JP on Whether Gays Are Abandoning Pride

Yesterday I put up a piece wondering if gay Americans and Brits were abandoning Pride and some of the mainstream gay organisations. This followed a video on YouTube of the operations manager of the group Gays Against Groomers angrily tearing apart the gay flag. Gays Against Groomers was set up to combat the gender ideology being taught to children, which they feel is a form of indoctrination and sexual predation. Instead of the Pride flag, the man pointed to the American flag as the banner which represented gays and all Americans.

Barry Wall, the EDIJester, and Clive Simpson and Dennis Kavanagh of the Queens’ Speech podcast, are gender critical gay YouTubers. They are extremely critical of the mainstream organisations for their focus on trans rights to the exclusion of ordinary gay men and women. They also feel that the trans ideology has become a new form of eugenics and gay conversion therapy by encouraging gender nonconforming young people, who in most cases would pass through their dysphoria to grow up to be ordinary gays, to transition, rather than accept their natal sexual identity. And many gays are also saying that they aren’t going to Pride marches because of the overt displays of kink and fetish.

JP, one of the great commenters on this blog, posted his perspective on this issue from across the Pond. He writes

‘Well yea, I haven’t been to a Pride parade in … over a decade. The weekend of events were drunk Allies and naked people walking streets. I imbibe and defend adult’s choosing to go to nude beaches and the like, but when those happen in public … where children are brought by their parents these parades?! Mardi Gras in New Orleans was more tame than Pride in Chicago, and Mardi Gras isn’t tauted as being a posterchild of family-friendly events. Pride events weren’t something to be proud about if the intention is to support family-friendly storytime.

Don’t be too surprised by LGBs in America not all supporting a liberal agenda. So-called Log Cabin gays have been politically active conservatives for decades. It was the Log Cabins who challenged President Clinton in court over his Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy for the US military. The irony with Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is that “liberals” went along with an anti-liberal policy. It’s another example of how liberal parties do not defend democratic freedoms. It’s good to hear that some LGBs are aware and don’t just fall in-line stereotyped gender and sexuality politics.

The problem for straights in these debates is not seeing similar politicing, like supporting so-called “family values”. Jim Crow laws defended the “family values” of banning interracial marriages in the US. Hopefully today’s straights would not fall in-line with mid-20th century politics about that.’

There’s a gay American writer and blogger, whose name escapes me at the moment, who has stated that as a demographic group, gays are largely Conservative, believe very much in fiscal responsibility and have a strong sense of loyalty to the companies that employ them. He called this ‘the Smithers Syndrome’, after Mr Burns’ intensely loyal secretary from The Simpsons. This is very different from the image of the gay milieu given by radical gay groups, such as the mock order of nuns, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, who were at the centre of controversy a day or so ago when they were disinvited from appearing with the Dodgers’ sports team.

Related to this, the American chain store Target has been forced to scale down its display of trans clothing. Part of the scandal there is that the clothes were designed by a Satanist, and included messages like ‘Satan Loves You’ and ‘Satan Loves Your Pronouns’. The stores were ordered to take this merchandise to a room a third of the planned display in size. They were afraid the controversial clothing would result in them being on the receiving end of the same kind of boycott that has knocked billions of sales off Bud Light after the brewery made the mistake of choosing transwoman Dylan Mulvaney to promote it.

The Satanism here seems to come from the Church of Satan and the Satanic Temple, neither of which believe in Satan as a real, personal force of supernatural evil. Instead they identify Satan with the promotion of the self and its desires, which they view as liberating. The Satanic Temple has been around for years performing stunts intended to infuriate Conservative Christians. After the community in one American town put up a stone inscribed with the 10 Commandments in front of their courthouse to symbolise justice, they put up a statue of Baphomet. When another American town put up a crib to celebrate Christmas, they put up one with a baby Satan. They come across as a radical atheist/secularist group determined to attack the Christian right and the public promotion of Christianity. I also wonder if the clothing’s Satanism was also partly inspired by the rapper Lil Nas. Nas is gay, and is another pop star who has cultivated a Satanic image. One of his videos has him twerking in front of Lucifer in hell. I did wonder if Target had launched the clothing hoping capture the market offered by young, edgy LGBTQ+ peeps who listen to him and similar pop artists. If so, all they’ve succeeded in doing, it seems to me, is provoke a reaction against the store, especially as it came after the controversy that erupted a few days earlier when it was revealed that several of the speakers at a Satanist convention were trans rights activists. I can understand some of this desire to insult and provoke. It’s a reaction to the splenetic homophobia in sections of the Christian right, though to be fair, the Republican party as a whole seems to have become quite pro-gay and now accept gay marriage.

As for Bill Clinton and his sort-of legalisation of homosexuality in the US armed forces, this was intensely controversial for the Christian right when it was passed. I can remember reading a passage in the book Mind Siege, which is all about the way left-wing ideas are taking over America. This accused Clinton of ‘sodomizing the American military’. This boggled my mind! What! All of them! Where did he get the energy? And what do Hillary and Monica Lewinsky have to say about it? Of course, they then explain that they mean it metaphorically, not literally. It is interesting hearing another perspective on this issue, and I hadn’t known he was challenged about it by the Log Cabin Republicans.

As for the family and family values, I very much believe that the traditional family needs strengthening. The statistics for Britain, like America, show that children from fatherless homes generally perform less well at school, progress as well economically or professionally and are more likely to become criminals, do drugs and engage in promiscuous sex. Of course, this is a general view – there are also any number of single mothers, who have done an excellent job of raising their kids. But I believe that it is possible to do this without promoting homophobia or prejudice or discrimination against gays. I recall that something similar was done a few years ago to a family values group in Yorkshire. This was reformed so that it genuinely worked to strengthen family after they’d kicked out the old guard, who had ‘some funny ideas’ and seemed to have used it as a tool for attacking gay rights.

