may also be behind it. Many adolescent girls are embarrassed or feel awkward about their developing breasts and the sexual attention they get from boys and their periods. They may also be terrified of what they see in pornography with women beaten and strangled. One of the gender critical feminists speaking on YouTube said that fifty per cent of women between the ages of 18 and 24 had been strangled during sex. This is an alarming statistic, if true. Children are being exposed to pornography through the internet at increasingly younger ages. So, it is argued, some young women try to escape from these awkward, uncomfortable aspects of femininity and frightening, sadistic sex by believing that they are really men.
But there are also very powerful corporate forces behind the trans movement. There’s a considerable amount of funding from various lobby groups as well as pharmaceutical companies and activist lawyers. For example, it’s been claimed that the company that produces lupron, used as puberty blocker for trans-identified children, has given a very generous donation to the Lib Dems. A few years ago a document emerged from Denton’s, an international company of lawyers, about how to introduce pro-trans legislation into governments around the world. This advised activists to keep very quiet about what they were doing. There was to be no publicity. Instead, the legislation was to be tacked on to genuinely popular government motions. This is happened in countries like Spain, Iceland and Scotland, where various gender recognition acts, in which women are defined according to mental/psychological identification rather than biological reality, were added to popular measures legalising gay marriage. Gender critical feminists have remarked that these tactics are the exact opposite of what popular reforming movements have done in the past. The gay rights movement, for example, wanted people to know about them and to understand what they were campaigning for. But Denton’s didn’t, and so showed that they, at least, believed that trans rights weren’t popular. Of course, against this is the pro-trans stance of the mainstream gay organisations like Stonewall and so on. From Big Pharma and the medical-industrial complex’s point of view, medical transition is immensely lucrative. Doctors and clinics performing the treatment are paid very well, and the side-effects of the treatment may mean that many trans people need supportive medical care for the rest of their lives. The surgery itself has a 30 per cent failure rate, which is absolutely unacceptable anywhere else in medicine, so that patients need corrective surgery. Once this is done, they need to be kept on cross-sex hormones, which may have detrimental effects on bone density and the heart. Many transmen need to have hysterectomies after being placed on testosterone. This is not because they want the surgery done, but because the hormone causes the uterus to atrophy and stick to the body cavity. The result is extremely painful. And there is the related criticism that the groups demanding better healthcare for trans people aren’t interested in improving these aspects of their treatment. What they want is the expansion of medical transition.
I’ve started watching an interview on YouTube with Benjamin Boyce and K. Yang. It’s two hours or so long, so it might be some time before I see all of it. Yang’s a New York based gay rights activist and was a fervent supporter of trans rights until she became disillusioned. The video’s title is about how activists are carrying water for the corporations. If this is true, then it means that the idealistic people campaigning for trans people are being cynically used by big businesses whose only real concern is the profit margin.
Clare Page is the mother of two daughters at Haberdashers’ Hatcham College. Her story has been mentioned by the EDIjester and she has been interviewed by Calvin Robinson of the New Culture Forum and Dr Anna Loutfi of the Bad Law Project on Reclaim the Media, which is connected to Laurence Fox’s Reclaim Party. She’s trying to sue the school or local authority to get them to reveal the lesson plans for the Personal and Human Development course at her daughters’ school and the identity of the person who taught it. She has very good reasons, as the school does seem to have a very hard left approach to teaching human sexuality and gender and racial politics. She became concerned when her daughter told her that they had been taught that society was heteronormative, and that this was bad. The EDIjester, in his video about this, stated that all heteronormativity means is that there are more heterosexual than gay people. And this is how it should be, as heterosexuals gave birth to the next generation of gay men, and without that, there wouldn’t be any younger gay blokes for him to chase. They were also told that the proper response to heteronormativity was to be sex positive and embrace all forms of sexuality. There’s clearly a moral problem there. Calvin Robinson made the point that this excluded people of more traditional views, for whom sex should be kept within marriage or a loving, committed relationship. The attitude seemed to be, however, that everything was alright provided it felt good. These lessons were delivered by an outside provider, the School of Sexuality Education, previously Sexplain. The lessons were given to 15- and 16-year olds, who were given such tasks as make lists of the way they would talk about which aspects of sex they enjoyed to another child in their class, as a way of making them less reticent about talking about sex. As Page said in her interview with Loutfi, this sexualised children, who may otherwise not have been so and were unprepared for it. The EDIjester, on the other hand, remarked that it was a bit pointless telling teenagers sex was fun, as they already knew that. The schoolchildren were also told that for more information they should watch the satellite/cable series Sex Education, even though this was rated 18+ and therefore inappropriate for them. The organisation’s website was also inappropriate for children, as the company also sold sex toys, pornography and tips on anal masturbation, all of which was available to the kids consulting the site at the click of a mouse. Page tried to get hold of the lesson plans from the school, but all she got in return were the titles of the various lessons. She, and the school itself, were told by the School of Sexuality Education that they were not going to release the information because of copyright confidentiality. There was an option briefly discussed in which she could go in and see the lesson plans but would not be given copies. She found that unacceptable because it would prevent her from contacting the authorities over specific points or discussing them with her daughter if she did not have the documents to hand. The school also refused to give them on the grounds that, she later found through freedom of information requests, the school and the SSE had been corresponding with each other over whether she was harassing the company and its staff. She complained to the school governors, but they couldn’t give her a decision about the lesson plans because they weren’t given copies of them either. The point was made by the jester that in this instance the school was prioritising the commercial interests of an outside provider over the democratic right to free speech and debate. There is also a commercial conflict of interest in giving the teaching contract to a company that also sells porn and sex toys.
