I’ve been debating with myself whether to repost anything by Barry Wall, the EDIJester, for a little while now. I really don’t share his political opinions – he’s a Telegraph-reading Tory, who thinks that five years of the Labour party in power will totally wreck this country but will have the benefit of leading to another 25 years of Tory rule, as he says in this video. He also thinks that the NHS needs to be scaled back as it’s a socialist state. Well, it’s not state socialism that’s responsible for the increase in bureaucracy, but privatisation. He is very well-informed on the immense damage Queer Theory and the transgender ideology has done and is doing to gays, lesbians and vulnerable young people, principally autistic and gender nonconforming children. However, he is very forthright and outspoken in the scorn and sheer loathing he has for the ideology and those pushing it. While I share his views there, I’m very much aware that many of the great readers of this blog don’t, and I don’t want to insult them. But this issue’s a bit different. It’s about the Critical Social Justice invasion of STEM and in particular the teaching of evolution and ecology.
In the video, he reads out and adds his own comments to a review from the website ‘Why Evolution Is True’, of a scientific paper demanding that the teaching of evolution and ecology should be revised to include the subject’s racism in order to combat modern racism and ‘White complicity’. He states that it’s the kind of material that comes from Black activists like Ibrahim X. Kehindi. This isn’t anti-racism as you and I would normally understand it, where people look past skin colour and disregard past prejudices in order to appreciate the person within. No. Critical Race Theory states that all Whites occupy a privileged position at the apex of society, while all Blacks are brutalised and discriminated against by the system. This has to be laid bare, and Whites must feel guilty about their past in order to make up for past or present racial inequities. This last word does not mean equality in the sense of equality of opportunity. It means equality of result. Thus, lower performing Blacks must be given preferential treatment over Whites and now Asians through affirmative action schemes.
The Jester’s a meritocrat, who believes that firms should only hire and employ the best people, regardless of race. But this is under attack from the Critical Social Justice adherents, who, following the pedagogical theories of the Brazilian Marxist Paolo Freyre, wish to turn teaching into a form of political indoctrination, with the individual subjects merely vehicles for this. The Humanities have been the hardest hit by this attitude, but it’s beginning to infect the science subjects as well. This is particularly pernicious because of the immense power of the STEM subjects to affect the quality of people’s lives. Scientists, engineers and medical professionals need to rely on object fact. But postmodernism, of which Critical Race Theory is a part, rejects objective knowledge as merely a product, or rather a prejudice of western society, and criticises the exclusion of ‘indigenous ways of knowing’. The scientific paper being reviewed does exactly the same.
Now I’d normally avoid sites like ‘Why Evolution Is True’. In my experience, many of them appeared in the first decade of this century as a response to the rise of Creationism and Intelligent Design. They tended to be run by militant atheists, who sneered at people of faith generally when they weren’t attacking them for not believing in evolution. This followed the New Atheists and its leaders, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and so on. Dawkins is known for his particularly bitter hatred of religion, but to be fair he was also very critical of postmodernism. And it’s now postmodernism, in the form of its Critical Social Justice ideologies, that are taken over from religion as the main threat to rationality and objective science.
Evolution is particularly vulnerable to criticisms about its racist past because it was incorporated into the racial anthropology and pseudo-scientific racism that arose in the late 19th century. But Europeans had already developed racial hierarchies with northern Europeans at the top and Aboriginal Australians at the bottom before Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. Also, other cultures have also developed their own racial prejudices and hierarchies. Medieval Muslim scholars speculated that White people owed their complexions and temperaments, which were inferior to those of brown Arabs and Asians, because they lived in northern regions and so had not been properly cooked by the sun. Blacks were also inferior, but for the opposite region. They lived in hotter, southern climates and so had been overcooked. And in the First Millennium AD, some Chinese scholars decided that Whites were the product of interbreeding with monkeys. And at one level, I think many students of evolution are already aware of its racist past through works like The Mismeasure of Man by the late palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould.
European readers may be surprised at the accusations of racism against ecology, but the American ecological movement is tainted with a racist past. Some of those who established the first national parks in America were fervent racists, who hated Blacks and indigenous Americans. But many of them were also otherwise progressive liberals, who believed in a mixed economy, welfare provision and strong trade unions, as Thomas Sowell points out in his book, Intellectuals and Race. But obviously, racism is only part of this, as I think much of the American ecological movement also sprang from ordinary, working class Americans, who yearned for the beauty of the natural world their parents and grandparents had left when they migrated from the farms to seek work in the cities.
Militant Black activists have also developed their own splenetic racist ideologies, in which Whites are at the bottom. These have been developed by the Afrocentrists and the Black Muslim organisations like the Nation of Islam. The latter teaches that Whites were created thousands of years ago by an evil Mekkan scientist in order to destroy Black racial purity. As time went on, however, they also interbred with lepers and dogs. Now, if the teaching of mainstream subjects like evolution and ecology has to include these subjects’ racist past, the argument could be levelled that no teaching about Afrocentrism and Black Islam should exclude mentioning the racism of these ideologies and religions. But I can see real resistance coming to the mere suggestion of this.
This isn’t about informing students of a particularly evil side of their disciplines, but about using that history as a means of indoctrinating them with an extreme and controversial racial ideology at the expense of the subject itself. CRT should have no place in the curriculum.
It seems I’m not the only one on the left concerned about the rise of ‘wokeness’ and the detrimental effects it’s having on politics and culture. Looking for various books on Amazon yesterday I found Cancelled: The Left Way Back from Woke, by Umut Ozkirimli. The blurb for the book runs
‘Right now, someone, somewhere is being cancelled. Off-the-cuff tweets or “harmless” office banter have the potential to wreck lives. The Left condemns the Right and the bigotry of the old elites. The Right complains about brain-dead political correctness. In reality, both sides are colluding in a reactionary politics that is as self-defeating as it is divisive. Can the Left escape this extremism and stay true to the progressive ideals it once professed?
