World War Two
Published 7 Feb 2026In spring 1933, Nazi Germany shows how dictatorship becomes normal. This episode of Death of Democracy follows the regime’s second quarter in power, from the first state-organized antisemitic boycott to the destruction of free trade unions and the takeover of the courts. Step by step, democratic institutions are hollowed out through fear, legality, and propaganda. Death of Democracy reveals how tyranny doesn’t arrive overnight — it is made to feel ordinary.
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February 8, 2026
How Legal Immunity Becomes Absolute Power – Death of Democracy Q2 1933
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QotD: Life of Brian in modern day Europe
“What bad has mass immigration to Europe ever done for us?”
– “The raping?”
“What?”
– “The raping”
“Oh yeah yeah. They do rape an awful lot that’s true yes.”
– “And the welfare costs”
– “Oh yes the welfare costs, Rich. The unemployment benefits alone.”
“Ok, I will grant you the raping, and the welfare costs, are two bad things mass immigration have done for us.”
– “And the terrorism”
“Oh yeah obviously the terrorism. I mean the terrorism goes without saying. But apart from the raping, the welfare costs, and the terrorism …”
– “Violent crime”
– “Honor killings”
– “Car bombings”
“Yeah, you are all right, fair enough.”
– “Burqas”
– [nodding among the group] “Yeah, that is something we’d really not miss if the immigrants left.”
– “Political support for bad economic policies.”
– “And it’s less safe to walk in the streets at night now, Rich.”
Ok, but apart from the raping, the welfare costs, the terrorism, the violent crime, the honor killings, the car bombings, the burqas, political support for bad economic policies and the unsafe streets, what bad has mass immigration ever done for us?
Jonatan Pallesen, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-11-06.
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February 7, 2026
S.R.E.M.: Britain’s Experimental WW2 Bullpup Sniper
Forgotten Weapons
Published 15 Sept 2025The Sniper Rifle Experimental Model (S.R.E.M.) was designed by the “Czech Section” of small arms designers who had taken refuge in the UK to escape German occupation of Czechoslovakia. The intention was to develop a scoped sniper rifle that could be fired and cycled without disturbing the shooter’s sight picture. The idea that the designers came up with was to use the pistol grip as a moving charging handle, similar to the Czech BESA machine gun already in British service.
In 1944, the Essex Engineering Works in the UK got a contract to make 22 sample S.R.E.M.s, although only 2 were actually made. Really, the whole concept was a bit of a red herring, as the recoil from 8mm Mauser (this was made in 8mm, expected the post-war the UK would be adopting it or another modern rimless round to replace the .303) would disturb the sight picture regardless of the mechanism used to cycle the action. The project was cancelled in 1945, and this example is the only known survivor today.
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February 6, 2026
Dresden Part 2 – Firestorm Dresden: Three Days In Hell!
HardThrasher
Published 5 Feb 2026In “Firestorm Dresden: 3 Days in Hell”*, we’ll unpack the bombing and subsequent firestorm in February 1945. We’ll look at how first the RAF night raids and then the US 8th Air Force daylight attacks unfolded, the damage they did and the horrific impact on the ground. We’ll look at how the aftermath shaped the myths and understanding surrounding the raid, and the fate of Arthur Harris and those who’d planned the raid.
* Proof once more, as if it were needed, how shit AI is — I have, apparently, to put the title of the video into the first words in the description to attract Google’s attention … I am so sorry to brutalise the English language like this.
[NR: Part one was posted here on January 22nd, should you want to watch it first.]
00:00 – 02:22 – Opening
02:26 – 06:20 – The weather
06:20 – 16:12 – The attack
16:18 – 25:17 – Horror on the ground
25:22 – 29:26 – USAAF Attacks
29:30 – 34:30 – Dealing with the bodies
34:34 – 44:59 – Reaction in the west
45:03 – 48:06 – The Soviet view
48:10 – 54:27 – Summing up and close
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February 5, 2026
“It was not fear of the crime that silenced authorities, but fear of a word: racist“
On Substack, Celina101 outlines the long and sordid history of official deliberate blindness to a widespread and horrific crime wave in Britain, all for fear that if they paid proper attention they’d be labelled as “racists”:
There are crimes so extreme that the mind instinctively rejects them, not because they are implausible, but because accepting them would require acknowledging a collapse of morality too large to comprehend. Child sexual abuse is one such crime.
Child sexual abuse does not arrive in a single form. It ranges from isolated abductions, to organised pornography networks, to violence carried out by parents or those entrusted with care. Every one of these crimes is horrific, and none should ever be minimised or ignored.