The school was also teaching Critical Race Theory. Page’s daughter was told that she had White privilege. This was all right, but what was not all right was denying that this privilege existed. The children were also told that Black lives were viewed as lesser and expendable by the government and law enforcement. It wasn’t clear whether this referred to Britain or America or both. The sources for these assertions were similarly obscure. Sometimes searching for them on Google revealed they came from teenage magazines, sometimes the sources simply couldn’t be found. This racialised the school in a way that it hadn’t been before. Page states that her daughter was referred to by her race in a not-altogether friendly fashion, but this could have been simply playground banter. But she said that it introduced racial division into a school that had previously been very non-racist. The children were also taught that Whites were racist because of previous abuses, and that White people held all the social and economic power. The school curriculum itself would be biased as it was probably created by middle-class White men. They were also told that racism against White didn’t exist.
The history taught was heavily biased to niche Communist history before it got to the level when the national curriculum took over. Page’s daughter was taught that, in the period leading up to the Second World War, Hitler’s main opponents were Communist guerrillas in Cameroon. It was only several weeks later that they were taught about Nazism and the Jews.
Robinson also, unsurprisingly, wanted to know if there was a general anti-Tory bias at the school. Page agreed that there was. One teacher wore a pro-Corbyn T-shirt. Her daughter told her that she had been told to vote Labour. One of the schoolchildren had also thrown a milkshake at Michael Gove during an Extinction Rebellion demonstration, for which she was congratulated by the other schoolchildren. Back to race, a rap song with the refrain, ‘Our Prime Minister is racist’ was played in class with no comment.
Page herself comes across as reasonable and conciliatory. She stated that nobody really wants to sue their school, and that she would like these kinds of issues to be subjects that schools and parents could explore together. She also made the point that all indoctrination was wrong, regardless of whether it was far left or right, and even if we agreed with it, because it could all be turned around.
I am not a member of and certainly have no interest in joining either the New Culture Forum or the Reclaim Party. The New Culture Forum are the civilian wing of the Institute of Economic Affairs, who are a hard-right Thatcherite outfit that would like to privatise everything, including the NHS. Reclaim are also likely to be right-wing economically. But I think they are absolutely right to tackle the issue of woke political indoctrination in school. As for the teachers who teach it, EDIjester has remarked that they probably don’t understand it or the issues themselves. They’re too busy teaching, and so simply go along with whatever they’re told by their superiors. I find CRT to be an entirely fraudulent discipline and fear it is going to do enormous damage with its teaching. As for the material about sex, Page said in the interview with Loutfi that it was a case of a uniform attitude where it was inappropriate. Some children no doubt needed such explicit information, particularly if they were in danger. Other children weren’t ready and so it wasn’t suitable.
These are all major issues, which at least need to be discussed openly without highly biased organisations and private companies demanding silence and compliance for reasons of commercial sensitivity.
Here’s EDIjester’s video on it. Warning – there is more than a little bawdy humour.
The New Culture Forum’s video is entitled ‘Anti-White Racism Doesn’t Exist’: My Kids’ School Refused to Show Me What They Were Teaching’ and is on YouTube if you want to look at it.
The Reclaim the Media video is ‘What’s Being Taught In Our SCHOOlS – The Bad Law Show – Clare Page.
Correct, Not Political are a right-wing group who organise counter-protests and put up videos on YouTube giving their own coverage of Pride marches, Drag Queen Story Hour, anti-racist and pro-immigrant demonstrations, Extinction Rebellion and so on. Just how right-wing they are is shown by a section on their YouTube homepage devoted to ‘socialists and commies’. Having said that, watching some of their videos they do seem to be polite. Many of their videos about Pride and Drag Queen Story hour simply consist of them talking to the demonstrators, asking why they believe as they do and simply putting their own arguments. Quite often this is done simply and conversationally. I realise that with any broadcast material, including stuff from the official news organisations, you have to be careful of selective editing but they do come across much better than some of the left-wing demonstrators. Some of them come across as very aggressive, simply screaming ‘Trans Rights Are Human Rights’ and ‘Off Our Streets, Fascist Scum’, as if those are adequate replies or rebuttals. Other left-wing protests they interview are polite and personally reasonable.