In this provocative book, Umut Özkırımlı reveals how the Left has been sucked into a spiral of toxic hatred and outrage-mongering, retreating from the democratic ideals of freedom and pluralism that it purports to represent. Exploring the similarities between right-wing populism and radical identity politics, he sets out an alternative vision. It is only by focusing on our common humanity and working across differences that the Left will find a constructive and consensual way back from “woke.” ‘
The potted biography for Ozkirimli states that he ‘is a Senior Research Fellow at IBEI (Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals), a professor at Blanquerna, Ramon Llull University, and a Senior Research Associate at CIDOB (Barcelona Centre for International Affairs). He is the author of the acclaimed Theories of Nationalism: A Critical Introduction, currently in its third edition. His writings appear frequently in The Guardian, openDemocracy, Times Higher Education, Huffington Post, Al Jazeera, among others.’
I remember a piece in Lobster from over a decade ago where editor Robin Ramsay attacked postmodernism and the new identity politics. He felt that it had arisen in the 1990s as a substitute for the traditional class politics of the left as it retreated and rejected traditional socialist policies. He was particularly critical of its use or promotion by Tony Blair. To be fair, I’m not sure Blair was particularly woke. I think there was more noise about multiculturalism than anything really substantial during Blair’s ‘Cool Britannia’. This included, if remember properly, one song which started out as standard pop but then included traditional Indian musicians and dancers along with other musicians and performers from ethnic minorities in one pop contest. But Blair is also quoted as saying that multiculturalism is a failure, and I’m quite prepared to believe that this is the old warmonger’s real view. I note that Ozkirimli doesn’t attack pluralism, just radical identity politics, which seems fair and moderate. With the Conservatives turning to cultural issues and particularly attacking ‘wokeness’ and multicuturalism, this might have some important insights into how the left can free itself from radical identity politics without succumbing to the reactionary nationalism being promoted by the Nat Cons.
Okay, I’ve got to confess to making another mistake. Earlier today I put up a piece reporting that Starmer had told the leaders of the Labour party that people weren’t interested in woke, and condemned the Tories for being ‘out of touch’. This had been covered in a video put out by That Preston Journalist. I watched it and got the wrong end of the stick. He seemed to me to be saying that Starmer had decided that woke policies weren’t appealing to the public and was ready to ditch them. At the same time I thought that Starmer was also attacking that part of the Conservative party that is woke.
How wrong I was! It seems Starmer isn’t prepared to ditch ‘woke’ at all. He just doesn’t think that voters care enough about it to vote against Labour because of it. Instead they’re more interested and concerned about the NHS and the cost of living. When he said that Sunak and the Tories were out of touch, he meant that they failed to appreciate that these issues took precedence over the woke policies Starmer is promoting and defending and that the British public generally didn’t share their concerns about woke policies. This is how it’s been interpreted by GB News and their presenters.
Before I go further, let’s try and unpack what is meant by the term ‘woke’. Gillyflower, one of the great commenters here, remarked that I should refresh my memory over what it means. As I understand it, it’s Black slang meaning being awake to injustice. Looking at how it’s now being used, it seems to have replaced the old term ‘political correctness’ for extreme and intolerant anti-racist, feminist, anti-homophobic and anti-transphobic views. More narrowly, it’s being used to describe the various Critical Social Justice ideologies derived from the Postmodernist, Critical Theory revision of Marxism which narrowly sees societal issues through the lens of privilege and oppression. These differ from previous forms of anti-racism, feminism and so on in rejecting individualism. In Critical Race Theory, all Whites are privileged because of their skin colour and the fact that some Whites are less privileged than some Blacks is ignored. It isn’t enough to be non-racist, and judge people on their merits and character regardless of race. You must be positively anti-racist and fight against White privilege and for Black uplift through social programmes that demand the granting of opportunities to Blacks and other underprivileged minorities simply because of their colour. For example, in America Black and Mexican students generally do less well at Maths at school than Whites and Asians. So some schools in California are trying to even these results out by giving pre-calculus lessons only to Black and Hispanic students to the exclusion of Whites and Asians.
In the eyes of GB News’ Mike Graham, however, woke means just about every anti-racist, feminist, environmentalist and radical gender view or ideology. Yes, he conceded, people did care about the NHS and the cost of living, but people also cared about: woke teacher telling kids there were 73 genders, environmental protesters gluing themselves to the road, petrol and diesel cars being phased out in favour of electric vehicles, and the cost of power rising due to green energy policies. And so on.
Piers Morgan also did a piece about whether people cared about ‘woke’. This included Reform’s Richard Tice and a woman from the Labour party. Unsurprisingly, Morgan and Tice believed that people did care about ‘woke’. The lady from Labour didn’t. She didn’t like biological men being allowed into women’s private spaces and sports, nor rapists in female prisons, when asked by the former editor of the Mirror. He replied with, ‘Ah, but they’ve prevented you from talking about this’. She replied that they hadn’t, and she’d been talking about it for a year or so. This contrasts with the case of Rosie Duffield, who has been isolated and shunned by Starmer and other senior Labour members for her views. I can’t remember whether the lady believed that people didn’t care about woke policies, or did, but that they were far more concerned about the cost of living and the NHS. I think Morgan had claimed that it was because Labour was pushing these woke policies that it looked like they would not have an absolute majority at the election next year.
My guess is that the Labour lady is probably right. People are directly affected by the cost of living, and wondering how they will afford food, heating and their rent or mortgages. The latter was one of the major issues on the local news tonight in Bristol, which has been revealed as the most expensive city outside London. One woman spoke of how she had been forced to move back in with her parents after the landlord raised the rent by 66 per cent. And they are very much concerned about getting hold of a doctor, thanks to all the wonderful privatisation that Rishi’s so proud of. These are issues that immediately affect everyone. I’m not sure how many people are aware of the debate over transgenderism, let alone so concerned that it affects the way they vote. Some are, and it may become a more important issue in the public consciousness by the time the next election comes round.