The EDIJester in one of his videos also sharply criticised one of the trans rights activists, who appears on TickTock. This individual told his audience of young people, that if their families didn’t accept their gender identity, they should cancel them and having nothing more to do with them. The Jester was furious because young gays have been hurt by their parents disowning them, and considered this grossly irresponsible. There were gay organisations in Bristol that worked to help young gays left homeless after being thrown out by their parents. And some of the best stories from gay YouTubers have been about how young gay people were able to keep the love and support of their parents after coming out, or had succeeding in reconciling themselves and their families. Obviously, there should be more of this than victimisation and prejudice.

As for the stifling of civil liberties and freedom of speech, I see this as coming from both the left and the right. In Britain the Conservatives are trying to pass laws severely limiting the freedom to protest and for workers to strike. At the same time, the hate speech laws have been expanded so that they’re severely limiting what may be said in public. Today’s news has included coverage of the case of Kathleen Stock, a lesbian and a gender critical feminist academic. She lost her place at one university due to student protests that branded her transphobic, and there were similar protests when she spoke at the Oxford Union. As a result, Oxford Student Union has cut ties with the Oxford Union. And other academics and ordinary women with similar views have also suffered similar protests and harassment. James Lindsay, who is one of a group of academics alongside Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose, who are particularly active fighting woke ideology, has said that this intolerance is no accident. It comes from the ‘repressive tolerance’ advocated by the ’60s radical philosopher Herbert Marcuse. Roughly translated, it means that freedom of speech should only be extended to those on the radical left, while their critics should be silenced. Lindsay describes himself as a liberal, by which he appears to mean someone who stands up for their traditional liberal values of freedom of speech, individualism and Enlightenment rationality. He is, however, vehemently anti-Communist, though possibly not without reason. Helen Pluckrose also describes herself as a liberal and someone who believes in those values, but also has socialist beliefs. And the other day looking through the internet I found a book by a left-wing author on how the Left can fight woke.

It therefore seems to me that countering the intolerant, extremist ideologies that have been called ‘woke’ – Queer Theory, Critical Race Theory, Postcolonial Theory and so on and the attempts of their supporters to silence reasoned criticism and debate isn’t either a left-wing or right-wing issue. It’s one that concerns people on both sides of the political spectrum, who are concerned about preserving Enlightenment values of free debate, rationality and the individual.

Jacob Rees-Mogg Admits Voter ID Laws Were Gerrymandering

How stupid and arrogant is Rees-Mogg? I’ve put up several messages I’ve received from Open Britain and other internet campaigning organisations giving their assessment of the Voter ID laws. Not surprisingly, they’ve been wholly negative because of the way severely normal Brits were turned away from polling stations because they either didn’t have ID, or didn’t have the right ID. In Somerset 400 people were so denied their right to vote. Open Britain has argued very strongly that this is part of the Tories’ attack on British democracy. They’ve also given sharp criticism of Keir Starmer’s plans for constitutional reform, expressing their concerns over what he leaves out, such as proportional representation and repealing the highly authoritarian legislation stifling the right to protest. There always was a very strong whiff of gerrymandering about the Voter ID legislation. The amount of electoral fraud is low. I think there have been only seven or so recent cases, and so there’s no need for it. The Tories introduced it following the example of the Republicans in America. Left-wing commenters over there pointed out that many of the people affected by the new legislation – Blacks, the young, the poor and students, the sections of society least likely to have such identification – were also the parts most like to vote Democrat. One Republican politician even admitted it was done to the nobble them.

And now Jacob Rees-Mogg has also admitted it on this side of the Atlantic.

The man one of the great commenters on this blog dubbed ‘Jacob Reet Snob’ let the cat out of the bag at the National Conservative conference. National Conservatism is the trend in transatlantic politics towards nationalism as a reaction to the collapse of globalism. Andrew Marr did a very good analysis of it for the New Statesman YouTube channel a week or so ago. Although it’s becoming influential in the Tory party, its roots are in America with the right-wing Edmund Burke Society, and its leadership seems to be American. Mogg was speaking at the conference about the threat to British sovereignty and Brexit posed by Keir Starmer’s statement that he would give the vote to the 6 million EU citizens in Britain. This has naturally panicked the nationalistic, Brexiteer right. Mogg sought to calm them by telling them that such gerrymandering never works, and rebounds on the party that did it.

Which he illustrated using the example of the Tories’ Voter ID laws.

They had, he said, been put in to stop people voting Labour. But they harmed the Tories instead, because most of the people turned away were Tory-voting senior citizens.

I found this short video commenting on Snob’s speech on the News Agents’ YouTube channel. The man in the video is absolutely amazed at Snob’s admission. He states that when he spoke to people in America about the Voter ID laws over there, they all defended it by telling him it was about protecting democracy. Presumably he didn’t meet the Republican politico who was open about it being a ruse to stop Democrat supporters voting. But there Mogg was, telling his audience that it was a piece of deliberate gerrymandering.

So why was Mogg being so open about it?

Maximilien Robespierre did an interesting video the other day talking about how bonkers Snob and the other headbangers demanding the return of Boris Johnson were. He’s part of a group which includes Nadine ‘Mad Nad’ Dorries and Priti Patel, the woman who makes up her own foreign policy. They had declared that the Tory party had been stupid to get rid of such an electorally successful Prime Minister as the huffing classicist. Well, the Tory party had done the same to Thatcher. She was massively successful, but when it seemed she was becoming an electoral liability, they got rid of her. She was replaced by her chancellor, John Major, just as Johnson had been replaced by Sunak. But Robespierre also wondered if the three weren’t also trying to scupper the Tory party’s chances at the next election by reminding everyone just how terrible Johnson was. Bozo had promised to build 44 new hospitals, of which only one has been built, if that. And that’s only one of his failures and broken promises.