They posted this piece up on their channel the other day, claiming that teachers have now entered into a contract with the government to report on whether their pupils hold one or more from a list of conspiracy theories. They are also asked how they are tackling these beliefs. This also includes whether they have been referred as radicalised.
This is the list.
They comment: Parents beware, the state have incentivised teachers to enter a contract in which they get subsidies on teaching materials in order for them to take part in surveys to collect data on your children, this is getting very scary.
I don’t know what’s going on here, as they have not said how they acquired this information, whether it was from a teacher or some other school or educational employee or official, nor how reliable this is. It could all have been cooked up as a form of disinformation designed to spread even more paranoia by someone. It’s possible that the list is correct, as the government is keen to prevent the radicalisation of young people through the Prevent programme, but it’s dubious whether this is part of it without further information.
They’re also wrong about one of the conspiracies. The Great Replacement, from what I understand, is the notion that the Jews are encouraging Black and Asian immigration to Europe to replace the White population. The idea that Muslims are going to replace us through immigration and outbreeding us is ‘Eurabia’.
I also wonder how many schoolchildren are actually interested in any of these stupid theories or have come across them on the web. It seems to me that a far greater problem is children seeing pornography or other age-inappropriate material, as well as the dangers of sexting and girls having the nude pics they sent to a boyfriend passed and put up for all to see.
Their commenters are naturally afraid of the state taking an interest and trying to control what pupils believe. I’ve got absolutely no problem with any teacher refuting any of these during lessons if they come up. But what is worrying is that some of their commenters seem to think some of them might be true. My guess, from some of the group’s content, this would be the theories about climate change and the ‘scamdemic’, in which the Covid crisis has been manufactured to take away our freedom.
As a Bristolian, I feel I have to add my fourpence worth about this controversy. One of the arenas of the culture war is over sex education in schools and especially sex education, with particular concern about the teaching or promotion of homosexuality and transgenderism. Parents and politicians are concerned about proper age-appropriate teaching of these subjects. The controversy seems to be particularly acute in America, where various, mostly right-leaning journos, activists and media pundits like Michael Walsh have criticised videos posted on TikTok of teachers coming out to young pupils and announcing that they’re gay, non-binary or trans. There have been instances where primary school children have been asked about which gender they identify with, as apart from their biological sex. One teacher proudly announced the ‘gender closet’ in which children can get changed into the clothing of the opposite sex when they want to keep it secret from their parents. There have been very sexually explicit books published for schools about gay and gender issues, containing the kind of imagery that once upon a time only used to be found in hard porn. And schools have also been told that, if a child trans, they should not inform his or her parents. As a result, there have been meetings of outraged parents confronting their local school boards in various towns and cities across the US. The Republican governor of Florida,, Ron de Santis, has just passed his so-called ‘Don’t Say Gay’ act, which forbids the teaching of anything about sex and sexuality, including heterosexuality, from ages 5 – 9. The Disney corporation and various LGBTQ+ employees have been particularly incensed by it, and have tried to mobilise opposition against the bill. This was in conjunction with a leaked video showing some of its top brass saying that they want half of all their characters to come from ethnic minorities or the gay community. As a result, right-wing Republicans like Walsh are calling for an end to Disney’s autonomy in the state and its tax exemption. I have to say that this shows a somewhat skewed morality. As a massively profitable global enterprise, Disney should pay its fair whack of tax like the rest of us proles. And especially because conditions for its workers in China are so dire that they’ve had to install suicide nets in their factories to stop the wage slaves toiling over their merchandise from killing themselves.
The Tobacco Factory, one of Bristol’s many theatres, put its collective feet firmly into this mire of controversy last week when they announced they were hosting ‘A Small Family Sex Show’ by theatre company ThisEgg. The show was described as woke, Queer and feminist, ,and intended to teach children about sex, using personal experiences, covering sexual orientation, gender identity, boundaries and so on. The show was described as suitable for children of five upwards, and included a section where the performers were free to take their clothes to the extent they felt comfortable. This could be total nudity, or else the removal of bottoms but not underwear, or even just simply staying clothed. The content included teaching children about masturbation, touching as well as other, much more dubious and extreme practices. Quiet-voiced Benjamin Boyce, an American YouTuber who discusses topics like gender identity, went through the description of the show’s contents on their website. This also included various explicit drawings. It was a weird mixture of sex with information about theatre, such as pointing out that the areas to each side of the stage that are hidden from the audience are called the wings. It also promised to teach children about White privilege and supremacy. In the video introducing the show, it’s producers introduce themselves with their pronouns and a description of their race, complexion, hair colour and so on. They seem to have been White, and Boyce wondered why they thought such descriptions were necessary when everyone could see what they were like. But it was the sexual subjects they show intended to teach which naturally attracted Boyce’s astonishment and disapproval. Again and again he wondered aloud how it wasn’t grooming. And others wondered too, on both sides of the Atlantic, with many being very firmly convinced it was.
