Links - 20th December 2025 (2 - DEI at the University of Michigan)

A Top University Bet on D.E.I. What Went Wrong? - The New York Times - "Diversity, equity and inclusion programs are under attack. A dozen states have passed new laws restricting D.E.I. in public universities. Conservatives argue that the decades-long drive to increase racial diversity in America’s universities has corrupted higher education.  After covering some of these debates for The Times, I decided that I needed to see D.E.I. programs up close. So earlier this year, I began visiting the University of Michigan, one of the country’s most prestigious public universities.  Michigan voters had banned affirmative action in 2006, leading to a plunge in minority enrollment, particularly Black students. So the university built one of the most ambitious D.E.I. programs in higher education. It hoped to attract and retain a more diverse array of students and faculty. Since 2016, I learned, the university has spent roughly a quarter of a billion dollars on the effort. Each of Michigan’s 51 schools, colleges, libraries and other units has its own D.E.I. plan; many have their own D.E.I. offices. By one count, the school has more D.E.I. staff members than any other large public university in the country.  The program has yielded wins — a greater proportion of Hispanic and Asian undergraduates and a more racially diverse staff. It has also struggled to achieve some central goals. The proportion of Black undergraduates, now around 5 percent, has barely changed in a decade. Most strikingly, the university’s own data suggests that in striving to become more diverse and equitable, Michigan has become less inclusive. In a 2022 survey, students and faculty members reported a less positive campus climate than at the program’s start and less of a sense of belonging. Minority students — particularly those who are Black — were also less likely to report “feelings of being valued, belonging, personal growth and thriving.” Across the board, students were less likely to interact with people of a different race or with different politics... Last year, the school received more than twice as many formal complaints of sex or gender discrimination than it did in 2015. During roughly the same period, complaints involving race, religion or national origin have increased from a few dozen to almost 400. Some of that change reflects a growing willingness to challenge ugly behavior that might once have been tolerated. But people at Michigan also argued to me that the school’s D.E.I. efforts had fostered a culture of grievance. Everyday campus complaints and academic disagreements, professors and students told me, were cast as crises of inclusion and harm, each demanding administrative intervention.  At the law school, some students demanded that a professor be fired for referring to two students — who were both named Xu and sat next to each other in class — as “left Xu” and “right Xu.” Another class was derailed when the professor asked a white student to read aloud from a 1950s court decision containing the word “Negro.” As at other colleges and universities nationwide, faculty and students told me, everything escalated in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020. One professor, Eric Fretz, was pulled into a Title IX hearing because he invited his class to let him know when he wasn’t being sensitive enough to gender stereotypes. (A student complained that Fretz was forcing his female students to educate their own professor on how not to be sexist.) Michigan’s recent past may be a glimpse of D.E.I.’s future. The school’s program was built to accomplish what affirmative action, forbidden in the state, could not. Last year, the Supreme Court copied Michigan and barred schools nationwide from using racial preferences in admissions, making administrators likely to reach for D.E.I. solutions.  What went wrong at Michigan? One answer is that programs like Michigan’s are confused about whom — and what — D.E.I. is really for. The earliest versions were aimed at integrating Black students who began arriving on college campuses in larger numbers in the 1960s and 1970s. But in subsequent decades, as the Supreme Court whittled down the permissible scope of affirmative action programs, what began as a tool for racial justice turned into a program of educational enrichment: A core principle of D.E.I. now is that all students learn better in diverse environs. That leaves D.E.I. programs less focused on the people they were originally conceived to help — and conflicted about what they are really trying to achieve. Schools like Michigan pay lip service to religious or political diversity, for example, but may do little to advance those goals. Along the way, they make ambitious commitments to racial diversity that prove difficult to achieve. As a result, many Black students at Michigan have grown cynical about the school’s promises and feel that D.E.I. has forgotten them. They are, a leader in the university’s Black Student Union told me, “invested in the work, but not in D.E.I. itself.”"
DEI is poison as it encourages grievance mongering (as does wokeness in general)

What to Know About the University of Michigan’s D.E.I. Experiment - The New York Times - "Michigan’s expansive — and expensive — D.E.I. program has struggled to achieve its central goals even as it set off a cascade of unintended consequences... Striving to reach “every individual on campus,” Michigan has invested nearly 250 million dollars into D.E.I. since 2016, according to an internal presentation I obtained. Every university “unit” — from the medical school down to the archives — is required to have a D.E.I. plan. The number of employees who work in D.E.I.-related offices or have “diversity,” “equity” or “inclusion” in their job titles reached 241 last year, according to an analysis by Mark J. Perry, an emeritus professor of finance at the university’s Flint campus... students and faculty members across the board reported a less positive campus climate than at the program’s start and less of a sense of belonging. Students were less likely to interact with people of a different race or religion or with different politics — the exact kind of engagement D.E.I. programs, in theory, are meant to foster... Instead of improving students’ ability to engage with one another across their differences, Michigan’s D.E.I. expansion has coincided with an explosion in campus conflict over race and gender. Everyday campus complaints and academic disagreements are now cast as crises of inclusion and harm. In 2015, the university office charged with enforcing federal civil rights mandates including Title IX received about 200 complaints of sex- or gender-based misconduct on Michigan’s campus. Last year, it surpassed 500. Complaints involving race, religion or national origin increased to almost 400 from a few dozen during roughly the same period.
At Michigan, as at other schools, campus protests exploded after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks in Israel and Israel’s retaliation in Gaza. So did complaints of harassment or discrimination based on national origin or ancestry. This June, civil rights officials at the federal Department of Education found that Michigan had systematically mishandled such complaints over the 18-month period ending in February. Out of 67 complaints of harassment or discrimination based on national origin or ancestry that the officials reviewed — an overwhelming majority involving allegations of antisemitism, according to a tally I obtained — Michigan had investigated and made findings in just one."  

Thread by @JohnDSailer on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Tabbye Chavous, Chief Diversity Officer at UMich, has penned a long response to the NYT piece on her DEI bureaucracy.  Chavous says the article reminded her of “the novice student writing a class paper,” makes accusations of sexism, and then ties the piece to Project 2025. 🧵
She starts with a string of strong, specific condemnations: "misinformation," "disinformation," "sexism," "a preconceived thesis," "confirmation bias." She then gives a quick summary of the article's ostensibly worst offenses. One is that she only had two days to respond to a list of questions.  Another is that the article only cites @PsychRabble's article on microaggressions, "very thin analysis," and not the "decades" of scholarship on the topic. She argues the Heritage Foundation is a "primary" source showing "the failures of DEI." @nickconfessore mentions Heritage twice. Once citing the only study of its kind on the growth of DEI; once illustrating what conservatives think about DEI.  Therefore: Project 2025. Says that the article is "rife with sexist tropes." Specifically:
1) mentioning her marital status
2) not mentioning her credentials
3) using "gendered language"
Seems relevant that Chavous is married to UMich's former head of DEI, whose marital status is thus also mentioned." University of Michigan Weighs Changes to Its Diversity Program - The New York Times - "The changes under consideration would make Michigan one of the first selective public universities to rethink D.E.I. from the inside, rather than under legislative pressure... An investigation published by The New York Times Magazine in October found that Michigan had spent roughly a quarter-billion dollars on D.E.I. since 2016, creating one of the largest and most ambitious such programs among major research universities. Fifty-six percent of that amount went to salaries and benefits for D.E.I. staff across the university’s three campuses, according to an internal review conducted last spring by Michigan’s central D.E.I. office. Some regents believe that figure may understate the extent to which Michigan’s D.E.I. budget goes to fund administrative positions. “It is my hope that our efforts in D.E.I. focus on redirecting funding directly to students and away from a bloated administrative bureaucracy,” said Mark Bernstein, a Democratic regent. Sarah Hubbard, a Republican regent, said she believed that the growing use of diversity statements across the school had led the university to hire too many faculty members with similar views. Critics say that such statements, typically testimonials of a job candidate’s commitment to D.E.I., amount to compelled political speech. Officials at two other selective institutions, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, announced this summer that they would no longer require job candidates to submit diversity statements. “We must do better in hiring a wide variety of voices in our faculty so that they’re teaching a wide variety of opinions to our students,” Ms. Hubbard said. Su’ad Abdul Khabeer, a professor of American culture, dismissed such concerns at Monday’s rally, calling them “a thinly veiled attempt at thought suppression on campus.”... Michigan’s program has also drawn criticism from some of the university’s own students and faculty members, who have argued that the D.E.I. effort has struggled to meaningfully improve racial diversity on campus while restricting the range of views and ideas that are taught or discussed there. A survey conducted at Michigan’s flagship Ann Arbor campus to help measure progress on D.E.I. found that students reported a less positive campus climate than at the program’s start in 2016 and less of a sense of belonging... In January, the regents approved a statement reaffirming the school’s commitment to diversity of thought and freedom of speech. In September, a faculty committee appointed by Dr. Ono found that many professors and students across the generally liberal university regarded some of the school’s D.E.I. efforts, such as requiring diversity statements of potential faculty hires, as “enforcing an ideological orthodoxy, contrary to its commitment to freedom of expression.” An internal report submitted to Michigan’s provost this summer found that more than two-thirds of the academic units surveyed required job candidates to submit diversity statements. In October, the regents unanimously adopted a bylaw requiring Michigan’s president, deans, department chairs and other senior administrators to observe a policy of institutional neutrality, barring them from issuing official statements on political issues or controversies off campus... The school’s chief diversity officer, Tabbye Chavous, attacked The Times’s reporting in a lengthy response posted on LinkedIn... The counterattack appears to have frayed Ms. Chavous’s relationship with the board. “It is astonishing that we are not approaching this with any degree of self-reflection or curiosity,” said Mr. Bernstein. “And it is yet another example of how this area of activity considers itself to be beyond scrutiny. The moment of reckoning is fast approaching.”... The Senate voted last month to censure the regents for committing Michigan to institutional neutrality... Dr. Chavous also appeared at a public Senate meeting in mid-November to rally support for D.E.I. At the meeting, Dr. Chavous said it would be difficult for the program she oversees to be “fully dismantled” because it had been successfully “infused across the campus”"
Clearly, soaring college costs show that college needs to be free and paid for by the state as an investment in its people
Thought suppression is good when it pushes the left wing agenda, of course

Meme - i/o @eyeslasho: "The message about "very very low black achievement" being the root cause of racial disparities seems to be getting out, even to readers of the New York Times."
"What a waste of money. These colleges try to pretend they are these liberal bastions of equality, meanwhile DEI has become this self-propelled engine for hiring more and more low value administrators who in turn cause tuition to balloon. It's also all very silly. In 2024, the answer to "why does Michigan admit fewer black students than expected based on population" is blindingly obvious: black student achievement at the high school level is very very low. But that's not allowed to be discussed, instead there's dark hints that racism is the cause. When you can't even talk about the real issue (extremely low achievement in years before college) you have no chance of making any meaningful difference."