But there is one form of abuse that stands apart, not because it is worse in kind, but because it was allowed to flourish unchecked. The organised targeting of schoolgirls by groups of men who lingered outside schools, fast-food outlets, and transport hubs, grooming children into addiction, sexual exploitation, and prostitution, constituted a distinct and recognisable pattern of abuse.
This pattern was not hidden. It was not unknowable. And yet for longer than a quarter of a century, British authorities chose not to act. Despite the issue being raised at a national level as early as 2003, and despite its presence being well understood in certain towns since at least the late 1980s, it was deliberately sidelined, minimised, and left to metastasise.1
For decades, these gangs were allowed to congregate openly around school gates without consequence. What shielded them was not ignorance or lack of evidence, but an institutional terror of confronting anything that carried racial implications; the shade of their skin protected them.
By 2011, the long-standing silence surrounding the issue began to break. Once the initial barrier was breached, the extent of the abuse became increasingly difficult to suppress.2 Over the following years, British media outlets published a succession of detailed investigations that brought the scale of the crimes into public view.
In September 2012, The Times published an extensive overview of the phenomenon.3 The paper reported that for more than a decade, organised groups of men had been able to groom, exploit, and traffic girls across multiple towns and cities in Britain, often operating with minimal interference from authorities.
Yet, event The Times underestimated the scale of this. By early 2015, senior police figures were publicly acknowledging the scale of the crisis. One officer spoke of “tens of thousands” of current victims of grooming gangs. A Member of Parliament, representing a constituency widely associated with the problem, went further, suggesting that the total number of victims nationwide, past and present, could reach as high as one million.4
These figures are almost impossible to comprehend. They refer to school-aged girls systematically identified, isolated, and exploited over many years. And yet, despite the magnitude of the harm, perpetrators were able to operate with remarkable impunity.
By the end of 2014, the Association of Chief Police Officers confirmed that the number of victims each year ran into the tens of thousands.5 Even on the most conservative interpretation, this would place the number of victims over a twenty-year period well into six figures. Against this backdrop, the number of successful convictions, under 200, stands as a staggering indictment of the system meant to protect the vulnerable and enforce the law.
There is no comparable serious crime in modern Britain where the disparity between victims and convictions is so extreme.
- https://web.archive.org/web/20100620042427/http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/society/law_order/Asian%2Brape%2Ballegations/256893
- https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/944206/Group-based_CSE_Paper.pdf
- Andrew Norfolk, “Police Files Reveal Vast Child Protection Scandal”, The Times, 24 Sep 2012.
- https://www.thetimes.com/uk/society/article/grooming-gangs-ethnicities-how-many-statistics-data-dpx2bfrts#:~:text=The%20%E2%80%9Cone%20million%E2%80%9D%20figure%20comes,over%20a%2070%2Dyear%20period.
- https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/police-files-reveal-vast-child-protection-scandal-ffrpdr09vrv
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February 4, 2026
“Until relatively recently being victimised did not constitute a claim to a distinct identity”
On Substack, Frank Furedi examines the rapid-onset victimization plague that now afflicts most western societies:
It seems that these days there is a relentless demand for gaining the status of a victim. No group wants to be left out, which is why a group of cultural entrepreneurs from Manchester, England have decided that since working people get a raw deal in the arts world class should become a “protected characteristic”.1 In other words, they believe that the working class should be regarded as a victim of social discrimination and join the ranks of other formally protected victim groups like women and racial and sexual minorities.
The aim of this essay is to explain the changing meaning of the term victim and its evolution into what has become one of the most valued and celebrated identity in the western world. In this Part One of our discussion of the rise of the cult of the victim our aim is to provide context for the development of the unique status of the victim. In our era of historical amnesia, it is easy to overlook the fact that the moral authority enjoyed by the victim, its subsequent politicization and its transformation into a stand-alone identity is a relatively recent development.
Remember!!! Until relatively recently being victimised did not constitute a claim to a distinct identity.
The evolution of the cult of victimhood
It is important to note that originally the word victim had very restrictive meaning. In the 15th century it referred to a “living creature offered as a sacrifice to God or other power”.2 Its meaning gradually altered to refer to the experience of being harmed either intentionally or unintentionally. Its shifting focus did not simply refer to an act of harm or crime affected by an agent of force but also to the existential difficulties caused by being a “victim of circumstances”. Since the 1970s and 1980s, the victim category was no longer restricted to those who suffered from crime or some other act of injustice. Virtually any misfortune could be assimilated into the perspective of victimization. According to this convention, people who suffer from a physical or psychological problem are represented as victims of their condition. People do not so much have heart attacks, they are often portrayed as victims of heart attack. Alcoholics have been reinvented as victims of alcohol addiction. A multitude of new interest groups now claim that they are victims of addictive behaviour. Compulsive eaters, sex addicts, internet addicts, shopping addicts, lottery addicts, junk food addicts are some of the new group of victim addicts that were invented during the last two decades of the twentieth century.