Karen Davis, a gender critical Black American YouTuber, covered it on her channel. She was concerned that it was aimed at a time when children were only just learning to differentiate between fiction and reality, and that you could not like people while still being civil to them. She was also concerned that it would break down barriers about sex between children and adults, barriers that children naturally have for very good reasons. She was concerned that it was teaching kids not to believe their own eyes and feelings about whether an adult presented a danger, and would so make them vulnerable to predators. Davis has very strong and uncompromising views on the trans issue and she goes further in her opposition than some other gender critical folks. But in this instance her views seem to be very well grounded. She frequently cites the medical and academic literature to support her opinions, which are also informed by her work as a special needs teacher for children. She has also previously worked in centres for people with mental health issues. She knows whereof she speaks. And one of her concerns was about the theatre companies name. ‘Egg’ apparently is trans slang for someone on the verge of being trans, who needs to be ‘hatched’. I wondered if the name wasn’t inspired by a cult BBC show about a group of graduates living in London called This Life, one of whose characters had the monicker ‘Egg’. The show claimed it had the support of one of the organisations charged with protecting children, but a glance at that organisation’s website – it might have been the NSPCC – showed that the show was in conflict with the organisation. This said on their website that one of the signs that a child was being abused or near to a child who was, was sexuality explicit talk.
There have been any number of people on YouTube in Britain and America tearing into the show. Meesh Makeida, a Black British mother, covered it in one of her videos and made it very plain that she definitely would not take her five year old to it. Karen Davis in her video about it compared it to the real, grubby sex shows for adults. Unfortunately, these have been about in my city. The city council voted a few months ago to shut down the, er, ‘gentlemen’s clubs’. And the tone of Park Street in Clifton went up when the strip clubs there closed down in the 1980s.
A large number of Bristol’s citizens also made their opposition to the show very plain. There was a petition against it, which garnered 38,000 signatures. There were also threats of death and violence against the theatre and ThisEgg. This resulted in the show’s cancellation. The producers have claimed that they were forced to pull the show due to the threats, and that these came from a small minority of extremists.
I don’t agree with making death threats, and sincerely hope that those sent did come from a small minority. But the 38,000 signatures on the petition definitely don’t come from a small number of people. I don’t know how many people were actually aware of the show’s existence – I haven’t seen it mentioned on the local news. But offhand I can’t think of anyone who would be happy at such a show being performed in front of children and especially not five year olds.
And grooming is a real and legitimate issue with this play. It appears to be informed by Queer Theory. This, in the view of scholars and critics like James Lindsay, explicitly wishes to break down the barriers between adults and children in matters of sexuality and sexual identity. It’s based on the theories of Foucault, a postmodern philosopher and paedophile. Foucault and other intellectuals tried to get the age of consent reduced to 12 or there about in France in the 1970s, and Foucault himself used to go to North Africa to take advantage of the prostituted boys. One of the issues here is that the gay rights movement in its early stages included many paedophiles and civil rights activists who mistakenly believed that it should be legalised. The gay movement in Britain began making headway when the gay organisations purged the paedophiles from their ranks and made it very plain that gay very definitely did not equal paedo. There are thus fears that the paedophiles are trying to come back in through Queer Theory and the kind of sex education that it produces.
Graham Linehan, the writer of Father Ted, Big Train and the IT Crowd and a very firm opponent of the trans ideology, also discussed the play with American gender critical feminist Kara Dansky. I think Linners believed that ThisEgg were genuine in their concern that children received proper information about sex, just misguided. Dansky, on the other hand, suggested that the company really may have been deliberately grooming children. I hope not. They seemed sincere, but terribly, destructively wrong in my opinion.
When the news that the show was being staged a week ago, some of the commenters on various videos had a dig at Bristol. The city’s terribly ‘woke’, you see, and somehow it’s all the fault of the University. Well, certain parts of the city are very left-wing. People joke about the ‘People’s Republic of Stokes Croft’, for example. Other parts are more moderate or Conservative. And the various initiatives taken by Bristol University, such as lowering admissions for Black and Asian applicants in order to encourage more of them to apply don’t come from a long history of left-wing activism. They seem to be initiated in order to dispel criticism that the university is too elitist and White. But of course, there are left-wing lecturers there, just as there are Tories and others, who keep their political views quiet.