But Starmer’s less than exciting performance can also be blamed on other problems apart from the ‘woke’. Like he broke every promise and pledge he made, and has done his level best to purge the left. Corbyn’s policies were genuinely popular, and he enthused and inspired the public in a way Starmer can’t. The turnout at the local elections was low, and my guess is that many of the people Corbyn had appealed to didn’t vote. They had been alienated by a party leadership that was actively hostile to them and which to many people just offers the usual Tory policies, or something not too different from them. Tice, I think, said that Labour’s woke policies wouldn’t appeal to the socially conservative voters of the red wall. He might be right, though if they do become disenchanted with Labour, it’ll be far more to do with the lack of proper, old-style, socialist Labour policies.
This is a video from Lawrence Fox’s Reclaim the Media channel on YouTube, which is part of his Reclaim party. I’m very much aware that by reblogging it I’m tempting the ire of the Labour party for publishing the ideas and content of a rival party. But I think here Lozza and his crew have a point. Looking at it, he doesn’t object to drag as a late night entertainment for adults. What he objects to is very sexualised drag performances being staged in front of children as a vehicle for indoctrinating them with Queer Theory and the gender ideology.
I state again that I am definitely opposed to anyone being stigmatised or persecuted because of their sexuality or gender identity. I’m putting this video up because I do think that there is an attempt to use drag as a vehicle for indoctrinating children, and that the theories about human sexuality and sexual identity are fundamentally wrong and dangerous.
The video traces the history of drag from the days of ancient Greece, the middle ages and the early modern period, when male actors took female roles because of the social taboos against women appearing on stage. He claims that drag as a distinct form of entertainment appeared in the 19th century. The word itself may be a contraction of ‘Dressed As A Girl’. By the late 19th century drag was subversive and political, critiquing social norms about gender. It was originally late night fun for adults, but now there are attempts to put into the classroom. Drag Queen Story Hour is in the vanguard of this campaign.
Queer Theory, which is part of this new movement, has its origins in the postmodernist philosophical movement of the 1960s and 1970s. It begins with Michel Foucault’s 1976 History of Sexuality. Lozza says that Foucault definitely wasn’t a paedophile. This is almost certainly irony, as Foucault used to travel to north Africa for sex with young, pre-teen boys. He also explicitly argued that children can give sexual consent. His book claimed that sexuality was a social construct shaped by culture and history. This was then extended further by Gail Rubin, a lesbian anthropologist in her Thinking Sex. This also argued that sex and gender were the product of cultural norms, which were themselves oppressive and had no basis in nature. She defended every sexual taboo, including ‘boy lovers’.
Rubin was followed by Judith Butler and her book, Gender Trouble, which introduced into the debate the theory of performativity. Gender was not innate, but something people perform. She also challenged the gender binary of male and female. Drag Queen Story Hour differs from other forms of drag in that it is an exercise in gender performativity. This is unlike pantomime dames, who are comic figures exaggerating some female mannerisms while preserving their male gait. Drag queens themselves evolved from gay nightclubs and cabaret to challenge gender norms, but they were adult entertainment.
Drag Queen Story Hour itself began in 2015 in San Francisco, launched by author and activist Michelle Tea. She started it as a way of spreading knowledge of gay culture. Tea was already involved with transgressive culture, touring with a sex workers’ artistic collective and with a Queer feminist poetry collective, Sisterspit, whose anthology included pieces by and about drug addicts and other marginalised, underground groups. Drag Queen Story Hour was launched with Tea’s own group, Radar Productions, and was first staged in San Francisco public library. It was intended to introduce children to gay culture and diversity, equity and inclusion. It was an immediate success, and spread to other cities and across the Atlantic to Britain.
Lozza states that the claim by its defenders that Drag Queen Story Hour is just about teaching children to read in a fun way is dishonest. Here he mentions the recent scandal of the drag king, who performed in schools in the Isle of Man. This individual sparked controversy and a review of the programme by teaching children that there were 72 genders. Amongst themselves, the advocates of Drag Queen Story Hour are quite clear about their intentions to indoctrinate children. He talks here about the paper ‘Queer Pedagogy’, co-authored by the drag queen Little Miss Hot Mess, which appeared in an American journal of education. This stated the goal was to attack racist, capitalist modes of reproduction and the nuclear family.
From this he moves to the matter of expense and how much these events cost. Much of it is funded by the Arts Council. In 2019 the British Library hosted a Drag Queen Story Hour as part of their ‘Live, Love, Liberty’ exhibition. Last year, 2022, New York public library spent $200,000 on such events. The organisers insisted that these performances were safe, with background checks made on the performers and the performances themselves not sexual and suitable for children. This was belied by clips of some of these events showing very sexualised performances. Seven of the drag queens who performed in the Story Hours have been charged with child sex offences. Sharon Le Grand, another drag queen, also said in 2022 ‘We need to teach our children to open their hearts. We need to teach our children to open their minds. We need to teach our children to open their legs.’ Drag kings, a recent addition to the show, have also exposed their chests during the performances to show their mastectomy scars, blurring the line between drag and strip shows. He also talks about the problem of the adult nature of the drag acts away from children. Many of them have web pages with very adult jokes and content, which children can easily find. As an example, he gives a rather coarse joke from Ruby Violet’s description of herself, who performed in front of children aged 3-11 in an event staged by Hertfordshire council.
He concludes by discussing the way opposition to Drag Queen Story Hour has been misrepresented and the attempts to outlaw protests against it. The Beeb declared that opponents of drag queens were motivated by conspiracy theories and were members of the far right. In Canada a law has been passed banning protests within a certain limit of drag queen performances, punishable by a fine of $25,000. The video concludes with him mentioning that there are a number of organisations fighting the gender ideology and Drag Queen Story Hour, whose details he’ll put in the blurb about the video, and a plug for another YouTube series from Reclaim, Bad Education.
