I am going to go out on a limb and say that most Guardian readers who watch a BBC documentary called America’s New Female Right are unlikely to be in accord with the views espoused therein. We are not going to empathise with statements such as: “Women getting the right to vote has led to every form of degeneracy,” “Feminism was absolutely created to destabilise the family [and] western civilisation,” and: “Feminism is a thousand times more toxic than the ‘toxic masculinity’ we hear so much about.” We are unlikely to agree that “Satan’s agenda” is to destroy the nuclear family structure in order to control society.But since you're the 'Guardian's TV critic, watch it you will, despite your reflexive cringing at the attitudes therein.
It’s a fascinating subject that deserves attention and rigorous interrogation of all the factors at play, especially with subjects as bright, articulate and confident as these (again, especially Faulkner). What we get instead is a cheap, shoddy programme apparently thrown together in 10 minutes, presumably on the grounds that everything and everyone is so obviously awful and evil and bad-bad-bad that it is enough just to film them, show Wright’s pained face occasionally and have her lob in a few wet questions to show that she is still listening and still on the side of right (which is, of course, left, not right).
Well that sounds like most of the ‘Guardian’s’ output, so it should be familiar!
Sinister music is played in certain scenes, in case we are in danger of forgetting which side “we” are on – all of us, without doubt, without question, without occasionally wondering if the “other side” might have half a point buried in there that might be worth pulling out and examining in the light.
Only a Sith (and a ‘Guardian’ columnist, it seems) deals in absolutes. There’s never any chance of conceding a point from the other side.
If you are going to interview people such as McMichael, Hutcherson and Faulkner, you need a presenter who is capable and unafraid of going toe to toe with them. These are people with sincerely held beliefs. You need someone with the intellectual and temperamental firepower to challenge them – someone who is not afraid to, in British terms at least, be “rude” to their subjects and see if they can really defend assertions that are otherwise allowed to stand as truth.
Why do you want to challenge them, when any attempt to challenge a left-wing viewpoint is treated as if heresey against truth come down from the mountain on tablets of stone?
After having put the boot in, yesterday, to Toby Young’s TDS, today they excel themselves with two accessible articles … one on oikophobia and one on Nigeria’s Christians. This is part one.
Through that article, you can access all the rest, saves me running the screenshot. So … to business:
In his 2004 book England and the Need for Nations, the British philosopher Roger Scruton termed the rising liberal ideology of self-contempt as oikophobia. The Ancient Greek word for home is oikos; and thus oikophobia, Scruton wrote, is “(stretching the Greek a little) the repudiation of inheritance and home. It manifests as a consolidated, wide-spanning offensive against the historical, theological, literary, legal and social inheritance that formed the modern West.“
I call that mid-intellectualism, that paragraph … in other words, accessible to a wider range of people … to those “of the people” down to the insufferably snobby upper middle or left intellectuals. This thing gets quite inverted, with educated pollies being below that, with true oiks such as Rayner and Phillips near the bottom of the heap. And at the top? Well, the Scrutons and Thomas Sowells of course. Plus the C19th working men’s clubs and evening classes:
Despite being useful on a football field, my swottery separated me from my fellow spotty herberts and why did I swot long into the evenings in secondary? Because my parents were working to put me through, not just a grammar or private but through a “public school” I’ll not name, which admittedly has opened certain doors, but my humble beginnings have turned out to be more useful in the long run.
One thing I learnt was that tradesmen were where the money was … those people were never going to starve. Back to the DS article:
As Scruton observed: “Oikophobia is a stage through which the adolescent mind normally passes. But it is a stage in which some people — the intellectuals especially — tend to become arrested. As George Orwell pointed out, intellectuals on the Left are especially prone to it, and this has often made them willing agents of foreign powers.”
Hence, the tedious political activism that was formerly confined to the university campus has now been propagated across Western institutions and corporations. Indeed, the touted ‘grown-ups’ in the West are now largely liberal oikophobes, educated at elite universities that serve, as the conservative historian Niall Ferguson has argued, to transmit civilisational self-contempt in place of the classical Western inheritance.