As for theatre in Bristol general, the city has a number of excellent venues. The Hippodrome tends to stage West End musicals like Cats, Return to the Forbidden Planet and even, every so often, the Rocky Horror Show. The Theatre Royal in King Street is one of the oldest in the country, and has produced many of this great nation’s leading thesps. It’s had everything from one man shows by Michael Bentine and John Mortimer, to performances of Into the West, from the film starring Ron Moody as a villain. It also staged more challenging performances about the Vietnam War and its legacy. Another theatre venue, Quaker’s Friars, has staged great plays, one of which was by one of the great 18th century French playwrights, as well as a production of the Hollywood classic Key Largo. And before it decided to put on A Small Family Sex Show, the Tobacco Factory had also put on several excellent plays, including puppet shows for children.
I think it’s excellent that the show has been cancelled, but I’m also acutely aware that children do need proper sex education. There was a time when it was not taught in school, and so children were really ignorant about their bodies, the changes of adolescence and reproduction. We should very definitely not go back there, whatever opposition there is to it by right-wingers like Peter Hitchens.
I’m also not entirely convinced that there’s been this controversy about it just when Bristol is facing a referendum over the elected mayor. At the moment it’s Marvin Rees for Labour. Now the mayor and city council generally have had nothing to do with the show, and no-one has said they have. But I’m afraid that the controversy over the play and the constant statements by the right about it being the product of the ‘woke’ left will lead some people to mistakenly connect it to Labour.
Bristol’s a great city, with great theatre. A Small Family Sex Show isn’t one of them, and shouldn’t have been booked.
Children do need proper sex education, given at suitable ages and using appropriate material. They cannot be left ignorant, but should not be exposed to material that is too explicit either. Especially when there is the danger that real abusers could use to approach children, no matter how well-intentioned the people behind such material are.
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 anti-racist, anti-religious extremism organisation and site, Hope Not Hate, has put up on their site any number of stories showing how bonkers, ridiculous, and ultimately sad the Far Right are. These include details of their attempts to style themselves as the new Mussolinis, Hitlers and Mosleys, complete with cod Fascist uniforms. The megalomania of their leaders, as shown by the demand of one of these sawdust Caesars, that the assembled squadristi kiss his ring. One of them refused on the grounds that it was ‘homoerotic’. No! Really? This from a movement which has, historically, been fully of self-hating gays.
Then you have the sordid details about how these brave patriots, determined to save Britain from the menace posed by Jews, Muslims, Asians, Blacks, trade unions, gays, Gypsies, Socialists, Communists, and that bloke, who looked at them in a funny way once, have run away from the fights they’ve caused when they’re outnumbered. Or have beaten each other up because of disputes about money, stealing other people’s girl- and boyfriends. HNH has also mocked them because of their hypocrisy for engaging themselves in the type of sordid activities they blame on ‘Jewish big business wideboys’ and people of colour. Like drug peddling.
And they can hardly claim to be standing up for innocent, virginal White people and wholesome sexual morality against ‘Jewish pornographers’, when they themselves have, er, ‘private’ shops selling such magazines and other material. Which includes interracial porn. One female contributor to Counterpunch, looking at the marching morons in Charlottesville, stated that Fascists generally tend to be repressed self-hating gays, or, if not, be massively fixated on Black men pleasuring their wives with their enormous members. The Alt Right regularly uses the term ‘cuck’ as a form of abuse for their opponents. It’s short for ‘cuckold’, meaning a man, whose wife has been unfaithful to him. It also refers to a sexual perversion, where a man gets off on watching his wife have sex with other men. So in the case of the assembled Nazis, the term ‘cuck’ would seem to be self-referential.
The Far Right are a real menace and a growing threat. But they’re also so grotesque and incompetent that they’re also blackly funny. Hope Not Hate laughs at their stupidity, calling them ‘Nutzis’ and ‘Boneheads’. So did Private Eye. After running a series of stories about the bizarre antics of the BNP in Dagenham and Barking, and Tower Hamlets, the satirical magazine somehow got hold of an internal document showing that many of their stormtroopers had resigned. Among the various reasons was that the party had been made to look silly in the Eye.
Now the silliness continues in the form of the banned Nazi group, National Action, having sent a begging email to Tony Greenstein. I’ve blogged about and linked to several of Greenstein’s posts before, because he’s a bitter critic of Israeli racism and their ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. He’s also very anti-racist generally, and is a staunch opponent of Fascism. Quite apart from the fact that he is Jewish. His Zionist opponents have smeared him as anti-Semitic, but anyone reading his column will find plenty of evidence to refute that. He’s a secular atheist, like so many people, but that does not mean he hates his own ethnic group. Reading his posts, you find that he is very active within other Jewish Socialist organisations and those of Jews, who share his own fierce opposition to Israel and its ethnic cleansing of the country’s indigenous Arabs. In one article about a genuine Jewish anti-Semite, Gilad Atzmon, Greenstein has stated that the constitution of the pro-Palestinian group to which he belongs makes it clear that anti-Semites are very definitely denied membership.