While I feel that the video is broadly accurate, obviously that doesn’t mean that each and every drag queen involved in story hour is ideologically motivated or a danger to children. Clive Simpson and Dennis Kavanagh have said in their YouTube videos, The Queens’ Speech, that many drag queens are just gay men trying to make a buck, and so don’t want a blanket ban on such shows. The EDIjester has also drawn a distinction between British and American drag. In his view, British drag, unlike its American counterpart, came out of the music hall tradition and wasn’t sexual. Again, I remember when British TV comedy frequently included drag. One of the major stars of 70s week day TV was Danny La Rue, while comedians and comic actors like the Two Ronnies, Dick Emery and Les Dawson also performed in drag. Also back in the 70s and 80s were Hinge and Bracket, which mixed musical comedy with drag. Again, this was mainstream entertainment on TV and radio and considered entirely innocuous. There have also been Paul O’Grady’s Lily Savage and Barry Humphries with Dame Edna Everege.
And yes, some of the opponents of Drag Queen Story Hour are far right conspiracy theorists. You can see that with Correct, Not Political, who hold weird conspiracy theories about the World Economic Forum, staged counter-protests against left wing demonstrations and openly admire Mosley. Their opposition to Drag Queen Story Hour comes from a deeper hostility to homosexuality and its promotion.
But I think critics of Drag Queen Story Hour and Queer Theory, like James Lindsay, are absolutely correct about the attempts to use drag as a vehicle for explicit political indoctrination and very harmful ideas about gender. It’s this aspect of it that needs to fought and combated.
A few days ago I found a video posted on YouTube by Laurence Fox’s Reclaim the Media. This was a short piece of part of a debate he’d had about racism with Ash Sarkar, one of the women of the left-wing internet news and comment channel, Novara Media. This was about whether Whites could experience racism. Sarkar denied that they could, because they enjoyed White privilege. She maintained this stance even when Fox raised the issue of White working class boys, who perform worse academically than Blacks and other ethnic minorities and girls. I’m not surprised Sarkar continued to maintain this view. Novara have posted a couple of videos denying that White working class boys are underprivileged compared to other ethnic groups, and even that the White working class constitutes an ethnic group at all. Sarkar has said very proudly that she’s a communist, particularly when she was exasperated by the attitude of one of the TV hosts interviewing her. But it’s not entirely the Communism of classical Marxism, which saw class as the motor of history and oppression. It’s partly the postmodernist revision of Marxism of Critical Race Theory. This replaces class with race, declaring that Whiteness is a bourgeois quality that ensures that Whites enjoy a privileged position denied to people of colour. This attitude comes partly from the intersectional Marxism of Herbert Marcuse, a member of the Frankfurt School. Frustrated by the failure of the American working class to rise up against capitalist, Marcuse instead urged radicals to look to the ‘people of the ghetto’, groups traditionally confined to the margins of American society. This included Blacks, gays and feminists. CRT denies that Whites can experience racism through a highly contrived redefinition of the term. In their view, racism = prejudice + power. In bourgeois western society, Whites have a power denied to Blacks. Therefore they cannot suffer racism. This is profoundly wrong and in itself deeply racist. It also has highly dangerous implications that may encourage, or at least demand that a blind eye be turned to real racist violence against Whites.
The term ‘privilege’ suggests aristocratic ease, of the type enjoyed by David Cameron. Before he became prime minister, this Eton-educated aristo certainly didn’t have to worry about getting a job. He was actually approached by the Crown to work for it. But the vast majority of White Brits don’t have this privilege, and especially not those at the very bottom of society. One of my old schools had an annex for its first year pupils in a run-down area of Bristol. This was in a grimy back street called Boot Lane, at one end of which was a public toilet frequented by tramps. These were men who enjoyed absolutely no social advantages at all, and their life expectancy was no doubt extremely limited. The life-expectancy of the homeless, I’ve heard, is about three years. Sarkar, by contrast, is middle class and university educated, as is her fellow presenter Dalia Gabreal. Gabreal, who also promotes the nonsense of White privilege, is the co-editor of an anthology of postcolonialist texts. They enjoy a privilege denied to the White underclass, but it’s a privilege that they, imprisoned by Critical Race Theory, cannot acknowledge.
The idea of White privilege also glosses over and ignores the fact that previous generations of working class Whites could be victims of grinding poverty until very recently. Examples of this can be found on YouTube in a series of videos about poverty in Britain in the 1970s. Whether Sarkar, Gebreal and the others of Novara realise it or not, the idea White privilege plays down this poverty, which could be extreme with the bland attitude that however tough it could be for Whites, it’s worse for Blacks. On average, this is true, but not always. While Novara has shown a deep concern for working class poverty and exploitation, the constraints of Critical Race and Postcolonial Theory means that it is unable to recognise or accept the fact of anti-White racism nor that Whites do not uniformly enjoy privilege.
While it comes from the Marxist left, Critical Race Theory’s view that whiteness is intrinsically oppressive is very much of the same type of ideological racism as fascism. This divides society into the race or nation and its oppressors. In the case of the Italian fascists, the true nation was that of Italy and its people. In Nazism it was Germany, and the enemies were the Jews. This binary opposition Noel O’Sullivan, a Conservative historian of fascism, traces back to the new style of political activism that began with the French Revolution. This divided France into the authentic nation of the ‘tiers etat’, the third estate – the common French people, and their oppressors, the aristocracy and clergy. He quotes one French revolutionary who made this very plain, as well as his intention to shoot the country’s noble oppressors. O’Sullivan makes the point that this opposition can be applied to other groups, as demonstrated in the magazine of a radical feminist group, Medusa. This declared that only women were human, and men were an inferior species. Critical Race Theory revises this racism so that the authentic, oppressed nation are Blacks and other people of colour, while the racial oppressors are White.