Nicholas A. Christakis on X - "So many of these features, if not all of them, have been apparent to so many observers at so many universities for over a decade. There is a kind of delusional decadence that has taken root about such matters. And, if anything, the response now that a bright light is being shone is a cynical effort to merely rebrand these efforts. The DEI apparatus has severely harmed the work of, and credibility of, universities, which should have known better, and even harmed the causes of equal opportunity and social justice, which I support."

John Sailer on X - "This NYT article reads like a list of rules for takeovers. Its an incredible cycle. Activists working with admin make demands, including for future climate surveys. No matter what, the surveys justify more programming. Eventually the bureaucracy is untouchable."

Thread by @sfmcguire79 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "“The rote incantations of a state religion.”  This is an incredible exposé of academic DEI.  It confirms so many things critics of DEI have been saying for years.  Better late than never, NYT!  Some highlights:  🧵
The most common attitude toward DEI at UMich, even among those committed to diversity and social justice, is “wary disdain.”  People are sick of it. Students find DEI to be “shallow” and/or “stifling.”  They “rolled their eyes” at the “profusion of course offerings” about identity politics and oppression.  They don’t read the emails (of course they don’t).
Michigan’s own survey data suggests the school has become less inclusive:  “Students were less likely to interact with people of a different race or religion or with different politics - the exact kind of engagement D.E.I. programs, in theory, are meant to foster.”  At the same time, the school has created a culture of grievance and an extensive bureaucratic apparatus that can be used to advance those grievances.
“Some administrators discovered that student activists could be a potent campus constituency.”  DEI is part of the growth of a massive bureaucratic class that is more leftwing than the faculty and uses students to advance its political goals.  It must be rooted out.
“No one can criticize the D.E.&I. program—not its scale, its dominance.”  Even other DEI employees complained about the central DEI office’s demands for plans, reports, meetings, etc., and its stifling control.
DEI hiring programs and the use of DEI statements were set up, officially to find people who would advance diversity (which is bad enough from a free expression standpoint), but everyone on campus said “it was almost universally understood among professors I spoke with that these programs were intended to generate racial and gender diversity without explicitly using affirmative action.”
It has created a culture of dishonesty at the university.  “Professors across the university described to me how, in faculty meetings and on search committees, they had resigned themselves to a pervasive double-think around hiring.”
The piece discusses at length the woke insanity of 2020.  “Every part of the university seemed to stage its own auto-da-fe... ‘There was a complete disconnect between the source of their anger and the target of it,’ the former dean said. ‘It was insatiable.’”  🎯
The piece details several cancellations, legions of complaints, etc.  The law school dean was pressured to release a statement.  He was criticized for not explicitly saying Black Lives Matter in it.  “Few of the attacks appeared to come from Black students.”
It also details the university’s response: hire more DEI bureaucrats and consultants, hold more trainings, etc.  This happened across academia.  These trainings subjected people to the hyper vigilance of wokeness and turned toward other causes such as pronouns.
One professor who was cancelled noted a common experience:  “Many colleagues expressed sympathy…but only in private.”  She also noted that “some of her accusers were white women.”  This was also common: “The most strident critics were sometimes not the most marginalized students, but peers who claimed to be fighting on their behalf.”
The piece totally exposes the reality that DEI is a political agenda that excludes dissenters: When a regent tried to do something about the lack of political diversity, the DEI office stood in the way:
For students, DEI is “simply background noise, the rote incantations of a state religion.” Black students have turned on it as well: And of course, DEI utterly failed after October 7:
This piece should be the death knell for bureaucratic DEI in academia."
Left wingers will continue to insist that conservatives who say "DEI" want to say the n word

Meme - Coddled affluent professional @feelsdesperate: "Wow look at these highly upvoted comments from the New York Times piece in DEI at University of Michigan.  Even credulous libs now feel comfortable saying they hate DEI.  This is a huge cultural victory."
"My mother has been a tenured professor at Michigan for over 30 years and the level of fear she has for being reprimanded has always reminded me of a communist regime. Control with fear"
"What's scary is how ironic and eerily this reminds me of Orwell's 1984. Where the language is so subverted every one is afraid to say anything and everything is the opposite of what it means. Orwell was a genius. He saw this 60 years ago as clear as day."
"Hats off to NYT for this incredible piece of journalism. It's frightening to see how even well-meaning efforts at improving campus climate can devolve into a culture of fear and censorship. Students have learned the power of their voices without the wisdom of how to use them."

Steve McGuire on X - "The most popular reader response (upvoted 3429 times) to the New York Times Magazine essay on DEI at UMich:
“If someone wanted to find a way to destroy American universities, they wouldn't be able to find a better tool than D.E.I. An enormous bureaucracy that drains resources and drives up the already astronomical price of college while contributing next to nothing to the advancement of actually underprivileged students. It has a profoundly negative effect on campus life by turning it into victimhood Olympics. Through its influence on hiring it actively works to exclude people on both ideological and racial grounds, and it further tilts the already wildly imbalanced campus politics. Moreover, as this article demonstrates, by trying to infuse every aspect of teaching and research with DEl considerations it further erodes the distinction between activism and scholarship and remakes entire disciplines in its shape (and not for the better). Finally, by politicizing the university it undermines the already problematic standing of higher education among the American public. As I said, one of the most pernicious things ever to happen to American higher education.”
Well said."

University of Michigan DEI administrator who was fired over alleged antisemitic comments plans to take legal action - "An administrator with the diversity, equity and inclusion office at the University of Michigan was fired Tuesday after she was accused of making antisemitic remarks – and now she plans to pursue legal action against the school, her attorney said.  Rachel Dawson, who served as director of the university’s Office of Academic Multicultural Initiatives, was accused of saying, “The university is controlled by wealthy Jews” during a conversation with two professors at an academic conference on diversity and equity in late March, according to documents obtained by CNN.  Dawson was also accused of saying, “We don’t work with Jews. They are wealthy and privileged and take care of themselves” and that “Jewish people have ‘no genetic DNA’ that would connect them to the land of Israel,” according to the documents...   The incident comes after months of escalating tensions between the university’s administration and pro-Palestinian students who have demanded leaders divest from Israel. Days ago, the home of a Jewish member of the university’s Board of Regents was vandalized with pro-Palestinian graffiti...   The allegations stemmed from a conversation that Dawson had on March 23 with two professors as they attended a diversity, equity and student success conference hosted by the American Association of Colleges and Universities in Philadelphia.  Loyola University New Orleans professor Naomi Yavneh Klos and an assistant professor of ethnic studies – who was not named and whose affiliation was not revealed – said they approached Dawson because they heard about the “negative experience” of a Jewish University of Michigan student, according to the Covington & Burling memo.  Klos asked Dawson whether her office works with Jewish students, and she responded that her office did not work with Jewish students because they’re privileged and did not need assistance from the DEI team, according to Klos’ account. The other professor stated that the conversation left her “practically shaking,” the memo said...   ”My client is a Black woman who was approached by two White women who became visibly angry with her when she didn’t agree with them,” Ghannam said. “The university decided to take the side of the two women over a beloved leader in the community who has a long history of serving all students.”   The university is grappling with a series of reports of Jewish people being targeted. On Monday, the sound of shattering glass jolted Board of Regents member Jordan Acker from his sleep just after 2 a.m., he told CNN. He went downstairs to find his front windows had been smashed and his wife’s car vandalized with the messages “Divest” and “Free Palestine.” The incident marks the third time Acker has been targeted since the start of the Israel-Hamas war."

Survey: Half of Women at University of Michigan Identify as LGBTQ | The American Spectator - "This month, the student newspaper of the University of Michigan released the results of its annual “sex survey.” It revealed a shocking result: Nearly half of biological women in the survey, which included 2,866 respondents, identify as LGBTQ.  Of the respondents who identify as women, 26.3 percent identify as bisexual, 6.4 percent identify as lesbian, 4.7 percent identify as queer, 2.8 percent identify as asexual, 2.4 percent identify as pansexual, and 1.5 percent identify as “other.” Additionally, 6 percent of respondents identified outside the male-female binary. Based on previous surveys, we can safely assume that the vast majority of these respondents are female. According to the 2022 U.S. Transgender Survey, the largest survey of its kind, 79 percent of people who identify as nonbinary are female. Factoring this in, we can estimate that about 48 percent of biological women in the survey identify as LGBTQ. (Though this excludes women who identified themselves as men.)... In contrast, 75 percent of respondents at Michigan who identify as men say they are heterosexual. Other surveys have also shown high rates of LGBTQ identity among young women and political liberals.  A 2024 Gallup survey, for instance, found that nearly 30 percent of Gen Z women identify as LGBTQ.  In addition, according to a 2021 Gallup survey, 30.7 percent of Gen Z liberal adults identify as LGBT while 6.6 percent of Gen Z conservative adults identify as LGBT. Notably, Gallup provided these numbers to me upon my prompting and did not otherwise make them publicly available. (Perhaps because the stark difference in LGBTQ identity across political lines was an uncomfortable finding.)... This extremely high rate of LGBTQ identity among women at the University of Michigan has important ramifications as the university reckons with its DEI program amidst growing backlash.  With so many students identifying their entire personhood with a category steeped in liberal ideology — such as pansexuality, asexuality, transgenderism, or genderqueerness — it’s hard to believe that such students will allow DEI to go away quietly.  DEI at Michigan has long promoted and catered to LGBTQ identity and ideology. For example, this year the university announced a “Queer and Trans Task Force” for “LGBTQIA2S+ students, staff, faculty, and alumnx” as part of its DEI 2.0 Strategic Plan. Additionally, a number of professors who were hired under DEI programs study LGBTQ-related topics... Regent Jordan Acker did suggest to the New York Times that such DEI reform could possibly occur in the future, saying, “[I]t is our obligation as a board to make sure as much taxpayer and tuition dollars go into direct student support as possible.”  Acker, a Democrat, has faced three incidents of antisemitic intimidation over the past year, including last week when people threw mason jars filled with urine through the window of his home and vandalized his wife’s car with the phrase “Free Palestine.” In an interview with Fox News this summer, Acker blamed DEI for campus antisemitism. One data point showing that Acker is entirely right came last week when the University of Michigan fired a DEI administrator after she allegedly said that “wealthy Jews” control the university and that Michigan’s DEI office doesn’t work with Jews because they are “wealthy and privileged.” (She denies the allegations.)  Even with Acker possibly considering some restructuring of DEI programs, it will be an upward battle to dismantle DEI at this incredibly woke school."