Nice article. I’ve told the tale before of being on the students’ swotting floor, I thought of it as, on the way to my tutorial room and a girl was struggling with what looked like Bloom’s Taxonomy … I really don’t recall which leftwing “intellectual” tome it was … I asked her about it and she showed me what she was studying … it may as well have been Greek.
Actually … to me, it may as well also have been Greek … it was the worst pseudo-intellectual claptrap, typical of the type, so beloved of curriculum departments. I translated it for her. Can’t recall if she asked … well why can’t they just say that … or maybe it was me, I, they, them its. Either way, it was that thing, starting with “w” in the vernacular, which churchmen in the day would warn a boy against … stop it or you’ll go blind. I mean it really was totally unnecessary and woolly thinking to boot.
So, to return to the article again … what are the four pillars of leftist w***erism?
First, Western history is condemned in an ahistorical, gratuitously unfair, even smirking, manner.
Second, the theological basis of the modern West – Christianity – has been assailed ferociously by the secular Left.
Third, contempt for traditional customs and simple patriotism has become a familiar and undisguised trait of the oikophobic Left. Indeed, George Orwell recognised the roots of this adolescent sentiment in his great 1941 essay, England Your England.
Fourth, as Orwell further noted in England Your England, a chief symptom of the Left’s worldview is its servility to anti-Western foreign regimes.
I’ll leave it there, otherwise this post might go on forever.
What is justice for Grenfell? After seven years of public inquiry we have a 1,700-page report and a cost of more than £200m. We have had investigations, books, plays and more than £100m spent on an ongoing police investigation. Yet so far we have no closure, no prosecutions and no convictions. The word ‘“justice” does not appear in the recommendations of this week’s Moore-Bick report of the inquiry’s findings. Ask any lawyer why, and you will get a knowing smile. Justice means trials, more delays and more fees.Well I never! You don't say, Simon? And yet, they roll on and on and on. With the bereaved always hoping for change as a result.
The answer is that the “judge-led” public inquiry has become an embedded institution in British democracy. By postponing blame, it somehow softens the guilt and gets a generation of politicians and regulators off the hook. When the Institute for Government (IfG) in 2019 looked back at the 68 public inquiries held in the previous 30 years, it found they had cost a total of £639m.
And why worry about that? After all, it’s only taxpayer’s money. As long as it produces results, right?
The give-away in the IfG report was that one in seven inquiries took more than five years to report, while only six cases produced evidence of a parliamentary follow-up. The public inquiries had served what seemed their hidden purpose, which was to delay blame until those responsible had passed out of sight. That is the only reasonable conclusion for the seven-year Moore-Bick Grenfell enterprise.
Well, they aren’t quite out of sight yet, should Starmer wish to flex his political muscles against a worthy target for once.
Last month came a breath of fresh air from the new prisons minister, Lord Timpson, with his company’s long record of aiding former inmates. He reckoned that only a third of prisoners should have been locked up. The rest needed the sort of remedies adopted by more progressive regimes such as those in Norway and Germany. In the cases of Grenfell, the Post Office and infected blood, this should surely mean heavy fines, dismissals and restrictions on office-holding. In most non-violent crimes, this should be coupled with various forms of restorative justice.
We’ll have to see if justice is a thing Starmer’s mob really care about as much as they claimed when in opposition, when they never had to actually do anything but snipe from the benches.
… to at least talk about it.
It’s far easier today, certainly moreso than 23 years ago, certainly since the start of this blog, even since last year when I wrote this:
https://orphansofliberty.blogspot.com/2023/09/911-remembered-personal-take-this-year.html
… far easier, once people really see what govts do … once the gloves come off, as Biden’s and Starmer’s have … Macron’s, Castro’s … it becomes far easier to write a post like this.
At what point did I feel something was very, very wrong with 911, apart from the bleedin’ obvious mayhem, the horror? I’d only started online in 2001, so it took a couple of years and those online types who are good as fisking, debunking … even debunking the debunkers, were putting out material now long censored … it was certainly not censored in Russia, as it was an attack on the PTB running the US.