This attitude is extremely dangerous. The critics of Critical Race Theory and other postmodernist ‘isms’, Peter Boghossian, James Lindsey and Helen Pluckrose, submitted a number of spoof papers making extreme claims to various postmodernist academic journals. One of these incorporated quotes from Mein Kampf, but with ‘Whiteness’ substituted for Jews. This was accepted. There have been a series of controversies over the other side of the Pond in which Black academics have announced on TV programmes or internet meetings that they want Whites to become extinct. And there has been real racial violence against Whites. Thomas Sowell describes a few in his book, Race and Culture, noting that the mainstream media either does not cover them, or if it does, the report is framed so as to exonerate the attackers. They acted as they did as a result of the oppression of White America. Racial violence against Whites isn’t confined to America. Over twenty years ago the number of racist murders of Whites was nearly equal to that of ethnic minorities, and the level of racist abuse and attacks against Whites exceeded those against other demographics. This was covered by the mainstream media until the BNP sought to exploit it. But many Black and ethnic minority activists do not want racism against Whites recognised. At a conference of Black and ethnic minority activists a few years ago, three of them criticised the government for including anti-White racism in official statistics. In their view, only racial abuse and violence against ethnic minorities deserved to be counted. Critical Race Theory’s contrived redefinition of racism does the same: it is intended to deny that Blacks can be racist.
Critical Race Theory is also dangerously defective in its Eurocentricismt It assumes that only White Europeans and their descendants in America and the New World can be racist. It ignores the fact that other cultures have also traditions of racial hierarchies and ingrained prejudice. For example, Muslim Arabs also developed ideas of the inferiority of Black Africans on the one hand and White Europeans on the other. India and China also have their own ideas of racial superiority and inferiority. Western Blacks have also developed a distinct racist ideology in Afrocentrism. There is a series of Afrocentric works promoting the idea of White inferiority in vicious, splenetic terms. At the same time, Black Muslim sects like the Nation of Islam and Ansaaru Allah also hold that Whites are racially inferior oppressors, who are due to be annihilated by God at the coming apocalypse. I’ve also come across British Muslim texts that are explicitly colonialist. One of these argued that just as the British allowed other peoples to enter their colonies and keep their laws and customs as a way of populating their territories in North America, so Muslims should be allowed to form autonomous communities in America and Europe. These forms of Black and extra-European racism are largely unknown to most western people, and there is real opposition to discussing them. The Labour politician, Diane Abbott, has said several times that discussing the different forms of racism amongst ethnic minorities would allow ‘them’ to ‘divide and rule’. But these tensions between different ethnic groups in Britain outside the Black/White dichotomy exist and have led to riots. A few months ago, there was rioting in the north of England between Muslims and Hindus. The acceptance of the idea that only Whites can be racist among liberal Whites has also been assisted by the idea of the Noble Savage. This goes back to the 17th century, and views primitive, non-European societies as somehow nobler and more virtuous than western civilisation. It is also a product of the tradition of European and indigenous opposition to imperialism. This concentrates on the horrors of western imperialism but similarly ignores those of other imperialist regimes, such as the Ottoman Empire. The refusal to accept that other peoples are also capable of terrible racism, and the idea that only White racism is to be tackled, led to the police and authorities turning a blind eye for twenty years to the Pakistani grooming gangs.
I find the denial of anti-White racism, and the bitter racism of some Black activists deeply worrying. Because Critical Race Theory declares that all Whites enjoy such privilege and that the level of racism in society remains constant, it comes very close to the old accusation that all Whites are racist. While I doubt very much that it’s supporters would see it as such, it is very close to racial essentialism of the type that causes anti-Semites as intrinsically hostile to Whites. I am very much afraid that this will encourage anti-White attacks and pogroms, but there will be no action taken or condemnation of these because of the racial attitudes promoted by CRT. Sarkar, Gebreal and the rest of Novara doubtless believe that they are sincerely anti-racist and they probably are so in their personal relationship with Whites. But they, along with numberless others of the same views, hold a twisted redefinition of racism that legitimises racism and violence against Whites, while denying that this is possible at all.
EDIjester is another gender critical gay YouTuber. He produces video specifically tearing into the gender ideology and how it is corrupting medicine, education and legal practice. In the video below, he turns his scathing attention on the RHSE curriculum for Welsh schools introduced by the devolved Welsh government. It is the subject of a damning report compiled by a group of concerned parents and m’learned friends, whose conclusions the jester summarises.
The report found that the curriculum, which corresponds to the personal and social development curriculum being taught in English schools, is based Posthumanism and Queer Theory, and is aimed at primary school children as young as three. It is part of a general project of queering and is based on the vile theories and research of John Money, a monster who experiment on children, and that of the French postmodernist philosopher and paedophile Michel Foucault. This raises the important issues of belief and safeguarding. The new curriculum views children as sexual beings from birth and safeguarding and child protection as inhibiting rather than protecting their proper growth. It promotes a sex positive attitude, including criminal sexual activity for and among children. One particular point of concern is that the child’s sense of self is referred to as ‘gender’ rather than personality. Its ideological basis in Queer Theory is prioritised over real human experience and characteristics. It erases the reality of biological sex and diverges from established definitions of sex and sexual orientation and this in turn erases the existence of gay men and lesbians. Moral considerations are viewed as irrelevant to this sex positivity and parents cannot opt out. It is also not based on factual evidence and stakeholders, such as the educators who actually teach children – nursery nurses, teachers, teaching auxiliaries and so on – were not consulted. There is also the implied assumption that any opposition to this curriculum comes from the New Right. The jester states that the people responsible for curriculum are so far left that to them everyone is the New Right. The curriculum also views legitimate safeguarding concerns as dismissible. It also promotes the mental alienation of parents from their child’s education, disregard for family life, of which the jester notes there are all types. It sidelines protected beliefs such as religion in favour of its own quasi-theological ideas.
The jester is absolutely horrified by this, and urges people to reblog and retweet the video, write to their MPs, and consult the resources on the report and the curriculum it critiques to which he links on the YouTube page with this video.