Michigan’s Radical Faculty Program - "At the University of Michigan (UM), professor Jessica Kenyatta Walker specializes in “critical food studies” and helped develop “in-class activities” on the “racialization of food in the United States.” Professor Adi Saleem’s recent book, Queer Jews, Queer Muslims: Race, Religion, and Representation, focuses on “triangulating the Jewish-Muslim dyad with a third variable: queerness.” Jennifer Dominique Jones, meantime, teaches courses in “Black Queer Histories” and “Black Intimacies.”  These scholars share more than an affinity for critical theory: each was hired through the university’s Collegiate Fellows Program. Established in 2016, the CFP hires postdoctoral fellows who show a “commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.” The fellows are guaranteed a tenure-track position after two years, bypassing the rigors of a normal competitive job search. Michigan has previously touted CFP as a success. But after the New York Times published a critical feature on the university’s DEI bureaucracy, UM quietly removed its web directory of faculty hired through program. That directory, accessible through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, lists a total of 44 faculty members. (The UM faculty claim the program has now recruited 55 scholars.) A close look at these scholars and their areas of research demonstrates the perils of screening faculty for their commitment to “diversity.”  Unsurprisingly, CFP administrators heavily favored scholars who conduct their research through the lens of race and gender. Former fellow Rovel Sequiera, now an assistant professor of women’s and gender studies, specializes in “global feminist, queer, and trans studies.” Jonathan Cho-Polizzi, assistant professor of Germanic languages and literature, lists “Activism & Radical Diversity” as an area of interest. Margo Mahan, assistant professor of sociology, focuses on the “racial and nativist origins of US domestic violence law.”   Last month, after news broke that the UM Board of Regents may vote to restructure the university’s DEI office, a group of faculty quickly circulated a petition opposing such a move. The letter spotlights the Collegiate Fellows Program, noting how it “has diversified the faculty by hiring 55 scholars from a range of backgrounds whose research, teaching, and other scholarly commitments contribute to diversity and equal opportunity in higher education and beyond.”  But the program seems to have “diversified the faculty” by way of viewpoint conformity. Of the 31 former CFP scholars now teaching at UM in non-STEM disciplines, all but one specialize in issues of identity—race, racism, gender, sexuality, and so on. Fourteen of those employ what can broadly be described as critical theory, including “critical race theory,” “critical translation studies,” “critical food studies,” “queer of color critique,” and “trans of color epistemologies.”  For years, defenders of academic freedom have argued that requiring prospective faculty to demonstrate their commitment to DEI functions as an ideological litmus test. The Collegiate Fellows Program lends credence to that argument"

Meme - i/o @eyeslasho: "Depressing facts about DEI at the University of Michigan:
— Almost 250 people are employed in DEI, and its budget could pay the in-state tuition of nearly 1,800 students
— Because 0% of black students in the state of Michigan score above 1400 on the SAT (compared to 25% of Asians), those blacks who are admitted to the school are academically unprepared for the rigor and about 1/3 end up on academic probation"

John Simpson shows all that is wrong with the BBC

Left wingers assume that the left wing worldview is the default and objectively correct way to view the world, and that anyone who disagrees is a bad person. This is what they mean when they claim reality has a liberal bias. 

John Simpson shows all that is wrong with the BBC

“Politically motivated.” Those are the two words that threaten to accompany the BBC into the gloom. They have been used with great indignation by its top journalists, who appear to see the fabrication of footage, pro-jihadi bias and trans fanaticism as trifling concerns set against the corporation’s overall mission of Making Britain Progressive Again.

Last night, John Simpson, the broadcaster’s World Affairs Editor, posted on X, “the BBC is facing a coordinated, politically motivated attack”, linking through to an article in – you guessed it – The Guardian. Did he never stop to consider whether, given the atmosphere, that was a good look?

Section 2.4.12 of the BBC’s impartiality guidelines reads: “Presenters, reporters, correspondents and on-air editors are the public face and voice of the BBC; they can have a significant impact on perceptions of whether due impartiality has been achieved. Audiences should not be able to tell from BBC output – or anywhere else – the personal opinions of its journalists or presenters in news and current affairs or factual journalism on matters of current public policy, political or industrial controversy, or on ‘controversial subjects’ in any other area.”

The fact that Simpson’s post appeared to be in clear contravention of that commitment was in itself a showcase of how far the BBC has slipped from its original brief. And as Daniel Hannan argued in his Sunday Telegraph column this week, impartiality is the whole point of the BBC. Take it away and the logic of the licence fee evaporates.

Unspun World, the programme Simpson presents, is described by the corporation as “an honest, unvarnished review of the week’s global news stories,” in which “BBC World Affairs Editor John Simpson and experts from across the world ditch the spin and get to the news.” Will anybody (aside from Guardian readers) watch it now?

As for its content, Simpson’s post summed up the BBC on several levels. Firstly, that its most senior journalists are simply unable to see the world as ordinary people see it. Politically motivated attack? Mate, the BBC literally edited footage and changed the meaning of the President’s words. This was no innocent error; as Janet Daley put it, this was “a professionally crafted editing job which has to have been designed to produce a calculated effect for a political purpose”. Your bleating is only making it worse.

Secondly, that the BBC considers a Left-of-centre worldview to be the definition of objectivity. The Guardian is its ideological ally because both assume they are the privileged holders of sanity, grown-up thinking and the truth, which must be defended against the fascist hordes. When the chips are down, the BBC won’t even bother to hide it.

Thirdly, that any criticism of the broadcaster represents a bad-faith attempt to destroy a great socialist project that aims to redistribute the news to each according to his needs. Here lies the kicker: in pushing such a conspiratorial Leftist worldview, the doughty journalists of the BBC have apparently dispensed with the need for evidence.

On the one hand, there is ample proof that the broadcaster has succumbed to systemic, progressive bias and has placed ideological warfare above the pursuit of fact. 

So much evidence, in fact, that I need not rehearse it here: The Telegraph has placed in the public domain the internal dossier that lays bare the scale of the catastrophe.

On the other hand, what proof exists for the counter-argument, that the BBC is the victim of a “politically motivated” campaign of destruction?

The column shared by Simpson was written by institutional Guardianista Jane Martinson and laboured under the headline: “The BBC is facing a coordinated, politically motivated attack. With these resignations, it has given in”. So there’s no mistaking where the World Affairs Editor’s heart lies, then.

Martinson’s piece hinges on one extremely telling paragraph: “Leave to one side for now the direct allegations about specific failures of BBC coverage, and the BBC’s own baffling inability or unwillingness to defend itself over the past week. But the row obscures the context that explains what is, at the heart of the matter, a political campaign against the BBC that could act as a textbook example of how to confuse and undermine the kind of journalism that is, at the very least, aiming for impartiality in a sea of spin and distortion.”

Read that again. “Leave to one side for now the direct allegations about specific failures of BBC coverage.” Leave it to one side? But those allegations are literally the whole point.

It’s a bit like saying, “leave aside October 7, the hostages, continued threats from Hamas and Israel’s extensive attempts to protect civilians and provide humanitarian aid, Israel’s campaign in Gaza was a genocide.” Hang on, that’s exactly the message we’ve been getting from the BBC, the UN and the rest.

The remainder of the column is built on two substantial points. Firstly, Martinson mentions how Prescott criticised the BBC for producing a major documentary on Donald Trump in the run-up to the presidential election, which was profoundly critical, but offered no such programme on his opponent, Kamala Harris.

This concern is dismissed by Martinson thus: “As someone who has spent years dealing with the issue of impartiality told me, this is an entirely wrongheaded and now discredited view of impartiality, the sort of view that led to airtime being given to climate denial.” Then she airily moves on, as if an assertion by “someone who has spent years dealing with the issue of impartiality” is enough to win the argument. Who needs evidence, eh?

Secondly, Martinson zeroes in on a section of the Prescott dossier in which he cited a 2022 report by a group called History Reclaimed. Martinson writes: “While some of its members are senior Oxbridge academics, History Reclaimed’s website makes clear that the group was formed to counter ‘culture war’ narratives in the media that suggest British history is shameful.”

She adds: “In its own review at the time, the BBC concluded that History Reclaimed ‘cherry picking a handful of examples or highlighting genuine mistakes in thousands of hours of output on TV and radio does not constitute analysis and is not a true representation of BBC content’.”

Yet in his dossier, Prescott has pre-emptively refuted the BBC’s standard “cherry picking” defence by emphasising his reliance on internal reports by David Grossman, Senior Editorial Adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Board. Those form the brunt of his dossier. By comparison, his citation of History Reclaimed is negligible.

Prescott writes: “One of the defences often deployed by the BBC when criticised by external organisations is to claim the evidence presented is mere ‘cherry picking’. This is why David’s reports were so very important: they came from within the BBC and were produced by a very experienced and talented BBC journalist. Yet his findings were still, on the whole, dismissed or ignored, even after EGSC members tried to press home the case for full-blooded action.”

In terms of substance, that’s it. Seriously. Otherwise, Martinson indulges in the kind of dangerous mud-slinging that The Guardian loves to condemn in the Daily Mail. The BBC has to “deal with enemies from within”, she writes, evoking shades of the Mail’s notorious “enemies of the people” headline, which did not go down well at Guardian Towers. “Each criticism of BBC coverage comes from the anti-progressive culture-war playbook,” her rant continues.

So that’s the strength of the BBC’s defence: duck the substance and descend into spittle-flecked diatribes which claim to attack the “culture wars” while playing a leading role in them. They are so deeply in the woods that they think the woods are all there is. Well, now the woodsman’s coming.