All this, apparently, has been lost on the leadership of the Nazi outfit, National Action. Greenstein says he’s been receiving emails from them over the past few months asking him if he would like to make a donation. He tried to unsubscribe from their list, but they’ve come back.
They want his money because two of the Nazi organisation’s wretched leadership, Paul Golding and Jayda Fransen, have jumped bail and gone on the lam. They want the money to overturn the bail conditions that were imposed on them for demonstrating against the ‘Muslim child rapists’. Presumably this would be one of the groups of Asian men responsible for the serial assault and sexual enslavement of hundreds of young girls.
No decent person has any time for child abusers and people do have legitimate reasons for protesting against the Asian paedophile gangs. Not because the gangs were Asian, but because the council knew about it and allowed them to continue because of the perceived threat to racial harmony. Since the scandal broke, there have been Asian writers commenting in the papers that the authorities smeared their communities by assuming that Muslims and/or Asians generally would riot if these men were arrested and brought to justice.
They also point out that the majority of paedophiles in this country are White. And there certainly is an element of selective outrage amongst the British Far Right, as several of those claiming to be defending girls and young women from these predators have themselves been sentenced to prison for sexual abuse and assault.
Greenstein suspects that the reason the Nazis have come back to ask him for cash is the result of some dirty tricks between the Zionist organisations that have set out to smear him as an Anti-Semite. He writes
Why have I been resubscribed? I suspect it is dirty tricks from one Jonathan Hoffman whose best friend is Britain First’s ‘Intelligence’ Chief Paul Besser. Both like to picket Palestinian and other meetings on the grounds of ‘anti-Semitism’.
This is a reference to a Palestinian civil rights conference which the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism declared was ‘anti-Semitic’ even before it started. Hoffman, a leading member of one of these anti-Palestinian groups, was caught standing next to Besser at the demo. Which shows how selective and hypocritical the Zionist’s definition of anti-Semitism is. As for Besser and Britain First, the real anti-Semites always had a very flexible attitude to who was Jewish when it suited them. Karl von Luegerer,, then anti-Semitic mayor of Vienna, whom Hitler admired, had numerous Jewish friends. When asked about them by one of his fellow bigots, Luegerer replied ‘I say who’s a Jew and who isn’t’.
Greenstein concludes his comments by saying
I guess it’s kind of flattering to be told that they need me, even if they offer me the alternative of signing up or do nothing. At least, it would seem they take Jews!
Dig deep for these two neo-Nazi nuts. You know they’re worth it.
This is obviously very heavy irony. National Action have been banned as a terrorist group. They’re very openly Nazi. There’s footage of them at a demonstration in Liverpool screaming ‘Sieg Heil!’ and raising their right arms in the Fascist salute. Hope Not Hate also obtained a copy of a speech one of their leaders, Kevin Layzell, gave up north, which followed the usual Nazi conspiracy theory about the Jews using non-White immigration to destroy the White race.
They clearly don’t want Jews at all. On the other hand, someone might think that they could be useful for smearing a genuine anti-racist by association. Or it could be simply colossal, asinine stupidity. Which, given the massive lack of competence these thugs have shown over the years, is also a very plausible factor.
This is reblogged from Kevin Logan’s mirror of Ropata’s piece. This is more about the Alt Right and its denizens, I’m sorry to say. In this piece, Johnny Ropata discusses the career and ideas of Kevin McDonald, one of the leading ideologues of the Alt Right and the man dubbed by another leading figure in the movement, John Derbyshire, ‘the Karl Marx of the Alt Right’. McDonald is one of the directors of the American Freedom Party, the neo-Nazi group that publicly endorsed Donald Trump. He was also one of the speakers introduced by the Alt Right’s leader and founder, Richard Spencer, at that notorious conference in the Texas A&M University. From 1985 to 2015, McDonald taught child psychology at the University of California at Long Beach, where he kept at low profile. He did his doctoral thesis on evolutionary psychology, and group selection amongst wolves. He published a series of three books in the 1990s applying his views to Jews – A People That Shall Dwell Alone, Separation and Its Discontents, and the Culture of Critique. In the first book, McDonald lays out his theory that humanity is composed of different groups all competing for resources. The Jews are able to dominate in this, as they have a ‘Group Evolutionary Strategy’, founded on the Talmud as a eugenics text.