Now comes this admission by Mogg, which tells anyone seriously worried about the state of British democracy that they shouldn’t vote Conservative. Is this part of the same plan to destroy the Tories’ chances from within? Cosplay priest Calvin Robinson has appeared on one video at some kind of right-wing political gathering saying that the Conservatives are no longer conservative, and the party needs to die to save Conservatism. Does Mogg share that view?

I doubt it. I think it’s just arrogance.

I think he came out with it because he either doesn’t believe it will do the Tories any harm and/or he thinks that the media won’t pick up on it and it won’t become a major issue. He probably has a point about that, as I have seen many people in the lamestream media commenting on it. The big news about the National Conservatives yesterday was about the Extinction Rebellion protester being thrown out for comparing them to fascism. I’m sure he was right and the parallels are there. But so far I haven’t seen anyone, outside of left-wing YouTubers, comment on this.

But worryingly, the Tory gerrymandering isn’t going to stop with the Voter ID laws.

Snob says in this snippet that the real problem was the postal votes.

So how long do you think it will be before they devise a plan to gerrymander those as well?

Open Britain Reports on Severely Normal, Innocent Brits Being Turned Away for Polling Stations Due to Voter ID

They told us that there was absolutely no need for it, and that the Voter ID laws were brought in to prevent the demographics most sympathetic to Labour and the left from voting. It was introduced in America by the Republicans, one of whom actually said it was to prevent people voting Democrat. And now it’s happening over here. I got this report from the pro-democracy group Open Britain on how it has resulted in ordinary, decent British voters being turned away because they don’t have ID, or the ID they do have isn’t the correct one. This is yet another perversion of democracy by the Tories on their way to turning Britain into a third world Fascist dictatorship. No doubt with either Mogg or Farage as ‘Minister for Public Enlightenment’.

Dear David,

The picture emerging from the local elections is not a happy one. The polls are still open, votes are still being counted, and we don’t have the full story yet. However, so far it looks like all our worst predictions are coming true. 

Worrying stories have been popping up on the news and on social media all day today. People are being turned away because they lack photo ID, and polling stations are having trouble handling the increased workload.

East Anglia Bylines has a running blog of the problems arising, cataloguing stories of people turned away and others headed off by greeters prior to entering the polls, meaning the rejection of their vote will go unrecorded. This is a critical concern, because it means we will never know the full extent of the damage that voter id is causing. 

A comprehensive twitter thread from Edwin Hayward is collecting people’s stories from the polls, and the picture is equally bleak. Here are a few people’s testimonies: 

• @Jlilburnsniece: “One of our tellers at a polling station has just let us know that 15 women have been turned away so far because they didn’t have photo ID.  This is going to be horrendous.”
  
• @TorUdall: “Cried at the polling station this morning as the old lady in front of me, who had struggled to walk there, was turned away. She had photo ID but not the right version. When I handed them my passport, they questioned if the photo was me. Horrible atmosphere.”
  
• @geography_paul: “Witnessed 3 people turned away for not having photo ID in the short time I was at the polling station.”

Byline Times, reporting from six English counties about the voter ID rollout, interviewed dozens of voters and poll clerks today finding similar results. Byline’s interviews paint a picture of a democracy mired in both chaos and apathy, with people who already found voting challenging struggling to get over this extra hurdle, and polling staff fighting to keep up. 

The official numbers will be published by the Electoral Commission soon, but those figures won’t reflect all of the people turned away outside of the polls by greeters and front desks. Even with just the anecdotal cases we’ve seen so far, a higher number of people have already been turned away from the polls than have been convicted of voter fraud in the last decade. 

If today’s experience were extrapolated to a General Election – when the entire country votes at the same time – there would be unmitigated chaos. Open Britain has been against this policy from the moment we heard the first mention of it in Parliament, and all of our concerns (which the government dismissed) are looking more valid by the minute. 

As the dust settles on these elections, we’ll be doubling-down on our work with allied organisations like the Electoral Reform Society, Unlock Democracy, Fair Vote UK, and others to make the same case we’ve been making since the beginning, but now with hard evidence to back-up our position: Voter ID is an unnecessary and expensive gimmick that has undermined trust and confidence in our democratic system. We must revoke it now or jeopardise the integrity of the next general election. 

If you had a bad experience today, related to voter ID or chaotic polling stations, please tell us about it by replying to this email. And if you’d like to support us as we continue the fight against this government’s agenda of voter suppression, please consider making a small donation.

HELP US DITCH VOTER ID

All the very best, 

The Open Britain team

I haven’t donated, but am leaving the donate button up in case some readers do wish to contribute to them.

Open Britain on the Threat to Democracy from the National Conservatism Movement

Just got this from the pro-democracy organisation. I’ve seen various arch-Tory types puffing National Conservatism, and this goes some way to explaining just who’s involved in it and where it’s coming from. It’s basically nationalistic Conservatism of the Trumpian populist variety. The name rings alarm bells, because I think the National Conservatives were one of the small, Volkisch parties who ended up being swallowed by the Nazis during their rise to power. The mention of Daniel Hannan is a particular red flag. He was an MEP for Dorset and would dearly love to privatise the NHS. Pretty much like the rest of the Tories, but he was outspoken about it. As for Gove, Mogg and Cruella, definitely ‘No thanks!’. It’s the Tory hard right, who really haven’t learnt that Tufton Street theories are massively unworkable and damn near wrecked us. Quite apart from the lofty intellectualism of Darren Grimes.