Links - 20th December 2025 (1 - General Wokeness)

The Grenfell effigy and the fall of liberal Britain - spiked - "He has narrowly escaped prison for distributing an offensive joke, in private. Bussetti says he had no hand in making the effigy and he sent the video to private groups. It is unclear how it ended up on YouTube. Still, he was arrested and later found to have breached Section 127 of the Communications Act, which criminalises the distribution ‘by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive’. In 21st-century Britain, being offensive – sorry, grossly offensive – is an offence. And yet Bussetti’s case has come and gone with little comment. Some of the news headlines seemed almost disappointed he wasn’t actually locked up. ‘Man who made “abhorrent” video of Grenfell Tower effigy on bonfire spared jail’, said the Independent, which once upon a time was Britain’s liberal newspaper, before it became an ad-crippled, clickbaity blog. We have become numb to cases like this. Last year, two men were actually jailed over a racist video, a rant about Priti Patel. The man who made it and sent it to some friends in a private Snapchat group got 10 weeks. His dopey mate who sent it on to another closed group got six weeks. Then there’s the Scot who narrowly escaped jail earlier this year for celebrating the death of Captain Tom Moore. These are just a few examples of the estimated nine people arrested in Britain each day under Section 127. That’s thousands every year. All of these men sound like prize dickheads. But it shouldn’t be a crime to be a prize dickhead. And there are plenty of people who have been caught in the net of British state censorship in recent years for statements that were far less outrageous, or were just puerile jokes. Take the case of Count Dankula, the Scottish YouTuber fined for making a skit about his pug turning Nazi. In 2014, a 20-year-old builder from Lincolnshire was fined £400 for taking a photo of a police officer and drawing two penises on top of him in a Snapchat post. And that’s just the Communications Act. Britain has many more legal restrictions on what really should be considered protected speech. Broadcaster Darren Grimes was investigated by the police in 2020 for a possible offence under the Public Order Act, all because of comments made by historian David Starkey on Grimes’ YouTube show. Then there’s the more than 120,000 Brits who have had so-called ‘non-crime hate incidents’ recorded against their names in recent years – an Orwellian police practice only recently struck down by the Court of Appeal as an unlawful interference in free speech.  This all amounts to an extensive regime of state censorship. And yet it goes on and on and on in supposedly liberal Britain. It is presented to us as benign censorship, as caring censorship, as censorship aimed at the hateful or offensive, rather than the dissident or blasphemous. But there is no simple distinction between these things. One man’s hate preacher is another man’s dissident. And while we no longer arrest those who defame Christ, we happily arrest those who ‘misgender’ trans activists. A truly liberal society would not trust the state to decide what is true or false or right or wrong in this way. But that is no longer the case here in Britain. State censorship has become a crazed form of virtue-signalling, and a symbol of our warped priorities. We prosecute a man for mocking a tragedy like Grenfell, while those responsible for helping bring that tragedy about continue to walk free... Britain is fast becoming a warning to the Western world. If you allow state censorship to take root, even with the supposed best of intentions, then even nominally liberal nations will do deeply authoritarian things – like locking people up for telling offensive jokes. Left unprotected, free speech can so swiftly go up in flames."
From 2022

The culture war is destroying equality before the law - spiked - "This process of prioritising certain crimes above others has been seen in Scotland, where violent crimes have been downgraded while hate crimes and cases of domestic abuse, even where no violence has taken place, are prioritised. The policing of domestic violence, for example, has been accompanied by an overzealous and interventionist approach to people’s private lives. But few if any criticisms are publicly raised about these police practices which have, at times, impacted badly on both the accused and the alleged victims.  Reach for the Scottish police training manual and you will not find a booklet that prioritises an understanding of law, order or even crime. Police Scotland’s Initial Training Course Manual 1 starts with a 50-page explanation of ‘Diversity Awareness’. Those who are not ‘aware’ are the people we are now meant to be concerned about, the people the newly educated cops know all about – the deplorables. The deplorables, in the British context, can be summed up by the put-down terms ‘Sun reader and ‘Daily Mail reader’, or as Fintan O’Toole put it, the ‘people with tattooed arms and golf-club buffers’. These are the imagined bigots that make up white Britain, the ‘White Van Man’ coupled with his more middle-class compatriot who lack not only the political but also the cultural and even emotional awareness of the metropolitan elite. These men and women are the targets of modern law and order.  We can see this even in the popular depiction of crime itself. In the 1970s and 1980s, for example, crime was a conservative, right-wing issue. It was street crime, muggers and robbers who captured the imagination and who were depicted in cop dramas. Crime was also politically linked to radicals and hedonists, to outsiders and militants – the ‘enemy within’, as Margaret Thatcher called them. Criminals were seen as lefties. Now, with TV programmes like The Good Fight, crime has been reconstructed through the minds of the modern liberal elite and has come to be associated with the deplorables, the racist, sexist bigots, who have become the new abusive ‘baddies’ responsible for all the crimes that matter.  Deplorable football fans in Scotland have been severely criminalised and policed over the past decade. The Offensive Behaviour at Football Act (now repealed) was a law that specifically banned offensive language among football fans while ensuring the cultured types – your poets and artists – were excluded from the law. Here, what are depicted as ‘sectarian’ (ie, racist) fans have particularly been targeted with a variety of laws and initiatives to change their behaviour or their ‘culture’ – with the threat of up to five years in prison for their offensive behaviour...  Even before the Offensive Behaviour at Football Act was passed, a man called Stephen Birrell was imprisoned for eight months for his online rants. His crime was to say he wants Celtic scumbag, Fenian tattie farmers to die. There was no threat of violence, simply an inane drunken rant. Sheriff Bill Totten explained that by arresting Birrell, he intended to ‘send a clear message that the right-thinking people of Glasgow and Scotland will not allow any behaviour of this nature, or allow any place in our society for hate crime’. It seems it was not enough for the right-thinking people of Scotland simply to disapprove of foul language – it had to be criminalised and Birrell needed eight months in a cell to help him to become aware. Online offences are being politicised and policed by the new elite. Facebook has a new board of censors filled with right-on individuals who approve of deplatforming deplorables...  There also appears to be a scale of deplorability – the more right-wing a person is, the more they can expect the authorities and the law to interfere in their lives and activities. In 2012, for example, a pregnant mother of three, Toni McLeod, found that getting her children back from social services was at least in part dependent upon her giving up her friendship with people associated with the English Defence League...  The culture war against the deplorables is not only a matter of who is being criminalised but also who is not being criminalised. We have seen, for example, the divergent attitudes to mass gatherings during the pandemic as well as to acts of vandalism and violence recently. This was previously clear in the case of Extinction Rebellion, which brought areas of London to a standstill and dug up or vandalised other parts of the UK with barely a raised eyebrow from onlooking police. We have also seen the numerous cases of grooming gangs, made up of largely British Pakistani Muslim men, who used and abused thousands of underage girls while authorities turned a blind eye and the media said little. Those who spoke up, like Labour’s Sarah Champion, were ostracised. Champion’s crime was to claim that Asian grooming gangs had been allowed to thrive because people are ‘more afraid to be called a racist than they are afraid to be wrong about calling out child abuse’.  As has been noted, this lack of concern for white working-class British girls appears to be because it did not fit the correct deplorable narrative. If the perpetrators had been Sun or Mail-reading types, one suspects a very different approach would have been taken and a very different level of outrage would have been expressed. The silence about the sexual abuse of underage girls also stands out in contrast to the #MeToo campaign which had an enormous impact on institutions across the UK. This involved largely middle-class professional women who rarely experienced anything like the levels of abuse that the girls in Huddersfield, Rotherham, Newcastle, Rochdale, Peterborough, Aylesbury, Oxford, Bristol and Keighley were subjected to.  These cases are important because they demonstrate what is becoming increasingly clear – that there is a war going on, not just in culture, not just in politics, but in law and on the streets of Britain where PC police officers are helping to transform the nature of policing across the UK. Britain is becoming a country less of the haves and have nots than the chavs and the chav-nots – a country not only divided by cultural differences but also one that is becoming increasingly authoritarian as the new elite attempts to enforce its cultural values on the entire population with the threat of law, policing and ultimately prison."

In defence of colourblindness - spiked - "the goal of a ‘colourblind’ society is in itself a racist idea. Contrary to past anti-racist arguments, many today argue that we should judge people by their race, emphasise racial difference and think along racial lines. And no, this isn’t just the far right – this is what is being put forward by a toxic strand of the new left, woke identitarianism. This illiberal, intolerant ideology is at odds with the universalist, humanist goal of a colourblind society. It is a disempowering, backward-looking movement.  ‘Woke identitarianism’ is an ideology that has accelerated over the past 10 years. It is strongly influenced by critical-race theory, standpoint epistemology and intersectionality. The thread that underpins all of these ideas is the notion that every aspect, every facet and every detail of our lives, history and culture are explicitly or implicitly complicit in racism. According to this view, there are hierarchies of victimhood in which the more claims to real or perceived victimhood status you have, the more authentic and morally superior you are. This worldview rejects dialogue between different groups because different people can never ‘truly understand’ each other’s experiences. As James Lindsay, co-founder of New Discourses, has pointed out, many woke identitarians even argue that ‘science, reason, and evidence are a “white” way of knowing’. He rightly concludes that this hurts everyone, especially black people. It renders dialogue pointless. It denies that black people can be individuals with agency. And it denies that we can make any progress towards equality.  It is important to understand how toxic the identitarian worldview is. And yet it has become incredibly influential. We have now arrived at a situation in which public debate has almost entirely broken down. History, society and white people as a whole are being recast as inherently racist. In order to make these kinds of claims, woke identitarians have to ignore inconvenient truths, such as the existence of high-flying, patriotic and successful ethnic minorities, or the fact that white working-class boys are among the most disadvantaged groups in Britain today. Britain certainly has its flaws, like all countries, but overall we are tolerant and welcoming. A 2019 survey commissioned by the EU ranked Britain the least racist of the 12 western European countries it studied. We mustn’t allow a fact-free picture of Britain to drive our thinking... if we cannot communicate freely and openly, we will not be able to understand one another and foster empathy. It is minorities – ethnic or otherwise – who benefit from free speech the most, because the views of the majority are already backed up by popularity and power.  Woke identitarians generally fear freedom of speech because their intellectually vacuous worldview is in danger of collapsing under even the slightest bit of scrutiny... The current obsession with race often means we are missing the true dynamics in society. Class, for instance, plays a major role in social outcomes, but discussion of it is rare. There are many white working-class people, particularly in the provinces, who do not feel they have benefited from ‘white privilege’. Indeed, they would argue that they are far from privileged. Do their ‘lived experiences’ count? Interestingly, white working-class boys face very similar social challenges to British Caribbean children. In contrast, the situation for British Nigerian, Indian and Chinese children is vastly more positive. These differences suggest that race alone cannot explain social outcomes... It also cannot be overlooked that some of the most ardent proponents of woke identitarianism are some of the most privileged, most significant beneficiaries of the status quo: corporations, the political, cultural and media establishment – and even the royal family. Far from challenging the establishment, wokeness has become a means through which the establishment reinvents itself. Corporations and public figures can gain woke points by engaging in superficial gestures which win social validation and accumulate capital, while real social issues remain unsolved.The woke worldview has merely repackaged racial essentialism for a new age. We must reject it."