The status of victimhood is not confined to those individuals who have directly suffered from a particular grievance. Moral entrepreneurs argued for the recognition of what they characterise as secondary or indirect victims. As one criminologist noted, “crime victim activists have worked to expand the concept of victim to include the family and friends of the actual victim”.3 Members of a family of the direct victim are often referred to as indirect victims. Victim advocates argue that family members and sometimes friends must be given access to therapeutic services and other resources. People who witness a crime or who are simply aware that something untoward has happened to someone they know are all potential indirect victims. The concept of the indirect victim allowed for a tremendous inflation of the numbers who are entitled to claim victim support. Anyone who has witnessed something unpleasant or who has heard of such an experience could become a suitable candidate for the status of indirect victim. This was the outlook that influenced the British Government’s law reform body, the Law Commission, when it recommended in March 1998 that people who suffer mental illness after witnessing or hearing of a relative’s death, even on television or radio should have the right to compensation.4
- https://www.hackneygazette.co.uk/things-to-do/national/25795044.class-protected-characteristic-arts-world-posh-report-says/
- https://www.oed.com/search/advanced/HistoricalThesaurus?textTermText0=victim&dateOfUseFirstUse=true&page=1&sortOption=AZ
- Weed, F.J.(1995) Certainty of Justice; Reform in the Crime Victim Movement,(Aldine De Gruyter: New York). p.34.
- The Times, 10 March 1998.
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Amelia, created by woke propagandists, is now the figurehead for the anti-woke
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, John Michael Greer provides a quick thumbnail sketch of the Amelia story for folks who need to get caught up:
I’ve been watching the saga of Amelia from the far side of the Atlantic in a state of utter bemusement.
For those who don’t know the first act of the saga, the British government had some collection of flacks create a video game for British kids, which was designed to elicit “racist” (that is, patriotic and un-woke) statements from them — at which point the kids who fell for it would be reported to the police for, erm, reeducation. (I wish I was making this up.)
Amelia was a cartoon figure who was supposed to mouth allegedly racist slogans, and they gave her violet hair because they thought that would annoy right-wingers, who make jokes about women with dyed hair.
Ponder the immeasurable stupidity of the flacks who put nationalist and patriotic slogans in the mouth of the kind of cute female figure who would have most teenage boys reaching into their trousers on the spot. Of course these same teenage boys instantly hijacked her and turned her into a mascot, just as they did with Kek back in the day. Of course these same teenage boys, being far more computer-skilled than government flacks, started doing LLM-generated videos of Amelia speaking out in favor of nationalist and patriotic ideas.
Of course everybody in Britain who’s sick and tired of the Starmer government and its woke doctrines embraced Amelia as their latest heroine, not least because the Guardian‘s foam-flecked fury when she’s mentioned is so entertaining to watch …
And then, as with Kek, things got weird. We’re still in the early stages of the weirdening but it would not surprise me a bit to find that just as a cartoon frog ten years ago became the vessel through which an archaic Native American deity manifested and sent the US spinning down an uncharted path, a purple-haired waifu may just become another such vehicle.
Britain used to have quite a collection of war goddesses, back in Celtic times. I’m curious, not to mention apprehensive, to see just who’s taking this opportunity to stream back into manifestation.
French Trials FN CAL: Adding Rifle Grenade Capability
Forgotten Weapons
Published 10 Sept 2025In the 1970s when the French Army was looking for a new rifle 5.56mm, they tested a number of foreign rifles alongside development the FAMAS at St Etienne. These included the HK33, the M16, and the FN CAL — and today we are looking at the FN CAL. It already had a four-position selector switch (safe/semi/full/burst), fulfilling one of the French Army requirements. But it did not have sufficient grenade launching capability, and so several examples were modified for trials with unique rifle grenade launching hardware.
Ultimately the HK33 was the best performing rifle, but it was not seen as a politically acceptable option and the FAMAS was chosen instead. I have not seen the trials reports to understand specifically why the FN CAL was unsuccessful, but we know that it was unsuccessful in many other trials, and FN dropped it for the distinct FNC design instead before long.
Full FN CAL teardown: • FN CAL: Short-Lived Predecessor to the FNC
HK33F Video: • Roller Delay in France: The H&K 33F (Trial…Many thanks to the IRCGN (Institut de Recherche Criminelle de la Gendarmerie Nationale) for allowing me access to film these trials prototypes for you!