As for Christian Nationalism, it’s bad politics and bad theology. Nothing does more to put people off religion and promote religious scepticism than its political imposition. After the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, religious scepticism grew, and in the various national churches throughout Europe there was a keen desire to avoid fanaticism and a return to religious bloodshed. Furthermore, to prevent continued religious fractures and conflict, theologians taught that only God can tell who is a true believer and who isn’t, and so it isn’t in the power of earthly governments or churches to say which of their flock is a true Christian or not.

You can see the same process of religious dissatisfaction occurring in the Muslim world. A Pew poll a few years ago found that the majority of Iranians are now no longer Muslim, with the largest bloc of non-Muslims atheists. I think that’s almost certainly a reaction to over forty years of the Islamic theocracy. I’ve also read that atheism is also spreading in the Arab countries. That wouldn’t surprise me, given the horrors of ISIS and similar movements. Religious belief has also declined among Americans, and I think that’s a reaction to entrance into politics of the religious right under Reagan. There are very, very good reasons for separating church and state.

‘Dear David,

For the British right wing, the “sunlit uplands” are always just over the horizon…if we would just entrust everything we hold dear to them one more time. Brexit. Johnsonism. The Truss catastrobudget. All trailed as the “one thing Britain needs to get us back on track.” Not one of them has worked.

And now they’re at it again with ‘National Conservatism’.

At first sight, National Conservatism might appear to be just the latest episode in a tired old series. But we need to keep an especially close eye on this one because it comes turbocharged with a boatload of Trump-scented dark dollars and a sharp line in Christian fundamentalism. It’s Farage-Johnson-style Brexit zealotry on steroids.

As announced in this Telegraph piece by Jacob Rees-Mogg and David Frost, the first “NatCon” event features a who’s-who of far-right gremlins. The list of speakers includes US Republican Senator J.D. Vance – who sought to overturn the 2020 US election – GB News’ on-and-off-presenter Darren Grimes, Tufton Street’s pseudo-intellectual Daniel Hannan, and, of course, Suella Braverman, Michael Gove, and Mogg himself. It’s a smorgasbord of radical libertarians, anti-woke crusaders, and straight-up election deniers. 

Their website promotes Italian “neo-fascist” president Giorgia Miloni, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and a litany of books and essays promoting such delights as Christian Nationalism and the importance of male-dominated societies. Several featured titles would challenge an experienced librarian not to put them on the ‘racist literature’ shelf.

None of this is all that new, but NatCon shows that the US and UK far-right networks are now cosier than ever and readying themselves to steal power they could not win fairly at the ballot box. As Byline Times reported yesterday, the intricate links between Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, and Boris Johnson are still being revealed, uncovering a well-funded and highly organised global right-wing network. 

Their fundamental goal is to promote an unpopular agenda that benefits only society’s most privileged elite, using asylum seekers, minorities, college students, protestors, and anyone else who stands in their way as cannon fodder. The problem isn’t merely that they have a regressive and outdated vision for the country. It’s that they’re willing to hijack democracy in order to achieve it.

This is what we’re up against. A unified bloc of deep-pocketed and well-connected figures focussed on the goals of self-enrichment and destruction of our democratic institutions. We’ve seen in the US what can happen when these people are given the reins: a privileged minority rules with impunity, cutting their own taxes, giving hand-outs to their friends, and reopening long-settled social issues such as abortion and racial equality. We have already had enough of that agenda. We can’t allow more of it to flood in.

Those of us who believe in democracy and social progress, whatever colour rosette we favour, must come together to fight any attempt by this Nat-C movement to slide into power through some back door in the Tory Party.

This is a wake-up call if ever there was one. Let’s keep a close eye on this new movement. But let’s also work double-time to make our democracy work for ordinary people. Let’s take the dark money out of politics. Let’s reign in big tech’s disinformation industry. Let’s shine a light on the Tufton Street ghouls that freely walk the corridors of power these days. Let’s take every chance we get to defend, strengthen and renew our democracy because, of all the ways a society might have to free itself from fascism, using democracy to stop it at the front door is probably the only one that bears thinking about.

All the best,

Mark Kieran
CEO, Open Britain’

Correct, Not Political Tackle Essex School Indoctrinating Autistic Children with Critical Race Theory

This is going to be controversial, and ideally I really wouldn’t reblog a video from this source. Correct, Not Political are what can only be described as a far right outfit. They’re anti-socialist, anti-Communist, anti-trades union, anti-environmentalist and anti-lockdown. They are genuine homophobes who disrupt drag queen story time because of this, rather than the fear that such events are being used to indoctrinate children into queer theory. Although they believe that as well. They hold weird conspiracy theories about the World Economic Forum, Freemasons and Jews and admire Oswald Mosley as if he was some kind of champion of free speech and not the absolute opposite. But this time I think they’re right.

It’s of a phone call made by their man Jim Boobeh to a school, which has called in an outside group to teach their autistic children anti-racism. This looks perfectly reasonable and good at first glance, but looking through the documents the video shows it seems BASE CC, the organisation involved, is teaching children Critical Race Theory. This is divisive, it has racialised the school children who have been exposed to it, and is based in a postmodern revision of Marxism. James Lindsay, who’s one of Peter Boghossian’s group with Helen Pluckrose, has made a number of videos and blog posts tearing this apart. He calls it ‘Race Marxism’, and that’s the title of his new book about it. Lindsay calls himself a liberal, but I think he’s very definitely a man of the right. Pluckrose is a woman of the left, and she also writes pieces for his New Discourses site. Critical Race Theory is not a continuation of Martin Luther King’s doctrine of colour blindness. It explicitly holds that all White people are racist, and one of its founders was an opponent of desegregation in schools. This is clear through his paper included in an anthology of writing on Critical Race Theory edited by one of its founders, Kimberle Crenshaw. Even though it comes from the left, I consider it just as Fascistic as the White supremacist stuff it opposes. I am aware that the Republicans in America are weaponising it against the left, and am informed by one of the great commenters here that one local Republican group lied about it being taught in the local school. Nevertheless, I firmly believe that it is a real attack on genuinely liberal values and proper anti-racism. It is political indoctrination and should not be be taught in schools, except possibly as a topic for discussion and free criticism at sixth form level.