Micro-aggressions could give people of colour heart disease, Bank of England tells staff - "The Bank’s slide deck suggests workers should report or confront colleagues for “micro-aggressions” such as asking to touch someone’s hair and whether their family owned a shop.  Managers are told they have a “responsibility” to “intervene or escalate” in response to such incidents. These are said to include when a member of staff tells a colleague from an ethnic minority that they “speak well” or asks them where they are “really” from.  Another example of a micro-aggression provided in the slides is someone telling a colleague that they “don’t act like other black people”. The Bank references a blog post on the website of pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, which in turn cites two studies published in United States academic journals around a decade ago.  One study, published in 2014 in the American Journal of Public Health, surveyed 3,105 adults in Chicago and found that “racism-related vigilance” may result in chronic stress that contributes to hypertension.  It concluded: “Vigilance may represent an important and unique source of chronic stress that contributes to the well-documented higher prevalence of hypertension among Blacks than Whites; it is a possible contributor to hypertension among Hispanics but not Whites.”  Another study surveyed 218 Native American people diagnosed with type 2 diabetes about their “micro-aggressive experiences in healthcare settings” and was published in 2015 in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine.  “Micro-aggressive experiences undermine the ideals of patient-centred care and in this study were correlated with worse mental and physical health reports for American Indians living with a chronic disease,” it concluded... The Bank’s review cited data showing its staff from ethnic minorities were more likely to report being interrupted when talking in meetings than their white colleagues, based on a survey of its employees.  The review went on to say that “disproportionately more minority ethnic colleagues believed that managers never or rarely held colleagues to account for non-inclusive behaviours or micro-aggressions.”  It recommended that the Bank took steps to “embed a culture of feedback and positive behaviour change” and “improve reporting mechanisms and accountability”."

French DIY chain in woke row over advert on Right-wing website - "France’s favourite DIY chain Leroy Merlin has been accused of capitulating to “woke” pressure after it pulled its online advertising from a Right-wing magazine.  The controversy erupted after a Left-wing online activist group publicly alerted the chain that one of its adverts had appeared on Frontières, which it denounced as a “despicable website” that is “obsessed with immigration”.  The swift response by Leroy Merlin, which has more than 140 stores across France, has unleashed a torrent of fury from Right-wing politicians and online commentators who argue the company risks alienating “millions” of its conservative customers. Frontières has recently been targeted by the Sleeping Giants collective, a group that campaigns to cut advertising revenues for outlets it deems “hateful”, “extremist” or “racist”. The campaigners took issue with the magazine selling a T-shirt bearing what it described as a “xenophobic” slogan... The magazine alleged that NGOs, lawyers and Left-wing journalists were “profiting” from migration – allegations that human rights groups insist are defamatory.  Just hours later, Leroy Merlin announced that the site had been “immediately added” to the company’s advertising blocklist... Others bemoaned the politicisation of everyday life. “Soon we won’t go to the butcher’s because he votes for the National Rally, or to the hairdresser’s because she votes for LFI... This is madness, guys!,” wrote one user."

Ayaan Hirsi Ali on X - "Sweden wanted to become a moral superpower but is now a moral basket case. This is the umpteenth warning to the West. Do not appease intolerance. It does not buy you peace or quiet it only emboldens the aggressors."

Helen on X - "When a mosque had it's paint damaged, Starmer and Mahmood rushed to visit and give them £10M for a lick of paint..... Meanwhile Ilyas Akhtar has pleaded guilty to an arson attack on St Peter's Church in Slough."

Freedomain - with Stefan Molyneux, MA on X - "90% of modern politics is just people pretending to be helpless/sad/angry so that single women will vote to ‘mother’ them with other people’s money."

Meme - Clownworld Chronicles: Ultra Maga: "Cool story bro, now try flying the Union Jack or the St. George's Cross"
"A van displaying a meme of JD Vance has been driving around the UK village where he is currently vacationing. The stunt was organized by a group to "prove" that the UK does have free speech."
An American tells a Russian that Americans have freedom of speech and that he could go to the White House and shout: “Go to hell, Ronald Reagan!”. The Russian answers: Oh, I too can go to the Kremlin and shout: “Go to hell, Ronald Reagan!”

A thorny history of race-based statistics - "Twenty-six years ago, a staff inspector by the name of Julian Fantino — future Toronto police chief — sat in a small committee room and delivered a slew of explosive race-based crime statistics focused on the Jane-Finch neighbourhood.  Fantino, then head of 31 Division, told North York’s committee on community, race and ethnic relations that, while blacks made up 6 per cent of the Jane-Finch population, they accounted for 82 per cent of robberies and muggings, 55 per cent of purse-snatchings and 51 per cent of drug offences in the previous year.  The Star’s Royson James was apparently the only reporter present. He duly filed a story that appeared on the next day’s front page. All hell broke loose.  Police in Ontario were forbidden to compile race-based crime statistics. Solicitor-General Joan Smith, responsible for law enforcement in the province, castigated Fantino for collecting and releasing data that “accomplishes nothing useful.” Black activist groups and social agencies condemned Fantino for fueling existing prejudices. Police chief Jack Marks insisted the force did not keep race stats. Fantino maintained the data had been collected at the request of the aforementioned committee. Its chairman disputed the claim.  That scandal clung to Fantino for the duration of his cop career and launched decades of angst-ridden discussion of when it might be justifiable to collate or analyze race-based data, particularly in a policing context.  The short answer: Never.  I thought that was the wrong answer then, the easy cop-out. Information is power. We need to know facts, interpret complex realities, evaluate trends. And try to fix the problem... Fast forward to Monday’s page-one story by the Star’s Wendy Gillis about the black hole of information surrounding visible minorities killed by Toronto cops. No such thing. Black males might get carded excessively, but, nope, the information you’re seeking doesn’t exist.  The provincial police watchdog, the Ministry of Community and Correctional Services, Toronto Police Service, not even Statistics Canada will touch the stuff. An attempt by the Star to match known fatal confrontations with contemporaneous media reports left too many gaps, because race of the victims wasn’t included in those stories. And that, I’m certain, harks back to an era when the Star vigilantly eliminated race details from news coverage... we’re left with a dearth of knowledge. And now some of the very people who most passionately demanded the abandonment of race statistics decades ago — because of the clear harm caused — are advocating for that information to be collected and accessible."
From 2015. Left wing strategy: refuse to collect data then accuse others who point out the truth of spreading misinformation

FIRST READING: B.C.'s public school teachers told to 'queer' outdoor education
OneBC presses BC NDP over “queering outdoor education” article pushed on teachers - "B.C.’s minister for education nearly broke down in tears after being asked if kindergarteners should be “queering the outdoors” after OneBC MLA Tara Armstrong read from a BC Teachers’ Federation article that she says frames the “birds and the bees” as a colonial, white supremacist narrative.  During question period yesterday, Tara Armstrong read directly from a BCTF article that claims colonialism shaped ideas about nature, gender, and biological reproduction. The article argues that the common phrase “the birds and the bees” reflects “binary pseudoscience” tied to “white supremacy culture.” Armstrong asked Education Minister Lisa Beare whether she supports teachers’ unions promoting these ideas to young children.  “What happens when left wing fanatics take over the union representing the province’s teachers?” Armstrong said. “You get ‘queering outdoor education,’ the latest module made by the BC Teachers’ Federation for kindergarten students. The birds and the bees are racist now. Does the minister agree that kids should be queering the outdoors?” Beare did not address the article’s content, instead accusing Armstrong of using her “place of privilege” to “bring children down.” Beare said the government is focused on making all students feel welcome and supported, then delivered an emotional response about vulnerable youth... The BCTF article, published earlier this month by a Vancouver teacher, promotes drag pedagogy, anti-colonial activism, and the rejection of biological categories in outdoor education. Teachers are encouraged to question whether describing animals as male or female reinforces “cis-heteronormative assumptions.” The article also urges educators to view biological reproduction as a political narrative rather than a scientific fact.  Armstrong said only a small minority of activists believe these ideas, yet they continue to shape curriculum materials. She argues that politicians, parents, and teachers need to “say loudly and clearly that the indoctrination of our children must end.”... Armstrong said she has heard from teachers who feel they cannot speak openly and parents who have been punished for objecting.  “There was a parent on Vancouver Island banned from her own child’s school for posting criticism online,” she said. “It is out of control.”"

Craig Kelly:🇦🇺Foundation for Economic Education on X - "Is anyone surprised that eSafety Karen has given X’s leftist competitor BLUESKY an exemption from the under-16’s social media ban ?
A fundamental principle of a free democratic society is that laws have to apply equally. In contrast, neo-fascist authoritarians & totalitarians are happy apply different standards for different groups. The fact that eSafety Karen has one rule for X and other for the leftist BLUESKY when they are direct competitors and have identical operating platforms - tells us everything we need to know about eSafety Karen.   She is a dangerous ideologue who is completely unfit to have any power."

Dries Van Langenhove on X - "For seven years now, my lawyer and I have been asking the judges what exactly I am supposed to have said or done that forms the basis of their prosecution. "Where and how, exactly, did I incite to hatred?" It is still completely unclear to this day.  Judge Mieke Butstraen (Court of Appeal) finally iresponded to this in the ruling. She only did so because she was obliged to do so due to the 𝘰𝘣𝘴𝘤𝘶𝘳𝘪 𝘭𝘪𝘣𝘦𝘭𝘭𝘪 objection we raised in our written submissions.  Judge Butstraen wrote: “It is not the case that it must be specified which concrete material acts the accused is precisely alleged to have committed.”  Well, if even 𝐓𝐇𝐀𝐓 isn’t required anymore, what is your 𝐫𝐔𝐥𝐄 𝐨𝐅 𝐥𝐀𝐰 still worth then? What does such a ruling even mean anymore? Absolutely nothing!  The 30th of December, the Supreme Court will decide wether this ruling, that convicted me to a prison sentence, holds."
Jonatan Pallesen on X - "This case is bonkers.  It is against the European Convention of Human Rights to not be told what you are accused of.  Specifically, Article 6 part 3 says: "Everyone charged with a criminal offence has the following minimum rights:  to be informed promptly, in a language which he understands and in detail, of the nature and cause of the accusation against him"  So that should apply to the Dries van Langenhove case.  But perhaps the European human rights law only applies when it prevents punishment of rapist foreigners?"

Leading Report on X - "BREAKING: Support for same-s*x marriage in U.S. falls to 54%, per YouGov poll."
Adam Zivo on X - "Support for gay rights has been eroding ever since radical activists replaced “love is love” with “queer as in fuck you” in the late 2010s. Normal gays tried to warn them that this would blow up in their faces, but were ignored and even vilified."