In there was a lot of pap, misleading, photoshopping … but certain things kept coming through over and over … things which puzzled me. One was why the firemen were so consistently anti the official narrative? It was because they were there at ground level or within this tower or that.
And then the infiltrators of the group, happy to be called Truthers as a pejorative. The conference given by the NIST head honcho, caught out twice lying about what happened to the twin towers rubble next morning. The firemen on camera and behind them, explosions inside, quite audible. The lady being interviewed swinging around to look.
The clincher though, to me, was not so much the Dutch demolition expert who called CD on WTC7 but it did seem their Achilles heel, the PTB and the real doozy, as they say, was Silverstein interviewed same day, before WTC7 came down, before he realised what he’d said. Quite a few saw that interview.
He was pointing out why it was now pretty much under control, they had it all tabbed, no more horrors … he was asked what would happen with WTC7. He said he was getting constant reports … if it was deemed too dangerous, they’d have to “pull it”. The interview was taken out of the mainstream immediately.
The obvious question was … how would they “pull it”? One of the core arguments against CD was that it would have taken days to place the charges and anyway, wouldn’t staff have seen them?
My reply is … why would they? Just as with JFK where one camp had a drawing of the passengers bolt upright with drawn in bullet trajectories … the assumptions were ridiculous. But Silverstein certainly had some explaining to do. He never did it.
And then, of course, by October, 2001:
Borrowing from our info-dropper IYE, this was from back in March:
MTG on Fah-nee:
“Judge McAfee worked for Fani Willis and donated to her campaign AND has now ruled that Fani can keep prosecuting Trump but only if she removes her lover Nathan Wade off the case!
Judge McAfee should have recused himself in the first place because of his obvious bias. Fani Willis lied under oath in his courtroom! Fani and Wade conspired with the White House and Jan 6th Committee, talk about RICO charges!
Fani Willis overpaid her lover Nathan Wade as he had zero experience with RICO cases, abuse of taxpayer funds! And the Georgia Ethics board needs to seriously investigate both Fani Willis and Nathan Wade, I’ve filed multiple complaints!
The Donald has just threatened (rightly in my book):
“Therefore, the 2024 Election, where Votes have just started being cast, will be under the closest professional scrutiny and, WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again. We cannot let our Country further devolve into a Third World Nation, AND WE WON’T!”
We had our abuses over here of course in the UK but this lot across the pond really took the prize for theatrical, deep and total corruption ... until, that was ... Starmer got in on less than 20% of the eligible vote.
Wednesday saw the first Prime Minister’s Question Time of the post-recess session. The in-house video is here and the Hansard transcript here (search page for ‘Engagements’).MailPlus subscribers can read Quentin Letts’ Parliamentary sketch here; other media comment is widely available.
A gruelling schedule of door-knocking to drum up local support for candidates was encouraged, and the campaigning expectations completely took over my life. My hours were tracked mercilessly in an app by the local campaigning team that fed them back to the regional bosses.
To be fair, when you're young and naive, that probably does feel like a gruelling slog...
In the run-up to an election, you are expected to complete five two-hour sessions a week, with an extra weekend session every fortnight on top, alongside your day job.But she won. And then the real 'problems' started.
The real issues started when I had to go back to my day job. Being a councillor is not a full-time role, and it was one for which I took home less than £13,000 a year, despite my rent alone being £11,000.
Which if you already had a job meant your rent was paid and you had an 'extra' £2k on top of that, as well as your day job salary, doesn't it?
A typical day would involve using my lunch break to join a council meeting on my phone and then after work, picking up a sandwich for dinner on the way to a three-hour evening meeting that would often overrun. The next evening or weekend would be more campaigning, meeting a local group or holding my ward surgery.
And it didn't occur to you that this would happen? Did you think they'd invent several hours more in the day for you to do this?
When I was eventually signed off work with exhaustion, the mental health practitioner told me I needed to spend more time with my friends and family. But when?You had no clue what it was going to demand of you? And that's someone else's fault, of course.