Starmer Sacked Scottish Labour Leader at Demands of Donors

I went to the online meeting last night on restoring Labour party democracy staged by Arise and the Labour left. I didn’t spend very long there, as sometimes I get too irate at what’s being said – not at the speakers, but at the problems they’re talking about. And the major problem facing democracy in the Labour party is Starmer. He and the NEC are doing everything they can to purge and silence socialists in the party. The most glaring example of this is his deselection of Jeremy Corbyn, a man whose position as party leader Starmer isn’t fit to fill. But there are other cases where he’s deselection sitting MPs and senior party officials over the heads of local constituency parties and the wishes of ordinary Labour party members. And one of the most blatant and toxic examples of this, after Corbyn, is his removal of someone Leonard as head of the Scottish Labour party.

Leonard had aroused right-wing ire by being too left. Even before his removal the NEC and the Labour right had been trying their damnedest to undermine him. The crunch finally came, however, when someone in the House of Lords and a group of Labour party donors told Starmer that they wanted him gone or they would take their money elsewhere. New Labour are corporatists, and when their masters in industry say ‘Jump!’, they say ‘How high?’ And Starmer duly got rid of Leonard and replaced him with someone more pliable.

This does not bode well for the future of the Health Service, as Stalin has among his advisers people from the private healthcare companies. He got touchy when asked about them, and declared that he wouldn’t answer questions on his advisors. Well, the time is long past when we should be questioning politicians on the help they’re getting from the private sector. When Blair slithered into power he was surrounded by a host of lobbyists and advisors from private healthcare companies and even American private prisons, all keen to influence his government. And the result was over a decade of corporatist government that left the people of this country worse off but made Blair and his backers rich. George Monbiot describes this sorry state in his book Captive State, and Bremner and the Long Johns tore into Blair and his corporate cronies in their book You Are Here.

Corporatism is a major problem in America. It’s led to an erosion of trust in politicians, as the majority of Americans believe that once they get elected, their politicos will abandon their election platforms to do what their corporate backers want. A Harvard study declared that because of this, America was no longer a proper democracy but a corporate oligarchy. And some conservatives were also outraged at it. A Republican businessman in California wanted to have a law passed stipulating that politicians gaining from corporate donations should wear the badges of the companies funding them, like racing car drivers and other sportsmen. The major problem in America is a judgement in the 1980s stating that corporate donations are free speech, and thus permissible under the law. Over here it seems to be pretty much a straightforward reaction by industry to the unions funding the Labour party. And just as this corporatism is undermining democracy in the Labour party, it also caused people to leave the Tories. Because the Tory grassroots felt their concerns were being ignored in favour of the corporate big boys and girls.

Starmer is just going to drag us back to the corporate sleaze of the Blair years.

There might be some hope, though. One of the speakers, Nabeela Mowlana, pointed out that Starmer hadn’t killed young people’s enthusiasm for socialism and Corbyn’s and his vision. And there was Blair’s spectacular failure when he tried to stop Red Ken standing as mayor of London. The man Private Eye dubs ‘Leninspart’ stood as an independent, and beat Blair’s candidate.

Starmer is not just destroying democracy in the Labour party, he’s also destroying the wider hopes of the British people, the majority of whom backed Corbyn’s policies for a mixed economy and strong welfare state. We do need to organise and resist him.

American Senator Calls for ‘National Divorce’ between Democrat and Republican States – Is It All Over ‘Wokeness’?

Okay, I caught some American YouTubers discussing the possibility of a ‘national divorce’ in America the other night. I didn’t quite know what it was, but suspected it was about the dissolution of the USA. After all, it couldn’t be that all American domestic marriages had now become so terrible that a mass divorce across the Land of the Free was the only solution. It seems a congresswoman, whose name I’ve completely forgotten, declared that the political divisions in the nation were so bad that the red and blue states – those held by Republicans and Democrats respectively – should separate. This would, of course, mean the dissolution of America. One YouTuber posted a piece last night wondering if it would be possible.

Okay, I’m British. I haven’t been to America, and what I know about the country comes from books, TV, magazines, newspapers and radio, as well as talking to American friends and people who have lived and worked in the US. So, I’ve got no particular expertise. But it seems to me that the idea is totally mad. Firstly, I’m not sure that the political divisions are necessarily that deep or that pervasive to warrant states’ ceding from the Union. Yes, there always have been a far left strand in American politics, particularly regarding race and gay rights. We took over affirmative action from America, renaming it positive discrimination. Much of the Critical Social Justice movement, which is really just a postmodern twist on Marxism regarding Black rights, gender and feminism and gay and trans rights and other issues, is imported and influenced by American developments. This is particularly true of Black Lives Matter and Critical Race Theory. Nearly twenty years ago, when I was beginning studying archaeology at Bristol Uni, one of the American students on the course complained that we worse than her country. But some of the controversy in these and other areas just seems the result of really hysterical propaganda.