This all sounds very alarmist and exaggerated, but I have absolutely no doubt he’s fundamentally correct. Unfortunately, the gender ideology is very strongly influenced by the two academics the video names as well as others, who wanted to erase the boundaries between adults and children. I admire the Welsh government, but here the educational curriculum they are promoting is absolutely horrific.
He is also worried by a report by the NHS which removes sex as a protected characteristic in favour of gender, and so allows the treatment of women patients, for example, by trans-identified men. This carries real dangers, and not just in the NHS. One woman who was due to have colorectal surgery at a private hospital was refused treatment because she made it clear she didn’t want trans-identified men treating her. This created a scandal, and the hospital company has found her an alternative in one of its other hospitals.
This is another excursion into the issue of the trans ideology and specifically that of Drag Queen Story Hour. There have been many protests against it both here and in America. This has largely been done by right-wingers deeply concerned that the drag queens reading the stories are paedophiles seeking to groom children. Unfortunately, in some cases that seems to be very plausible, as when young children have been taken to drag performances in bars and encouraged to dance with the performers or in drag themselves, with the gay clientele throwing money at them. There is, however, an ideological angle to Drag Queen Story Hour that is significant, but rarely discussed. According to mathematician and staunch critic of postmodernism, James Lindsey, at least some of the drag queens involved in this are supporters of Queer Theory, a postmodern doctrine that seeks to exploit and promote people’s unhappiness with their gender identity or sexuality to create a mentally unstable cadre ready for Marxist revolution. It has absolutely nothing to do with, and indeed is deeply hostile to, the idea of creating a more tolerant society towards gay people, and gay youngsters comfortable with their sexuality/sexual identity and respected, functional members of society. This would be supporting a bourgeois order that the people who promote Queer Theory are pledged to destroy.
EDIJester is another gay critic of the trans ideology. He runs a warrior teachers programme training people from all walks of life in how recognise and combat the trans ideology. I’m not in agreement with all his pronouncements, as he has told people to vote Conservative in a recent video. This is presumably due to Keir Starmer and Labour defending the trans movement, refusing to give the LGB Alliance, a group of gay men and women to seek to promote gay rights without the inclusion of trans people, a place at the Labour party conference and the party’s stated intention of banning all conversion therapies. It is feared that this will mean that only treatments for trans people that affirm their condition will be legal, even if this is inappropriate and harmful. I profoundly disagree with Labour’s policy on the trans issue but feel that at the moment Labour is the best option for defending working people and the NHS from privatisation, welfare cuts, poverty and starvation. More Conservative government will be utterly disastrous for these issues.
I’m putting this video, ‘Let’s Talk about Drag and Queer Performativity – Drag Part One’ up here because it tackles Drag Queen Story Hour from a fresh perspective. This differentiates sharply between traditional drag and Drag Queen Story Hour. He begins by drawing a sharp distinction between British and American drag, as in RuPaul’s Drag Race. British drag was mainstream and not completely gay – straight men often did it, like the Bernard Breslaw in one of the Carry On films and the late, great Les Dawson. There was also the camp humour from gay men, who were forced into show business because of society’s intolerance. This created Kenneth Williams and the Polari language in Round the Horne, Larry Grayson and John Inman, for example. He states that there were no ideological motives behind traditional drag – all they wanted to do was to separate you from as much of your money as possible by the time you staggered out drunk. They also raise money for charity. He knows a number of drag performers himself, having carried one of them back to the performer’s own house at the end of an evening of alcoholic and chemical refreshment. He mentions approvingly a traditional drag act oop north somewhere, Funny Girls. He states that American drag has a heterosexual bias, in that in Mrs Doubtfire the hero cross-dresses so he can see his wife and children.
Drag Queen Story Hour is different. And it isn’t about paedophiles preying on young children either. It’s about promoting Queer Theory, often mixed with Critical Race Theory by reading children’s books written from these standpoints. Like retellings of the Three Little Pigs where the pigs are black, brown and pink for gay, and the wolf is white. It’s this highly ideological, genuinely subversive literature he warns people about, not drag or drag queens themselves.
It’s an excellent perspective which draws a needed distinction between drag as a traditional form of entertainment, which boasted great and much-loved performers as Danny La Rue, the Two Ronnies, Lily Savage, and Les Dawson, and its contemporary abuse as a form of ideological propaganda.
Sorry I haven’t been posting much over the last few days. I had a hospital appointment Thursday and although it wasn’t anything serious, I haven’t felt much like posting anything online afterwards. But I felt I had to post about this. I was watching one of the videos from the New Culture Forum yesterday. It’s the cultural offshoot of the Institute of Economic Affairs and has been set up to defend traditional British culture from left-wing ideas and ‘wokeness’. In this particular video, they were discussing various topics that had arisen over the past week. One of these was a video produced by biracial Tory Calvin Robinson about how British children’s education is being ruined by left-wing teachers pushing Critical Race Theory and so on. Now I do agree with them about Critical Race Theory. I think it’s just a form of militant anti-White racism based on a mixture of Marxist legal theory and postmodernism. It considers that all Black people are automatically oppressed because of their colour, while White people are privileged and should be made to feel ashamed and humiliated because of this. It’s divisive and I see absolutely no value in it whatsoever. But Critical Race Theory is only one of their targets. The broader target is the teaching profession itself, which they decided is far too left-wing and needs to be comprehensively attacked.
My mother was a primary school teacher, and I did my first degree at a teacher training college, which has since become one of the new universities. I realise that this is nearly forty years ago, and I honestly don’t know how much has changed or not. I did an MA in history in 2004 and then a Ph.D. in archaeology at Bristol university, graduating ten years ago. My experience of university is therefore dated and limited. But this contradicts some of the assertions that the New Culture Forum were making. They claimed that 85 per cent plus of teachers were left leaning. Perhaps they are. And so, the arch-Tories claimed, they wished to indoctrinate children with woke doctrines like CRT, Postcolonial Theory and so on. They also asserted that they were generally indoctrinating people with the left-wing attitudes that only people on the left support the NHS and are caring.