Amala Ekpunobi on X - "Leftist says white people deserved to be “side-eyed” and judged when they are in asian grocery stores and predominantly asian spaces. These people are nuts."
Lauren Chen on X - "If this Asian hates seeing white people in "Asian spaces," I know this great place she can go where there are barely any white people at all. It's called Asia."

Links - 19th December 2025 (2)

Terry Newman: Malcolm Gladwell — the storyteller misunderstood as the sage - "Malcolm Gladwell has been disappointing people for years. In the fall of 2022, the bestselling author and speaker participated in a Munk Debate on Media in Toronto alongside New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, debating journalist Matt Taibbi and author Douglas Murray about whether the mainstream media could be trusted. When audience members entered Roy Thomson Hall that evening, as is practice, they voted pre-debate on the motion “Be it resolved, don’t trust mainstream media,” with 52 per cent backing Gladwell and Goldberg’s defence of the mainstream media, before they even took to the stage. In other words, the debate was Gladwell’s and Goldberg’s to lose. Gladwell performed poorly. Seemingly unprepared, he came off as arrogant and smug, engaging in ad hominem attacks, calling Taibbi and Murray conspiracy theorists. To illustrate the decline in trust in journalism, Taibbi referenced polls showing that American journalist Walter Cronkite was once “ the most trusted man in America .” In response, Gladwell created a strawman of Taibbi’s argument, saying, “What you’re really saying is you want to go back to the days when a white man in a suit sat behind a desk and everybody believed what he said. That’s what you’re nostalgic for. You’re nostalgic for the days of Walter Cronkite, when there was a white man who was in charge of the news, and when I think about that era, I think about the fact that era was also the era of Jim Crow. It was an era when a whole series of people in this society were not heard, were not listened to,” a response that Taibbi felt insinuated that he was a racist . Of course, the point Gladwell was trying to make had nothing to do with trust in journalism. By the end of the night, a dramatic shift occurred. Post-debate, after hearing arguments on both sides, the audience weighed in again, their votes swinging a whopping 19 per cent — a decisive win and the largest voter swing in Munk Debate history — awarding their opponents Taibbi and Murray the win, and 67 per cent of audience departed Roy Thomson Hall that night convinced that the mainstream media could no longer be trusted. Gladwell later admitted in his Revisionist History podcast that he had performed poorly, failing to engage with Taibbi’s or Murray’s arguments, or listen to his opponents’ and the audience’s concerns. “We lost because we weren’t listening. I wasn’t listening. I was so caught up in my own head, in my own argument, that I didn’t hear what the other side was saying, and I didn’t hear what the audience was saying.” In March of that year, Gladwell led “ a conversation on the path forward for the inclusion of transgender athletes in sports ” at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston, according to the events website. He opened the panel discussion with what he called a “dumb martian question” which he defined as “the question a martian would ask if they were looking down on this panel.” He continued, “When maybe 100 years ago women were let into things like the Olympics, and if you’d asked people 100 years ago why we had separate categories for men and women, they would have given a 19th century answer right? Women and men are physiologically distinct, the only way to have fair competition is to separate them out, does that definition in 2021 need updating?” The problem with setting the talk up this way, is Gladwell begins with a situation where women were unfairly excluded from the Olympics in general, loading his question about whether or not women still need separate categories, a very different issue than whether they were welcomed at all, front-loading it with the assumption that because inclusive thinking was flawed before, it may now be flawed again. During the panel discussion, there wasn’t a lot of disagreement from the panel members... Gladwell appeared unprepared for their responses, leaning naively into the inclusion side throughout the debate. Fast-forward to 2025, Gladwell once again admitted to another disappointing performance... he was “ ashamed of (his) performance on that panel, because I share your position 100 percent. And I was cowed at the idea of saying anything on this issue .” The reaction to Gladwell’s remarks was mixed. Tablet’s Liel Leibovitz called the apology “fake,” “self-serving,” and went so far as to suggest that it was a sign that he saw journalism “as a pursuit of social clout and career advancement” rather than telling the truth. Many were less harsh, noting that the most important thing was that he apologized. Others debated whether it was an apology at all. But everyone’s missing the point. Gladwell’s poor performance in debates and panels shouldn’t be surprising. This isn’t where his expertise actually lies. The truth is, Gladwell is a synthesizer and storyteller, not a master debater or moderator."

Meme - "WHEN YOU CANT DECIDE BETWEEN A GIRLFRIEND OR A PET SO YOU GET BOTH. *woman with dog mask including muzzle and ears*"

Meme - "Shout out to Carrie at Darvel Library for putting this display together... every little thing she does is magic!"
"Sting dropped in to return his books"
"EVERY MOVE YOU MAKE C.L. TAYLOR"
"EVERY SMILE YOU FAKE. DOROTHY KOOMSON"
"EVERY BREATH YOU TAKE. MARY HIGGINS CLARK & ALAFAIR BURKE"
"I'LL BE WATCHING YOU"

Viewers are the reason TV is so bad
From Channel 4, which pushes "diversity" everywhere. If you don't shut up and consume, you're a bad person.

Advertising's likability crisis - "We hear about many crises in marketing. Most are overblown. But if there’s one thing that’s approaching crisis level, it’s the decline in the likeability of ads"

Mom Has Ingenious Yet Mean Hack To Get Her Kid To Take More Baths - "He didn't want to take a bath, so I took a picture while he was sleeping and edited it with cockroaches. Now he takes a bath 10 times a day"

Meme - "Beef Wellington Is just a corn dog from a different socioeconomic background."

Meme - "Him: Your father must've been a thief.
Her: Let me guess... Because he stole the stars for my eyes?
Him: No. Because you're black."

Pizza shop workers take down armed robber, only to find it’s their former boss - "A former pizza shop employee in Massachusetts is accused of trying to rob his old workplace.  Police say a man wearing a mask and carrying what turned out to be a fake gun walked into Northeast Pizza in Barre"
Scooby Doo, where are you?

Meme - "Back in my day there was no twitter, so you had to write your crazy ramblings on poster board and try to get on national tv"
"Destineys child and TLC are lesbians" *WWE match*

Man Showed Up 25 Minutes Early To An Interview, And Lost The Job. See Viral Post - "Matthew Prewett, the owner of a cleaning service based in Atlanta, shared his experience on LinkedIn, revealing that a candidate for an office administrator role arrived 25 minutes before the scheduled time-something he cited as a major factor in his decision not to hire the applicant.  "I had a candidate show up 25 minutes early to an interview last week. That was a major deciding factor in why I didn't hire him," Prewett wrote, inviting opinions on whether arriving "significantly" early to an interview is appropriate.  As the post began gaining traction, Prewett further clarified the reason, stating that while arriving slightly early is generally advisable, turning up far ahead of time can signal poor time management or a lack of social awareness. "Showing up early is good. Showing up extremely early can suggest someone isn't good with time or expects to be accommodated. It also made me feel rushed," he explained, adding that in his small office, the early arrival made him uncomfortable as the candidate could overhear business calls.  Prewett emphasised that interview etiquette typically allows for candidates to arrive five to fifteen minutes ahead of time, but anything beyond that could come off as inconsiderate."

The staff ate it later - Wikipedia - ""The staff ate it later" (Japanese: この後、スタッフが美味しくいただきました, romanized: Kono ato, sutaffu ga oishiku itadakimashita) is a caption shown on screen when food appears in a Japanese TV program to indicate that it was not thrown away after filming (it is generally not socially acceptable to discard food in Japan). Some question this statement or believe the caption lowers the quality of TV programs."

Meme - "Minute Burger will soon be selling:
N_GGE_S
Hint: it's related to fried chicken"

Wife (36F) wanted open marriage, after I (38M) started dating she wants to add more rules. What would you do in my position? : r/relationship_advice - "  Two and a half years ago my wife "Sarah" (36F) asked me to open our marriage, she strongly implied the alternative was divorce. After thinking it through I said yes, primarily because we do have two children, I worked long hours and divorce sounded horrible.  So I set up some ground rules. Not bringing dates into our house, no dating mutual friends, acquaintances, family members, collages, keeping things private.  For the next two years I focused on my job and on my kids. I worked long hours, little free time I had I devoted to my kids. I didn't had the time for dating so I wasn't even trying. I moved to another room because the thought of Sarah having sex with another man, then sleeping in my bed felt horrible, our relationship became purely transactional, we became partners at raising kids. I didn't want to know anything about her sex life.  This summer I managed to fulfill my financial goals. I do not have any debt whatsoever, both of my kids have enough money in their college fund, and all I have to do is to keep adding some savings every month into the fund I made for their first home deposits. So I did some math and decided to cut my work from 74 hours to just 30 per week. Sarah wanted to get indebted again to buy another house and a new car, I said no.  I used my free time to finally have a vacation I really needed, took older son with me to tour US together. Did some renovation work on our house, turned basement into man cave. Started working out play sports, leading a healthier life.  Then I actually started trying to land a date. For me just having sex with somebody is... not my thing. I want to atleast be a friend before that. To go out together, watch movies, have fun AND have sex. So I dated a couple of women and found a "Jane" with whom I clicked.  With Jane I was going out to concerts, art galleries, comic cons, movies... AND we would "boink" too.  Sarah wanted to talk about my dates. I said no. Then I caught Sarah snooping through my phone and we had a very strongly worded argument.  Now Sarah want's to update the terms of our open marriage. She want's us repair our marriage by going to the counselor, she want's us to sleep in the same room, to go outside and have fun together.  Our outside of marriage relationships are to be strictly sexual and nothing else. And we are to talk about our sexual partners.  I told her that I am content with the situation as it is, and I don't mind if she finds a partner to go out with. I encouraged her to. And i don't want to talk about our partners.  She is holding her ground.  At this point I'm split between trying to fix our marriage and handing her the divorce papers. I need an advice guys.
TLDR - After opening our marriage and me starting to date wife want's to change the rules."

Meme - "6.9mm. iPhone 6
5.6mm. iPhone Air
*Due to camera, iPhone Air is actually thicker at its thickest point*
*Sedan* 6.9mm
*Tractor unit truck* 5.6mm *wheels only*"

Meme - Dinosaur to Jellyfish: "GET OuT OF YOUR COMFORT ZONE! EMBRACE DISCOMFORT TO EVOLVE!"
*YEARS LATER *
Jellyfish: "STILL EMBRACING DISCOMFORT?"
Chicken: "SHUT UP"

Why social media posts could invalidate your home insurance - "Insurers are increasingly rejecting claims made by customers whose houses have been burgled while on holiday if they have shared the fact that they are away from home on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram...   Insurers invoke a clause that exists in a majority of policies that requires customers to take “reasonable care” in keeping their property safe...   “If no precautions were taken to limit who can see the photo on social media, and your name and address were posted alongside then the general condition could come into play.”"