I remember what the bonkers American right said about Barack Obama. According to the nutters, Obama was a Black nationalist with a burning hatred of Whites, and was, depending on who you listened to, a Maoist Commie, a Nazi, a militant atheist and a secret Muslim planning to overthrow Christian America and make it subservient to Islam. One pair of Lutheran pastors in a church radio station went as far as declaring that he would be a dictator, who would kill more people than Mao. Alex Jones was prophesying that he would use an environmental catastrophe to seize power and force decent Americans into refugee camps.

The truth is Obama was none of these things. As people remarked at the time, he couldn’t simultaneously be a Marxist, Nazi, atheist, Muslim, Black nationalist subversive, and indeed he wasn’t. Despite the hoo-ha and the Nobel Peace Prize, he really didn’t do much for Black America. A few years ago, he said he always thought of himself as moderate Republican. He certainly acted like one, continuing Bush’s militaristic, imperial wars. Domestically he pushed through the charter schools despite community opposition in many areas. I think these are like the academies over here. Even Obamacare wasn’t the radical assault on private healthcare the Republicans screamed it was. It wasn’t a single-payer system, like the one advocated by Bernie Sanders. It simply made private health insurance more affordable to more Americans. It wasn’t even a Democrat policy – Obama took it over from Newt Gingrich, a Republican politico who proposed it in the ’90s.

And the same people are screaming that Biden is ‘far left’, when they aren’t suggesting he’s too old and doddery to hold the office of president. That accusation to me holds far more water. Biden is a bog-standard corporatist Democrat. He got in because the powerbrokers in the Democrat party didn’t want Bernie getting the nomination. Or somebody like the good senator from Vermont. But Biden pushed trans rights, and so he must be a communist.

I’ve read the Communist Manifesto and other bits and pieces by and about Marx and Engels. You won’t be surprised that neither of them wrote very much, if at all, about gay rights. I think it was also illegal in Soviet Russia, punishable with seven years in a forced labour camp. I’ve also got the impression that it was illegal generally in much of the Communist bloc. Contemporary gay rights are very much a western, post-War development, and not confined to one side of the political spectrum. Margaret Thatcher voted for the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1968 or whenever it was, while Labour politicians like Jim Callaghan were opposed. Her former Personal Private Secretary, Matthew Parris, was one of the founders of the gay charity Stonewall. Section 28 was frightening, as it did look like the Tories wanted the mass imprisonment of gays, but it was brought in, so I’ve heard, because a school or schools in one London borough was teaching gay rights and there was a fear that this included paedophilia.

There are real issues with the contemporary trans movement. There’s been a devastating critique of the treatment of the children who came to the Tavistock Clinic in London. Many of them were just confused kids, often neuro-divergent. A very high percentage were autistic, depressed, in care, or came from families where one parent was a sex abuser. Eighty per cent of the boys were same-sex attracted, and ninety percent of the girls. Nearly all of these were nevertheless put on puberty blockers and progressed to surgical transition. It has been estimated that if the children had been treated properly, both medically and ethically, only two percent of them would have had done so. Gay opponents of trans militancy, like Barry ‘the EDIjester’ and Clive Simpson and Denis Kavanagh view this is a new form of conversion therapy, in which they gay is not prayed away, but dispelled with drugs and surgery. Many of the kids said they preferred to be trans rather than a gay man or lesbian woman. This is internalised homophobia.

There are also issues regarding women’s sports and privacy and dignity, as shown in the recent scandals about the incarceration of extremely violent, predatory, biologically male rapists in women’s prisons. But many of the critics of this aspect of trans militancy are socialist feminists. Left-wing ladies were against this long before Matt Walsh appeared and claimed it for the Republican right, demanding to know where all the feminist women were. They were there, just ignored. And people like Simpson and Kavanagh are worried about the absence of the left and ordinary people with just moderate political views from protesting this issue. They said in their recent Queen’s Speech video that the American right is the equivalent of our far right. If ordinary people don’t make themselves heard, they’re afraid it’ll be left to far right organisations like Patriotic Alternative, who’ll protest against Drag Queen Story Hour and there will be a backlash against gays in general. I fear this is happening already. Correct, Not Political not only protest against Drag Queen Story Hour, but against gay rights generally. And the ‘Terfs’ don’t necessarily hate trans people. The EDIjester talks about how he knew and partied the night away with trans people and drag queens back in the 1970s. In a recent video describing his experiences in Glasgow, Mr Menno, another gay critic of the trans movement, was moved to tears. So many of the trans people who came out to protest Kelly-Jay Keane and her women were trans-identified women, some of whom, despite their declarations that they were happy, seemed to be anything but. And J.K. Rowling, despite being a moron when it comes to Corbyn and the anti-Semitism smears, has never urged the hatred or murder, let alone the mass murder, of trans people. And to be fair, the book criticising the Tavistock, Time to think, also includes statements from people who transitioned, who were happy in their new gender.

Okay, this is the situation in Britain, but it also exists in America, where some of the most powerful opposition to the militant trans movement comes from left-wing as well as right-wing ladies. Helen Pluckrose, who is a staunch critic from the left of the Critical Social Justice Movement, holds the position that it should be possible to work out a compromise position between the trans rights advocates and their opponents, but she fears that this may not be possible considering how entrenched and intransigent the debate has become.

There have also been problems in America with rioting due to Black Lives Matter, as well the assassination, and planned assassination of various politicians by Antifa. Andy Ngo’s been putting up a number of videos about this, though considering his own record of falsifying reports sometimes a little scepticism might be in order. But that doesn’t mean that everyone who supports Black Lives Matter, or simply thinks more should be done to help impoverished Blacks and people of colour, is a Marxist revolutionary wanting to tear up the flagstones, raise the barricades and shoot cops. Similarly, despite well publicised cases, I don’t know how many school teachers in America, or even here for that matter, are draping the LGBTQ++ flags around their classrooms, indoctrinating kids in Queer Theory and taking them to inappropriate drag shows. Probably much fewer than the impression Walsh and his ilk would like to give.