Now my experience is that teachers, whether left or right, go into the profession for the simple reason that they want to stand up before a class and teach. And what they want to teach is the traditional academic subjects – the three ‘Rs’, history, science, geography or whatever. They don’t want to push Critical Race Theory, Postcolonial Theory or Queer Theory. Issues of race, gender, sexuality, feminism and so on used be part of what was called ‘the hidden curriculum’, the set of values that the educational system sought to impart to its pupils. From what I can see, the overt teaching of issues like anti-racism was imposed from outside the school by the local education authority and involved outside groups. After the 1981/2 riots, for example, the school at which my mother taught was visited by such a specialist group to teach the children to be anti-racist. As far as I can make out, this came from above, from the council or LEA and that neither the school nor its headmaster had anything to do with it. Today there are concerns about schoolchildren in Brighton being taught Critical Race Theory, and one man has taken his child out of the local school there and was protesting against it. But the leader of Brighton council is a member of the Green party, and this seems to be part of Green party policy down there. The New Culture Forum, as could be expected from a group of high Tories, declared that it was the fault of the unions. Well, the National Union of Teachers, from what I can remember, is very hot on anti-racism and so on, but there were a variety of different teaching unions, and I don’t think they were all the same.
As for universities, some lecturers are admittedly very left-wing. Others are, or used to be, Tory. And others keep their political and religious opinions out of the classroom. With some of the ‘woke’ courses that are being made mandatory at certain universities, such as anti-racism awareness for freshers, the impression I get is that they are being imposed by the administration. This seems to be largely a response to criticism from the Black community. Blacks tend to get lower grades than Whites, and so universities have been under pressure since the 1980s to implement affirmative action programmes to admit more Black students by lowering the grades required. And it’s also being done in response to complaints that Black and Asian staff and students also suffer from racial abuse and so on. This aspect does indeed come from the Black sections of the unions, as reported by the Guardian.
The impression that teachers have been indoctrinating vulnerable little minds with Communism has been around since the days of Thatcher, when her government started a moral panic about Peace Studies. I think this latest round of political suspicion and witch hunting is partly a result of concerns across the Atlantic about the promotion of Critical Race Theory, Black Lives Matter and Queer Theory in schools. There have been a number of videos put up on right-wing YouTube channels commenting on TikTok videos by gay/trans teachers informing the world about their sexuality and how they’re trying to teach their class about it, as well as news stories and controversies about Drag Queen Story Hour. But while this goes on, I’m really not sure how widespread it is. I’ve watched videos that have claimed it’s near uniform because of the influence of these doctrines and left-wing staff on the American teacher training courses. But I’m not American, and my contact with the American education system has been limited to American exchange and other students at the universities and colleges I attended.
I am also unsure how far the local authorities can be blamed for the schools in their area teaching left-wing doctrines like Critical Race Theory. I was at school just before the National Curriculum came in, when schools had far greater freedom to teach what and how they chose. This freedom has been limited by the National Curriculum. Also, schools have been part-privatised by being transformed into academies. This system was intended to take them out of local authority control. But if schools are teaching subjects like CRT and Queer Theory, it has to be due to the wishes of the academy chain itself. These are private companies, which makes it difficult for Tories like the New Culture Forum to blame the state or left-wing local authorities. It’s no doubt why they’re blaming the teaching unions instead.
So, what are their solutions to all this? They discussed home schooling but rejected that on the grounds that working class parents have neither the time nor the books required to do it. They concluded that if the education system could be rescued at all, there had to be a battle with the unions ‘like the miners’ strike’.
This is very ominous.
I’m not in favour of anyone imposing their own personal political opinions schools. But I’d say that the most pressing issues in education aren’t about Critical Race Theory and so on. They’re the constant issues of underfunding and poor pay for teaching staff, lack of resources and teaching materials and inability to retain staff. There are concerns that children’s, and particularly boy’s personal development and educational performance is being harmed by the lack of male teachers. But one solution to that would be to raise salaries to a level where they would be attractive to men, where they felt that it was worth their while economically to go into teaching rather than a better paid profession. Or launch a campaign that would otherwise attract more men in the same way that other, traditionally masculine professions, are trying to attract women. As for universities, the main issue there in my opinion is the extremely high tuition fees. As far as I can see, the money from these isn’t going to teaching staff, who can be quite poorly paid. One of my friends was an assistant lecturer for a time in the ’90s. It all seems to be going on the bloated salaries of university chancellors and administrators. These seem to me to be the real issues, though I’m not discounting the harm done by the introduction of specifically woke courses. And whatever the New Culture Forum may say, no, the Tories do not support the NHS.
Their talk of attacking the teaching unions is frightening, because it means another Tory assault on state education generally, at a time when education is in crisis because of Tory privatisation policies.
Get the Tories out, renationalise schools and get rid of tuition fees!
This is a bit of trip into the world of postmodernism. Duneinfo is a YouTube site about Science Fiction book Dune and its film, graphic novel and other adaptations. A few days ago, they put up this piccie on their community page of a non-existent album of music by Gurney Halleck. Halleck is a character in Dune, a warrior troubadour, whose instrument is the ballaset, a type of futuristic lute. In David Lynch’s 1985 film, he was played Patrick Stewart and the ballaset used in the film was based on the stick, a new musical instrument developed from the electric guitar. The fake record sleeve, showing Stewart as Halleck was created by the artist John Bergin. It looks like a real vinyl record sleeve of the type that was knocking around back then in the days when K-Tel were advertising their records on TV.
It also reminds me more than a little of some the literary games played by Polish SF master Stanislaw Lem. Lem was very much an eastern European intellectual. He wrote some excellent science fiction but also sneered at the genre. He was very much into experimental literature, particularly that of the South American magic realist writer Borges, as well as the SF writer Philip K. Dick. Lem produced a several books consisting of reviews and blurbs for books that didn’t exist. One of these books was called A Perfect Vacuum, which I think is a literary jest, a way of saying that it doesn’t exist, because the books it reviews don’t. This fake record cover looks like the musical and pictorial equivalent.