Enfield council spends £500k debating LTN while seven libraries go bust - "A Labour council has “wasted a staggering” £575,000 planning a low traffic neighbourhood (LTN) with money that could have saved seven libraries.  A freedom of information request has revealed that Enfield council has ploughed the funds into consultation and design work and automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras for the Edmonton Green LTN.  However, critics claim there is widespread opposition to the proposed scheme, which is feared could increase traffic and pollution."
Clearly, the problem is austerity and they need to 'tax the 'rich'' to pay for everything

Chinese students pocketed £157k train refunds in delay repay scam - "Two university students amassed about £157,000 in train ticket refunds by defrauding the delay repay system.  Chinese students Li Liu, 26, and Wanqing Yu, 25, “exploited a loophole” in the rail refund system to make a small fortune while living together at their flat in Leeds, West Yorks.  Under the delay repay scheme, passengers can claim compensation when a train arrives late.  But Liu and Yu discovered that there were no automatic cross-checks to find out whether a customer had already had their ticket refunded, a flaw that proved central to their fraud. The pair would first claim refunds for train tickets – pretending they no longer wanted to travel – then pocket extra cash by applying for delay repay compensation on the same journeys if the trains ran late... The court heard that they had multiple bank accounts and had created 16 fictitious identities to help conceal their fraud.  They also used a 20-SIM card adapter in a single phone so they could closely monitor their scam, and make it appear that contact was from different phones and people.  The pair even did research to discover which services across the country were often late, and would buy tickets to these in advance. When the trains were late, they would then apply through the national scheme for compensation, having already claimed a refund for the tickets."

EU watchdog attacks Britain over iPhone ‘backdoor’ demand - "The European Data Protection Board (EDPB), which monitors tech privacy, said British demands to break Apple’s encryption “would create systemic vulnerabilities and pose a risk to the integrity and confidentiality of electronic communications”. In January, the Home Office demanded that Apple create a way to get around the end-to-end encryption in its iCloud storage system, sparking a dispute with the White House... The Government dropped the demand after interventions from Trump administration officials including Vice President JD Vance, but has since issued a new order related explicitly to the UK. European officials have stayed quiet on the matter, but on Monday, the EDPB became the first EU body to raise objections.  It said the European Commission should take the Government’s demands into account when deciding whether to allow data transfers between Britain and the EU."
Why is Trump trying to violate privacy? What a fascist!

Segregating the sexes would admit we’re now incapable of keeping women safe - "it wouldn’t work in practice. London’s trains are busy and increasingly walk-through; any “women’s car” would be porous unless you flood the network with inspectors and fines. That’s how Dubai does it, and even with enforcement, their metro police still reportedly fine around 100 men each day for entering the women and children cabins.  Indeed, the evidence abroad is hardly reassuring. Where women-only cars exist, harassment on the rest of the network persists. In Rio, a recent World Bank study on 22,000 train rides found that while reserved cars can reduce harassment inside them, they simultaneously entrench backwards norms: the majority of both men and women in the Rio study said that women who chose to ride in the mix-gendered cars are more “sexually open or inviting”.  The study also found that women who believed others held that norm were 79 per cent more likely to use the women-only car, even when it offered no extra protection because men had crowded in. In short: a short-term fix that backfires. Even in Tokyo, despite long-standing women-only cars, authorities still record hundreds of molestation cases and railways continue to battle groping with other tools – surveillance, plain-clothes patrols, bystander interventions – because gender segregation carriages alone don’t eliminate the offence. The solution is policing and deterrence, not signage."

London Tube mosquito came from ancient Egypt - "The mosquito – Culex pipiens f. Molestus – was first noticed during the Second World War when it started snacking on Londoners sleeping in Tube stations during bombing raids. Experts thought it had evolved from the UK common house mosquito, which feeds on birds, and it was held up as an example of a species’ ability to rapidly adapt to new environments and urbanisation."

Farmer, 31, dies after being bitten by fly - "Father-of-one Andrew Kane, 31, was bitten on the elbow by a horsefly while working, his mother said... Mr Kane was taken to hospital where he found he had developed sepsis. He spent weeks in a coma before passing away on Sept 18."

Egypt says stolen pharoah’s bracelet sold for US$4K, melted down - "Egyptian police said on Thursday they arrested a museum employee and three alleged accomplices after a priceless ancient gold bracelet was stolen from Cairo’s Egyptian Museum, sold for about $4,000 and then melted down.  The 3,000-year-old bracelet, a gold band adorned with lapis lazuli beads, dated back to the reign of Amenemope, a pharaoh of Egypt’s 21st Dynasty (1070-945 BC)."
Luckily, it wasn't consigned to a truly horrific fate, like being in the British Museum

reactions on X - "I’m an empath sometimes I can tell how people are feeling simply by deciding how I think they feel in my own mind and instantly believing it"

Pop Base on X - "Kim Kardashian tells Call Her Daddy that she would like to know the cost of a milk carton: "I mean, I don't have a concept of what like certain simple things cost, which really, um is, you know, I'd like to know a little bit more about what like a milk carton cost."
itsagundam on X - "Remember this when a celebrity tires to tell you how to vote."

Meme - "Sam Bankman-Fried's girlfriend and actor portraying her in The Altruists Netflix series.
A role Bella Ramsey's actually suited for, and they fumble it."
On Caroline Ellison

Frodo Watches Amazon's Lord of the Rings Show... - YouTube - "Elrond has summoned a meeting in Rivendell to decide the fate of Amazon's Rings of Power... a TV-show that spreads terror and darkness across all of Middle-earth. But the Fellowship is starting to suspect that Gandalf and Elrond might be hiding something..."

How is Ramsay the only person to bring up the fact that Jon might be a Night's Watch deserter? : r/freefolk - "Because all nuance and logic went out the window past season 4"
"Exactly.many ppl say Season 8 was a distraer and ruined GoT. But season 5 was the real point where quality went out the window"
"Didn't get how the reviews stayed good for so long--especially in Season 7."
"Reviewers are shepherds. They earn a living from pleasing their readers and only turn on something after the crowd has."

George R.R. Martin Is Never Going to Write 'The Winds of Winter' After His 'Game of Thrones' Reveal : r/HouseOfTheDragon - "More words have been dedicated to how Winds of Winter has not been released yet, than there will be words in the actual Winds of Winter"
"He actually was written more words I think in blog posts than what the book would even be ."
"Well, Martin keeps insisting he writes a few hours a day. Let’s be very gracious and say he averages 1 page per day (which would be extremely low for an author). That’s about 600-800 words worth of raw manuscript per day. Let’s say 700 words.  That’d be about 3.6M words since the last book came out. 2.8M if he stoped working on Winds while writing F&B.  If we assume he’s had to rewrite every page three times, Winds would still be around 3000-5000 pages long if we are to trust George’s self-described writing habits. In other words, about twice the size of LOTR, the Silmarillion, and the Hobbit all together.  But, George has also for five years said the book is about 80% done. Since he claims to still be writing, that must mean the book is still growing.  Accounting for this, the Winds of Winter will be ~7000 pages, or about the size of three Bibles. It’d take the average reader about two weeks of non-stop reading (12 hours per day) to finish it, and the audiobook would be around 330 hours long.  My god, it’ll be glorious /s"
"throughout the series there has pretty much always been two books remaining, until just before a book is released when a book is "split" or something changes to add a new book. It was originally proposed as at trilogy and had just grown from there. He has written in a style that is expanding both the world and the open questions, not closing them. It's probably possible to finish in two books, but nothing in the books preceding this have indicated that he is working to a mode to actually work towards his conclusion, and has only made that more and more difficult for him.  I am very confident that if a Winds of Winter were to ever be released, it'd be released along with an admission that either it, or the last book was being "split in two" so that he'd again have two books remaining. But at this point I'm doubtful Winds will ever be released at all, and wish that he'd just acknowledge that. We're not owed anything, but stringing along and all the talk of progress just seems disingenuous. But I'm honestly guessing there's a bit of denial on his end as well, I don't think he's trying to trick anyone."

What is the most unnecessary scene in Game of thrones? : r/freefolk - "isn't it weird how the show starting showing less T&A and it also got worse? Unrelated correlation but I just think it's funny. GOT Seasons 1-4 were full of nudity and violence yet the other seasons had that shit on and were worse."

Meme - "Not using source material RINGS OF POWER
Running out of source material and yoloing it GAME OF THRONES
*** on the source material THE WITCHER
Working with the author to improve upon the source material ONE PIECE
Pissing off the author so much that he revamps the series out of sheer spite DRAGONBALL EVOLUTION"

The Democrats’ Insanity Defense

From October 2024: 

The Democrats’ Insanity Defense

"In the September debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, Trump said something so ludicrous that many viewers must have dismissed it out of hand. “She did things that nobody would ever think of,” Trump said, while rattling off a list of some of the vice president’s most radical past positions. “Now she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.”

The idea that the vice president “wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison” seemed so patently absurd that The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser cited it in a column posted the next morning as an example of Trump’s lunacy: “What the hell was he talking about?” Glasser wrote of the trans operation lines. “No one knows, which was, of course, exactly Harris’ point.”

That reaction was understandable—the idea of the operations was, as Trump himself said, a “thing nobody would ever think of.” The problem was that it is true. As CNN had reported that week, Harris, when running for the Democratic nomination in 2019, had written in an ACLU questionnaire that she supported publicly funded “gender-affirming care,” including transition surgeries, for federal prison inmates and detained illegal immigrants. Follow-up reporting from The Washington Free Beacon revealed that while serving as California attorney general, Harris had in fact implemented a statewide policy of taxpayer funding for prisoners’ sex changes, born out of a settlement in which she agreed to pay for the transition of a man convicted of kidnapping a father of three and then murdering him as he begged for his life. Harris later bragged, on camera, about this policy as evidence of her commitment to the progressive “movement”—in a clip that has since become a staple of Trump campaign ads.

The sequence of events neatly encapsulated a pattern that has played out countless times since Trump entered American political life. Trump says something seemingly insane, to many people’s outrage and disbelief, only to have his supposed “lie” revealed to be wholly or at least significantly true. Often the specific truth revealed—that the outgoing Obama administration spied on the Trump transition team in order to gather information for what later became the Russiagate hoax, to cite another example—is in fact “crazier” than Trump’s exaggerations or garbling of the details. The insanity of the policy becomes the front line of defense against potential blowback: Who would believe that anyone would actually propose or support something so obviously at odds with public opinion and basic common sense? Trump must be a raving nutjob, just like we told you he was.