Ropata also believes that Jews see Whites as more of an enemy than Muslims, because Muslims are less intelligent and more easily dominated. He considers that Jews are motivated by a bitter hostility towards White, Christian civilisation, based on their own history of persecution, from the destruction of the Temple by the Romans through to the expulsions from Christian Europe during the Middle Ages. In Separation and Its Discontents, McDonald considered anti-Semitism to be rational strategy against Jewish domination, and saw the anti-Semitic campaigns of the Spanish Inquisition and Nazi Germany very much along these lines. In the Culture of Critique, McDonald examines Jewish involvement in western 20th century cultural movements, and concludes that they are actively trying to destroy White, Christian society in order to create an order more favourable to them.
Ropata here states that ‘this is straight-up bullsh*t’ without any hard data, and directs his viewers to a detailed critique of McDonald’s rubbish by JHate at bit.ly/2ktaauD. He has done little to understand or contextualise Jewish beliefs and practices, and his work is not accepted by scholars. He is simply a crank, and the only people, who take him seriously are other Nazis.
Among his other daft, poisonous ideas, he’s claimed on the David Duke Show on the radio that pornography is the Jews’ revenge for Christian persecution. he has also said that Jews want to set up Soviet-type gulags in the West for White Christians, when these become a minority in America. He bases this on his perception of Jewish involvement in the Russian Revolution and Nazi regime. Ropata says about this ‘This is what projection sounds like.’ After Anders Breivik horrific murder of 77 children at a Young Socialist summer camp in Norway, he wrote on his blog praising the butcher for being a great thinker with good practical ideas on strategy. Ropata also points out that McDonald is dangerous as he has forged a connection between the anti-Semitism of the early 20th century and that of the contemporary Nazi right. In this part of the video, he shows a Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda movie denouncing Jews, even assimilated Jews, of enemies of western civilisation provoking discontent and protest. He also plays a section from ‘The Daily Shoah’, a modern neo-Nazi podcast, whose hosts rant on about Jewish control of the media and how they were responsible for Stalin’s gulags. This ends with the host citing McDonald’s Culture of Critique as a source for further information. He also shows a clip of Richard Heimbach of the Traditionalist Worker Party stating that the ideals of White nationalism did not die in the bunker with Adolf Hitler, but are rising amongst ‘free peoples’ today, and that the Jews are waging a war against western civilisation. Heimbach also was shown pushing around a Black woman at a Trump rally. He regularly speaks at rallies of the American Freedom Party. Another regular speaker at these is the Holocaust denier Mark Weber, of the International Historical Review. He notes that these groups have become emboldened since the election of Donald Trump.
Some things never change. The current attacks on Jeremy Corbyn, with the Blairites doing their level best to engineer expulsions or a split in the Labour party, in many ways are almost like a re-run of the attacks on the Labour party under Michael Foot in the 1980s, and the mass defection of the Labour Right to form the SDP. On Friday I managed to pick up a copy of another book published in the 1980s, which critically examined the media bias against a variety of left-wing issues and causes, in one of the secondhand shops in Cheltenham. This was Bending Reality: The State of the Media, edited by James Curran, Jake Ecclestone, Giles Oakley and Alan Richardson (London: Pluto Press and the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom 1986). The has the following chapters in its three sections devoted to ‘Whose Reality?’, ‘The Politics of the Media’ and ‘Campaigning for Press Freedom’. They are
1. Media power and class power;
2. In whose image?
3. Sexual stereotyping in the media?
4. Racism in broadcasting
5. Portraying the peace movement
6. British broadcasting and Ireland
7. Living with the media – A landscape of lies, and Union World
8. The media and the state.
9. The different approaches to media reform
10. Selling the paper? Socialism and cultural diversity
11. Reconstructing broadcasting
12. Pornography annoys.
13. Campaigning against pornography.
14. The new communications revolution.
15. Media freedom and the CPBF
16. The aims of the campaign
17. Right of Reply
18. Freedom of information.
19. Media bias and future policy. This last chapter is particularly interesting, as it’s by Tony Benn.
I was particular struck by how little difference there is between the today’s attacks on Corbyn and those against the Left in the 1980s by the chapter on the campaign against the peace movement, written by Richard Kebble. Kebble amongst his other points, Kebble points out how scepticism towards nuclear weapons was widespread throughout society, including a sizable chunk of the Tories. It wasn’t confined to Labour, but the media and Tory leadership nevertheless acted as though it were. He also argued that the difference between multilateralism and unilateral disarmament was actually blurred but this was also ignored by the media in its campaign to present a simplified message to the public. The media also presented Michael Foot’s decision to abandon nuclear weapons as a policy that would leave Britain defenceless. He also states very clearly that a quote, used by the Navy as part of its recruiting campaign about the threat of the Russian Navy was a lie.