DuneInfo captioned this: ‘Another great imagined (but sadly fake) #Dune item from John Bergin – “The Ballads of Gurney Halleck” – almost all copies of which were destroyed due to the mistaken credit of “The Sting”! 🤣 ‘ Which is a joke about Sting appearing in the movie as one of the villains, Feyd Rautha.
Going through YouTube this past week I found a couple of videos tearing into Scientific American for publishing a piece of pseudo-science to support the trans ideology. Scientific American has been going for over a century now, and has been one of the major magazines popularising science and explaining scientific discoveries and speculation to the mass of ordinary folks. I used to read it, on and off, along with New Scientist until I went off both c. 2007. That was when Dawkins wretched book, The God Delusion was published, and the New Atheists appeared to try and convince the public that religion was incompatible and fundamentally opposed to science. Real historians of science rejected it long ago, although they recognise that there have been periods of tension. The view that science and religion are opposed comes from the works of three men, one an academic at Harvard in the late 19th century. Against them are all the scientific discoveries made by people of faith down the centuries. For Christianity, I suggest James Hannam’s excellent book on medieval science, God’s Philosophers. As for mathematics, I’ve got a collection of early mathematical texts which I picked up from a secondhand bookshop. These texts go from the ancient Egyptians through Babylonia, ancient Greece, Rome, Judaism, China, Japan and India, as well as some of the great Muslim mathematicians. Many of them begin with a dedication by their authors to their God or gods. Unfortunately, the editors at New Scientist and Scientific American don’t share this view, and the editorial line became very atheist. So I simply stopped reading them. Unfortunately Scientific American’s scepticism hasn’t prevented it from publishing what I believe can only be described as pseudo-science in the name of promoting trans rights.
Brett Weinstein and his wife, Heather, biologists who oppose the postmodern pseudery now being promoted throughout academia and society, put up a video in which they tear to pieces an article published by the magazine which declared that western civilisation only believed in a single sex, the male, until about 1880. I think Matt Walsh has also made a video about it. It’s clearly nonsense, as the Weinstein’s show simply by stating the number of times men and women both appear in the Bible as evidence that people that long ago knew full well about the gender binary. The Weinsteins also point out that something can exist in nature long before it’s recognised by science. For example, the coatimundi was long considered to be two different species. There were the coatis, who were solitary animals, and the mundis, who were social and surrounded by their infants. Then biologists came to realise that the two species were actually just the two sexes of the same creature. The solitary animals were the males, while the social creatures with infants were the females. Brett Weinstein also points out that at one time people thought that the two sexes of the elephant seal were different species, simply because they looked so different from each other.
I think I know where the nonsense that western science didn’t recognise the gender binary until the late 19th century comes from. Postmodernism rejects empiricism and scientific examination and research in favour of discourse, examining what others have said about a particular issue. In the case of Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory, Postcolonial Theory and so on, this is done through the ideological lens of Marcel Foucault, in which ideology and discourse are functions of power relationships. For Queer Theorists, or at least those supporting trans rights, the scientific view that there are two biological sexes is a western, patriarchal construct intended to exclude trans people and so support White, heterosexual male dominance.
It seems to me, and I confess that I haven’t read the article, that the author has done this by basing their view on Aristotle. Aristotle, or at least the ancient Greeks, believed that the female body was merely an imperfect form of the male. This has rightly and understandably annoyed feminists ever since. But Aristotle and the other philosophers never denied that their were two sexes, male and female. And I am absolutely sure that the Renaissance anatomist, Andrea Fallopi, who discovered the fallopian tubes and the clitoris, and who named the vagina, knew what a woman was and that women and men were physiologically different.
I think the purpose behind the article has been to provide a scientific justification for transpeople being true members of the sex with which they identify or have transitioned. If the sexes are not distinct, then someone who believes themselves to be a member of the opposite sex, contrary to their biology, can still be seen scientifically as a member of the opposite sex.
Now I don’t deny that there are people, who believe that they are in the wrong body, and wish to conform as far as possible to the opposite sex. I also believe that such people deserve appropriate medical care and should have the same respect and freedom from abuse and discrimination as everyone else. But the sexes are still distinct biologically, and the denial that this is so is ideology, not science.
As for the Postmodernists denying the historical existence of something simply because it wasn’t recognised historically, a prime example of such thinking is in the Sokal and Bricmont book, Intellectual Impostures. This is a case in 1974 or -5 when French Egyptologists and doctors unwrapped the mummy of an Egyptian pharaoh. Examining his remains, they concluded that the man had died from tuberculosis. The Postmodernists, however, disagreed, because no such disease was known to the ancient Egyptians. Of course the fact that a disease wasn’t recognise, doesn’t not mean it didn’t exist. It only means that the people of the time didn’t know what it was.
I find it worrying that this article claiming that biological sex differences are only a recent invention has been published. There have been too many occasions in the past when ideology has been allowed to corrupt science. Examples include the racial, ‘Aryan’ science of the Nazis, and Lysenkoism in the USSR, based on the ideas of Stalin’s favourite scientist, Lysenko. Other examples of bad science include lobotomy operations to treat mental illness and monkey glands to rejuvenate men. This last involved implanting slices of monkey testicles into those of human men in order to make them become younger and more virile. In fact it resulted in the men taking this treatment developing syphilis, as the disease is endemic in the type of monkey from whom they took the bits of implanted gonad.
I am afraid that articles like this, and the pseudoscience they promote, will cause great harm, albeit with the best of intentions. There are at the moment a number of detransitioners suing the doctors who treated them and who recommended transition. They believe that they were deceived by them. I’ve no doubt that for some people suffering from the condition, surgical intervention may well be appropriate and necessary. But this must be proper physical and psychological tests.
The publication of such ideologically based pseudoscience threaten the proper treatment of those who suffer from the very condition such articles aim to help. And so they must be strenuously rejected.
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