And people don’t necessarily hold opinions that are uniformly right or left. Many Republicans now genuinely support gay rights, including marriage, as well as trans rights. And I can imagine that for some Americans it might just be a matter of differing priorities. For example, I’m sure there are some Americans, who vote Democrat because they approve of what exists of the American welfare state and some policies towards the poor, women and minorities, but aren’t necessarily in favour of the more radical social policies. Ditto for some Republicans, who may support, against the stereotype of the right, gay and trans rights, but are afraid of what they see as the left’s attack on personal freedom. Some of these people cross party lines on some issues, and how they vote may depend on what is of greater importance to them at that moment.

I can remember reading an interview with an American author, who said that America is a weird mixture of the radical and deeply conservative, often in the same individuals. Looking at it from outside, it seems to me that there’s far more that unites Americans – a common political discourse and tradition than divides them. Certainly not the point where the country’s dissolution should be a serious consideration. I really don’t think these divisions are so deep as the economic and political division over slavery that caused the American Civil War.

But I fear this is being pushed by the Libertarian far right. Way back in the early part of this century White Supremacists like Richard Spencer were and are calling for the creation of a White ethnostate. The extreme right-wing, anti-feminist YouTuber Theodore Beale, alias Vox Dei, was looking forward to the collapse of America and the emergence of such a Whites-only state. And others have been posting up pieces about the coming collapse of the US since. I also found a piece on YouTube ages ago, which featured an interview between one of the Libertarian intellectual leaders, who was looking forward to the creation of a Libertarian, low-tax, free trade, no welfare and everything privatised state in the American heartland. They didn’t have a name for it yet, but were provisionally calling it ‘Reagan’ after Ronald Reagan.

I’ve no doubt that if you’re a rich industrialist, who can afford private schooling and has no chance of being unemployed or needing Medicare or Medicaid to pay your medical bills, such a state would would be an absolute paradise. But if you’re poor and a member of the working class, you’d be a dirt-poor, exploited wage slave, just like the ‘factory slaves’ over here in the 19th century. They can fantasize about the benefits of competition all they like, but on its own it ain’t going to drive medical bills down, provide better schools or create better working conditions. As for the economy, one of the goals of the invasion of Iraq was to liberalise the Iraqi economy. This meant American multinationals seizing the country’s oil and state industries, and removing the tariff barriers protecting its economy. This was planned by the Neo-Cons to create a new, prosperous Iraq, as the kind of economic order they’d like in America.

It didn’t work. When the tariff barriers were removed, any country that could dumped its goods cheap in Iraq. Iraqi industry couldn’t compete. There was a massive wave of bankruptcies and unemployment shot up to astronomical levels. If a similar state is created in the US, then that’ll also happen there. Only big business could compete, and the small businessman or woman would go under.

This is what I’m afraid is really driving the call for a new national divorce between right and left-wing American states. It isn’t abou8t irreconcilable political differences, but about the weird fantasies of the Libertarian extreme right about a state of their own. A state that in reality would be a dystopian nightmare. The panic about Critical Social Justice is just a means to push this.

And I’m afraid that calls for the dissolution of America would also be echoed in this country. Carl Benjamin and the rest of the Lotus Eaters are Libertarians, and I think they’d love to have a similar type of government over here. Indeed, one of them actually said so in one of their videos. If the calls for the dissolution of America become stronger, I think the right-wing nutters would demand something similar for Britain, despite their hostility to regionalism and the fact that England has been a united country since the reign of Edmund Ironside in the 9th or 10th centuries.

‘E Pluribus Unum’. I think it means ‘Out of Many, One’. The motto of the American nation. Well, I hope it continues that way and ordinary Americans ignore the panics caused by the extreme right.

Yedolf: Satirical Animation Skewering Kanye West and Real, Conservative Anti-Semitism in America

I found this vicious little piece of bitter satire on YouTube yesterday. It’s produced by Aamon Animations, whose brief description on the platforms states that he makes animations ranging from political memes to comic horror. Yedolf is obviously a combination Kanye West’s preferred epithet, ‘Ye’, and Hitler’s first name. West, as you’ll remember, effectively torpedoed his career and lost something like a hundred million after ranting about the Jews controlling the music industry. The dialogue in the animation appears to genuine, which is combined with computer generated caricatures of West, Alex Jones, Ben Shapiro and some other right-wing American pundits that are truly grotesque. Especially when West develops snail’s horns after eating one of the molluscs.

The video includes American right-wing media hacks talking about the threat of Secular Humanists with Jewish last names – which obvious means atheist Jews, raising the old canard about banking at its top levels being run by people with Jewish last names. In other words, the old Jewish banking conspiracy. Then Ben Shapiro appears to endorse West, stating that he’s not mad and states the issues clearly. I don’t think you can call Shapiro anti-Semitic, because I think he’s Jewish. But assuming that he’s talking about West’s anti-Semitic rant, he has shown that he’s prepared to endorse a conspiracist nutter for political expediency, and in the instance throw Jews under the bus.

And then there’s the interview between West and Jones. West goes really anti-Semitic in this one, declaring that Hitler had his good points when Jones tells him he sounds like the Nazi leader. West really, really needs to do some proper reading about Hitler and the Third Reich, and not crap that comes from White Supremacists and Black anti-Semites like the Nation of Islam. I really do wonder if he’d say that if he knew that among the groups the Nazis persecuted were the mixed-race children of Black American squaddies and White German women when the country was occupied by the Allies after the First World War. They organised a programme of sterilisation against them. As a self-respecting man of colour I would hope that this would help disabuse him of the notion that there was anything positive about Nazism.