The reason that this strategy has worked is because Democrats rely on all nonexplicitly right-wing media to adopt their framing of issues and cite the party’s preferred experts, which they do. The party’s influence over the country’s communications apparatus has, for the past decade, emerged into something like a political superpower, allowing it to act outside the normal bounds of American politics without suffering from political blowback.

“All of it,” said a Republican congressional staffer, “is insulated by their absolute confidence that they can just use their control over communications institutions to just say words, including change of language, right? Flip a switch and it’s now gender affirming care. Flip a switch and it’s now undocumented migrants, or undocumented Americans. Flip a switch and now you can change people’s pronouns.”

The result, for anyone skeptical of the Democratic Party yet bound to operate within the consensus reality of its discourse, is akin to living in a wilderness of mirrors. How to explain, for instance, that elected Democrats from the Biden White House on down support not only taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners and illegal aliens, but policies that allow schools to “socially transition” children without informing their parents? How to explain, without sounding like a lunatic, that the newspapers and expert bodies that recommend life-altering surgeries for children, and defend them as “life-saving” or “medically necessary” care opposed only by cranks and Bible thumpers, either don’t know what they’re talking about or are lying to you for political reasons? That the claim that such surgeries were rarely if ever performed on children was also a lie? That when President Biden, the kindly old moderate, directed his Department of Health and Human Services to address the “barriers and exclusionary policies” keeping children from accessing “gender medicine,” what he was describing was a policy that would see members of his own administration pressuring medical agencies to allow procedures such as breast and penis removal be performed on young children, despite the lack of any proof that these measures contribute to greater mental or physical health?

The same GOP staffer, who is currently working on a competitive congressional race, told me that one problem his campaign regularly faces is that aspects of Democratic governance are simply too insane for voters to find credible, even when they are documented as official U.S. government policy. “When you outline the Democratic agenda, you have to water it down, because in both polling and focus groups, people just don’t believe it,” he said. “They are critical of things like boys in girls’ sports, but they tune out stuff about schools not informing parents about transitioning their children. They just don’t believe it’s true. It can’t be.”

Another Republican operative made a related point on the failure of the party’s attempt to message on trans issues in 2022, which was that the reality of the procedures was so gruesome that voters simply preferred not to think about it. “Phrases like ‘genital mutilation’ are disgusting and viscerally off-putting, even to voters who may be sympathetic to the Republicans’ position but will just write you off as a freak for talking about it that way.” 

A similar dynamic plays out in foreign policy. On the one hand the Democrats conjured out of thin air the claim that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election, which was, we now know, a conspiracy theory concocted by ex-spies and Clinton campaign operatives and seeded in the intelligence agencies and media by the outgoing Obama administration to cripple the new administration. That is to say that it is not a matter of partisan political opinion; it is simply false. Yet as of 2022, nearly half of U.S. voters, and a majority of Democrats, still believed that Trump was elected in 2016 due to Russian interference, and the hoax remains a mainstay of Democratic rhetoric. It even played a major role in the 2020 election, providing the predicate for the Biden campaign to collude with tech companies and retired spooks to censor reporting about Hunter Biden’s foreign influence-peddling schemes, which turned out to be entirely real. 

Outside the pages of a handful of news sites, however, you will look in vain for coverage of the Biden-Harris administration’s disturbingly close relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran, an authoritarian and explicitly anti-American regime currently waging a multifront war against Israel. Like the Obama administration, of which it is a continuation, the Biden-Harris administration has attempted to realign the United States away from Israel and other traditional allies and toward a revisionist-Islamist bloc led by Iran but also including Qatar, the Muslim Brotherhood, and various Palestinian radical groups. This orientation is reflected at the level of policy—including nonenforcement of Iranian oil sanctions, flooding Hamas and Hezbollah with cash through cutouts, and, since Oct. 7, the relentless undermining of Israel’s war against Iran and its proxies—as well as at the level of personnel. The Biden administration’s envoy to Iran, who was suspended last spring for mishandling classified information later published in Iranian state media, also hired a confirmed Iranian influence agent into the U.S. State Department. And the White House’s coordinator for intelligence and defense policy on the National Security Council—i.e., the man who would normally be responsible for investigating the recent leak of Israeli military plans to Iran—is a former affiliate of not one but two fronts for the Iranian proxy Hamas: Students for Justice in Palestine and the U.N. Relief and Works Agency. The Iranian regime has repaid the Biden-Harris administration for its generosity, hacking the emails of Trump campaign employees and handing them off to a Democratic PAC, which published them last week.

These are all demonstrable matters of fact. Yet many Americans still have trouble accepting them, because the underlying predicate—that our country is purposefully allying with a terror-sponsoring, America-hating theocracy in its pursuit of nuclear weapons, which it has already promised to use to wipe America’s most powerful regional client, Israel, off the map—seemed too insane to credit. Why would Barack Obama have put that into motion, and why would everyone else let it happen? There are plenty of conceivable answers to these question, of course. But you can’t get at any of them if the underlying reality itself is too insane to accept.

Americans do not, as a rule, pay much attention to foreign policy, but the White House’s orientation abroad is inseparable from its politics at home. Within the United States, the Democratic power vertical has cultivated allies and sympathizers of the Iranian “axis of resistance” as donors, fundraisers, “organizers,” clients, and street muscle. It has protected them from law enforcement scrutiny, invited them into the policymaking process, and directed both federal money and funds from party-aligned megadonors such as George Soros and the Tides Nexus into their nonprofits, as I reported for Tablet in May. These nonprofits have in turn played a major role in organizing the pro-terror protests and encampments that erupted across blue America in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks, which have drawn on activist networks previously mobilized to organize anti-Trump protest movements (e.g., the Women’s March and Black Lives Matter) during his first term and anti-Supreme Court protests in the wake of the Dobbs decision in 2022.

The idea that the radicals and thugs shutting down a bridge in your city are part of the Democratic machine is not a particularly difficult idea to wrap one’s head around, particularly following years in which we were constantly warned about the threat of supposed Trumpist “militias” like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. The problem is that the Democrats’ alignment with these thugs strikes most Americans as too bizarre and obviously destructive to be true—a thing that “nobody would ever think of.” “You cannot get people to pay attention to the idea that the Biden-Harris machine is plugged into the Democratic machine, which is plugged into campus antisemitism,” a staffer told me. “It’s not because it’s too complicated. Voters understand that the same people fund the same things. It’s just that Americans find antisemites weird. We’re not in Europe, right?”

It does appear that this insanity defense may finally be breaking down. Polls and early voting returns suggest that Trump may be poised to recapture the White House and potentially even win the popular vote, despite a near daily stream of invective from Democrats and their press allies casting him and his supporters as some version or another of Hitler. Some of this is a product of objective factors hurting the incumbent administration, such as a middling economy and popular anger of its deliberate opening of the southern border, a crisis that eventually became too glaring for the White House to spin away. And some of it, no doubt, is the legacy of nearly a decade of hysteria and overheated propaganda on every topic under the sun, from Trump to the pandemic to race and the relations between the sexes. At some point, voters outside the bubble simply tune out.

Joe Biden, whatever his faults and infirmities, played an important role as a symbolic figurehead for what functioned in practice as a radical bureaucratic regime. Even as his administration pursued policies far outside the Overton window of American politics, it was difficult for anyone, let alone moderately engaged voters, to believe that “Scranton Joe,” the avuncular centrist and Irish bullshitter, believed in any of the things that his party was said to be doing. Noting the sudden success of the campaign’s transgender ads, one Trump campaign staffer told me, “We were making this attack on Biden, but it was through some sort of convoluted process because of, like, some sort of Department of Education regulation. But everyone perceived Biden as what he was—an establishment moderate. Maybe he’s had to take up some radical positions for political reasons, but no one thinks Joe Biden sincerely cares about trans rights.”

That seems to have changed when Biden was overthrown in favor of Kamala, whose 2020 primary campaign—pitched at party activists and powerbrokers—led her to make the mistake that both Biden and Obama for the most part managed to avoid: openly pandering to the party’s activist base, often on camera. Defund the police. Decriminalize illegal border crossings. Ban fracking. Confiscate guns. Transgender surgeries for illegals.

Harris has since tried to walk many of these positions back, which only creates the new problem of appearing inauthentic and weak—a bad combination when the opponent is Donald Trump, especially when he’s also trouncing you on every issue of substance. It is of course too early to say whether Trump really will return for a second term, though his campaign couldn’t have hoped for better odds back at the DNC in August, when it looked as if Obama and the rest of the party’s messaging machine might successfully reinvent Kamala as a patriotic moderate and champion of the middle class. That machine is slick and sophisticated, to be sure, but eventually, the laws of political gravity do reassert themselves. You can piss on the shoes of the American people for one term or maybe two, but eventually, they’re going to figure out it isn’t raining.

 

This partly explains "this is not happening, and it's good that it is" - the first part, at any rate.

Cognitive dissonance is a marvellous thing. Even when confronted with clear proof, many left wingers deny it. Presumably not all of them are stupid and/or lying.

Related:

Niels Hoven 🐮 on X

"The first Mentava hit piece is out and it's 🔥"

Amal Dorai on X

"Your haters are so deranged that sometimes the possibility that they’re your sockpuppets is more comforting than the possibility that they are real"

Evan Feng on X

"This is my headcanon too because the other reality is terrifying - who writes an overly verbose takedown of an opt-in app that is just trying to enable children to develop a joy of reading and learning?"

Niels Hoven 🐮 on X

"Education has become so absurd that half my job is convincing people I’m not making stuff up

- schools telling kids not to sound out words
- PhDs saying education isn't about results
- SF banning middle school algebra
- accusations of "structural misogyny" for literacy software"

Laura Powell on X

"This is often my experience as well. People assume their experiences in schools from years ago are the norm everywhere today. During the congressional hearing I testified at Wednesday, several Democrats flatly refused to believe the well-documented witness testimony."

Thread by @ChristianHeiens on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App

"They had to moderate the Democrats’ own policy positions when trying to persuade voters at the door. Telling them the truth about their enemies didn’t work because the truth was so extreme.

In late 2019, Dennis Prager went on Bill Maher’s show and warned about Transgenderism rapidly becoming a cult ideology on the Left.

The entire audience laughed at him and Maher said the typical line all of us have heard usually before calamity strikes.

“Nobody believes that.”"

Left wingers seek to degrade education because they only want students well-educated on paper - but actually feed the educational-industrial complex (more funding is always the "answer"), indoctrinate students and get them upset at the system, because if you can't make it with a Masters degree, surely that shows that Capitalism has Failed.