All this is being repeated with Corbyn stance against Trident. Some of the verbiage used has changed a little, but the overall stance and argument is so close that you could easily believe that the last thirty years have been merely a dream, and that Corbyn and Foot are the same person, despite the difference in appearance and name. Corbyn is being hysterically attacked for not supporting Trident. The Groaniad accused him of not being willing to defend a NATO partner, if it was attacked by Russia – a lie which Mike exposed on his blog. And the media lied to use about weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and the political establishment now seems to be sabre-rattling once more about a renewed threat from Russia. It’s almost as though the Fall of Communism and the Soviet Empire never happened. We were lied to then. We’re being lied to now. This screams that the mendacity of the British press and media hasn’t changed one bit in the last thirty years.
In this video, Jimmy Dore, an American comedian, who’s been a regular guest on The Young Turks, discusses the guidelines YouTube decided to impose on its users, who generate an income from the advertising that accompanies their videos. Jimmy Dore’s show is one of them, so is Secular Talk with Kyle Kulinski, along with many, many others. Dore here discusses how there was a firewall between advertisers and himself. YouTube looked after the advertising, leaving him and his show’s producers and creators to concentrate on making the show itself.
This has changed. Now YouTube has issued a set of guidelines stating that they will not allow advertising on certain videos. This includes, but ‘is not limited to’
* Sexually suggestive content, including partial nudity and sexual humour.
* Violence, including displays of serious injury and events related to violent extremism.
* Inappropriate language, including harassment, profanity and vulgar language.
* Promotion of drugs and regulated substances, including selling, use and abuse of such items.
* Controversial or sensitive subjects and events, including subjects related to war, political conflict, natural disasters and tragedies, even if graphic images are not shown.
If your video violates any of these, they will take the adverts away from it, so that you won’t make money. If you persist in violating their guidelines, they’ll pull your channel.
Using their customary ribald humour, Dore and his producers talk about how the ban on sexually suggestive material means that nearly every pop video would be banned, and how they violated the ban on the use of vulgar language themselves. As for the use of controlled substances, they make the point of asking if this includes the beer adverts that have appeared alongside their videos. What if they don’t want the beer commercials next to their material? As for war and violence, they make the point that this should affect General Electrics, which makes its money as a ‘war profiteer’. Will they still be allowed to post? And the final clause effectively forbids the news. Just as the guidelines on violence also automatically mean that 90 per cent of the content on YouTube is banned because it contains violence or people harming themselves, like in all the blooper or ‘fails’ videos.
The Young Turks has already suffered, as 10 per cent of their videos has been judged unsuitable for advertising and so demonetised. As they’ve posted up 30,000 videos, this is a significant loss. Kulinski has suffered the same over at Secular Talk. He found a fifth of his material had been retrospectively judged unsuitable. He stated in his video on the subject that he was up to 3 AM the previous night going through the videos one by one to appeal against the ban.
His show also has the problem in that he has the libertarian belief that all drugs should be legalised and taxed, and says so, though he does not recommend breaking the law. He’s also adamant that despite what YouTube says, they won’t stop him from posting controversial material, or make him post bland statements about how wonderful the world is.
Kulinski makes the point that YouTube tried something like this twice before, and each time had to back down, as people will simply go elsewhere to post their material. Dore states here that it looks like YouTube are trying to censor anything that might upset their advertisers. He drily observes that it’s not ‘YouTube’ but ‘TheirTube’. He and his team then demand that it should ‘OurTube’.
And here’s Secular Talk on the issue.
I’m posting this here, because some of the bloggers I’ve reposted over here have had trouble with what looks very much like censorship. Tom Pride had a couple of his pieces censored, or a threat to close down his blog, because he was posting ‘adult material’. He was, but only in the sense that politics is a serious, adult matter. He also uses the occasional coarse language and earthy wit to satirise some of the politicos, who really deserve it, like David Cameron. This looked very much like political censorship, as it came when the Tories were launching their campaign to clean up cyberspace to stop it containing anything that was a menace to children. Policing the internet to protect children from paedophiles is a good idea, and unfortunately all too necessary. But this looked very much like using the threat of paedophilia and internet pornography to censor anything that Cameron and the rest of the Tories don’t like.
So we have to be careful. YouTube, it seems, are now trying the same trick. My guess is that Kulinski’s right, and the ban’s unenforceable. It’s the nature of the internet that if you try to shut something down, it’ll simply go elsewhere. This could lead to the company taking a serious hit itself from a fall in business as people move away from it. But it won’t be before a lot of Vlogs and programmes are hurt as part of this campaign to censor and intimidate posters.
Okay, I put up a piece a few minutes, which used Tom Lehrer’s satirical song ‘Smut’ to attack the moral panic about pornography on the Net. I share the same fears as the people worried about the exposure of children to porn and other unsuitable material. However, I’m also afraid that these perfectly natural, perfectly decent fears are being used to justify a broader campaign of censoring anything of which the Right disapproves, even if it has little or nothing to do with the sex.
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