West’s opinions were too much for Jones, who splutters that his channel believes in freedom of speech, but nevertheless what West has said is unacceptable. Or words to that effect. And when Jones declares that West has gone too far, the man who has absolutely no regard for any kind of libel he can throw at his opponents, then several red lines have clearly been crossed.

I was unaware just how noxious West’s comments were. The impression I got was that he said little more than that the Jews controlled the music industry, but kept Blacks down – vile stuff, but unfortunately held by a number of Black artists who have similarly sabotaged their careers uttering this nonsense. I wasn’t prepared for how really unpleasant it was. I don’t like cancel culture, but if this is right, West deserves to be well and truly cancelled.

But one of the most revealing aspects is that there were too many American conservatives prepared to support him, even though parts of the Republican party are claiming to be the true friends of the Jews and staunch supporters of Israel.

This needs watching. Despite the allegations against the left, anti-Semitism is still present on the right.

Open Britain Launch Popular Campaign to Raise Awareness of Voter ID Laws

You may well have seen the adverts telling us on TV that the laws have been changed so that photo IDs will be demanded as proof of identity before you can vote at elections. This is supposedly to prevent electoral fraud, and was introduced by the Tories on the back of similar legislation in America. That was criticised by the American Left, including The Young Turks, because the most likely sections of society not to have photographic IDs are the poor, Blacks, the young and students, precisely the sort of people that vote for the left. And one Republican politico even admitted that it was done to keep the Dems out.

The pro-democracy group, Open Britain, have issued this message to their supporters informing them that they are staring a campaign to make sure everyone is aware of the changes and has such identity documents so that they can vote.

‘Dear David,

Did you know that millions of eligible voters may be turned away from the ballot box at May’s local elections? The government rushed through new voter ID requirements ahead of this year’s May 4th local elections – and it’s going to impact you. 

For the first time in England, voters will be required to present photo ID to vote—and not all photo IDs will be accepted. If you show up to the polls with an 18+ Oyster card or a student ID, for example, you may be denied your ballot, while IDs like 60+ Oyster cards will be accepted. 

It doesn’t seem very fair does it? 

While the Electoral Commission has launched a public awareness campaign, many fear that the new law will harm our democracy with voters unaware of the requirements. The [rushed] enactment of these restrictions is meant to target voter fraud (with very little evidence that this is an issue in the UK ) and will cost millions in taxpayer funds, while the public still faces an urgent cost-of-living crisis. 

Similar laws have been enacted in the American South to suppress votes, particularly those of society’s most disadvantaged. We cannot go down this undemocratic path in the UK. Any eligible voter denied this May is unacceptable, so we must act to ensure that everyone is able to plan to vote ahead of time. 

The Electoral Commission simply can’t do enough on its own, so we must take direct action to spread the word to our family, friends, and communities. The most effective thing we can do is to ask those around us if they know about the new rules, have proper ID, or if they need help applying for a Voter Authority Certificate. 

Everyone deserves a fair shot at having their voices heard, and Open Britain remains committed to ensuring that this is the case. This May, you, your loved ones, or your communities could be unjustly disenfranchised, so we all need to set out a plan to vote. Open Britain has launched a Plan to Vote campaign, and the hard work begins now.

Sign up to follow

Best,

Joel’

History Debunked Attacks NATO Warmongering

This is shocking! Far-right YouTuber Simon Webb of History Debunked put up a piece yesterday attacking NATO’s warmongering, from the bombing of a TV station in Serbia during the war in the former Yugoslavia to the Iraq invasion and the bombings of Libya and Syria. In his view, NATO is an aggressive force, and as two of the countries it attacked were allies of Russia, one of them being Syria, it is no wonder that Putin in his suspicious and hostile towards the west. He states, however, that he is certainly not a supporter of Putin either.

This is very much what left-wing critics of NATO have been saying, like the late, long-term critic of American imperialism, William Bloom and the Stop the War Coalition on this side of the Atlantic. I think Webb also may have been critical of the expansion of NATO until it’s on Putin’s doorstep. This may have been prompted by the Ukrainian president’s statement that his country is now effectively a member of NATO. But it wasn’t meant to be like this. The original agreement after the fall of communism was that NATO would not expand eastwards. Instead the newly independent states would remain militarily neutral, and their security would be guaranteed by both NATO and Russia. But NATO’s rapid expansion to include Poland and the Baltic States put an end to that and almost certainly provoked Russian fears of encirclement.

As for the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine that is one of the major causes of this fiasco through the overthrow of its former president, who favoured closer ties with Russia, this was definitely not a spontaneous public uprising. It was very carefully engineered by Hillary Clinton and Victoria Nuland at the American State Department and the National Endowment for Democracy, the quango set up by the American government to engineer regime change after it was taken away from the CIA. Conservative critics of the war in Ukraine have also made the point that their president is as much a dictator as Putin, jailing opponents, banning rival political parties and closing down critical TV stations. Some of this is self-serving – both the British Conservative party and the Republicans in America under Trump benefited from Russian support and donations, but it is still nevertheless true. Of course, Ukraine has the right to protect itself and Putin’s invasion of a sovereign and independent state is wrong. But this seems to be a war between ruthless oligarchs and international geopolitics, rather than a defence of an independent, genuinely democratic nation. And Webb, appallingly right-wing though he is, is right to criticise NATO for its belligerence. And what is even more surprising is that some of his commenters actually know that its due to NATO’s bombing of Syria and the Middle East that we now have the migrant crisis. So, no nutters ranting about Jewish conspiracies and the Great Replacement, although I think they also turn up in the comments section..