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QotD: The impact of quasi-official monotheism on the Roman Empire
That is part of the context where we should understand Constantine (r. 306-337). Constantine is famous for declaring the toleration of Christianity in the empire and being the first emperor to convert to Christianity (only on on his death-bed). What is less well known is that, having selected Christianity as his favored religion, Constantine – seeking unity again – promptly set out to unify his new favored religion, by force if necessary. A schism had arose as a consequence of Diocletian’s persecution and – now that Christianity was in the good graces of the emperor – both sides sought Constantine’s aid in suppressing the other in what became known as the Donatism controversy, as the side which was eventually branded heretical supported a Christian bishop named Donatus. Constantine, after failing to get the two groups to agree settled on persecuting one of them (the Donatists) out of existence (which didn’t work either).
It is in that context that later Christian emperors’ efforts to unify the empire behind Christianity (leading to the Edict of Thessalonica in 380) ought to be understood – as the culmination of, by that point, more than a century of on-again, off-again efforts by emperors to try to strengthen the empire by enforcing religious unity. By the end of the fourth century, the Christian empire was persecuting pagans and Jews, not even a full century after it had been persecuting Christians.
These efforts to violently enforce unity through homogeneity had the exact opposite effect. Efforts to persecute Arian Christians (who rejected the Nicene Creed) created further divisions in the empire; they also made it even more difficult to incorporate the newly arriving Germanic peoples, who had mostly converted to the “wrong” (Arian) Christianity. Meanwhile, in the fifth century, the church in the East splintered further, leading to the “Nestorian” (the term is contested) churches of Syria and the Coptic Church in Egypt on the “outs” with the official (Eastern) Roman Church and thus also facing persecution after the Council of Ephesus in 431. The resentment created by the policy of persecution in the East seems to have played a fairly significant role in limiting the amount of local popular resistance faced by the Muslim armies of the Rashidun Caliphate during the conquests of Syria, the Levant and Egypt in the 630s, since in many cases Christian communities viewed as “heretical” by Constantinople could actually expect potentially better treatment under Muslim rule. Needless to say, this both made the Muslim conquests of those regions easier but also go some distance to explaining why Roman/Byzantine reconquest was such a non-starter. Efforts to enforce unity in the empire had, perhaps paradoxically, made it more fragile rather than more resilient.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Queen’s Latin or Who Were the Romans, Part V: Saving and Losing and Empire”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-07-30.
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February 3, 2026
The Killer Pigs of the Middle Ages
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 5 Aug 2025Sliced roasted pork loin with jus
City/Region: England
Time Period: 1390Pigs were an important source of food in the Middle Ages. They didn’t take up a lot of space, had lots of babies, and ate pretty much anything, so despite their smell and bouts of violence (sometimes ending in murder), they were commonly found throughout Europe.
This English recipe, which uses black pepper, coriander seed, caraway seed, and wine, all expensive ingredients that had to come from far away, wouldn’t have been for the common folk. Today, these ingredients are readily found at the grocery store, and this is a delicious roast that is perfect for those just getting into medieval cooking. As with a lot of historical recipes, there are no quantities given, so feel free to adjust the amounts of any of the spices to suit your taste.
Cormarye.
Take Coriander, Caraway small ground, Powder of Pepper and garlic ground in red wine, muddle all this together and salt it, take loins of Pork raw and flay off the skin, and prick it well with a knife and lay it in the sauce, roast thereof what thou wilt, & keep that that falleth therefrom in the roasting and seeth it in a little pot with fair broth, & serve it forth with the roast anon.
— The Forme of Cury, 1390
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February 2, 2026
Amelia continues to annoy and scare the UK establishment
Leo Kearse mocks the establishment media folks who are just wetting themselves over Amelia’s malign influence on English youth, pushing such hateful themes as loving England, having a pint at the pub, loving dogs, eating bacon, etc.
Pathways: Navigating the Internet and Extremism is a computer game created in collaboration with Prevent, the agency tasked with stopping radicalisation that could lead to terrorism.
It’s your usual state funded dopey social engineering, You play a non-binary college student called Charlie. You have to make it through college without being radicalised. Parents in the United Arab Emirates will no longer send their kids to London because they’re worried about them being radicalised by Islamists. So do you think that’s what this game looks at?
No, this is dealing with white Brits. The radicalised actions are things like “looking up immigration statistics” or “talking about English identity”.
Amelia is a character in the game. A purple-haired girl who tries to radicalise you into eating bacon because, like all young purple-haired girls, she’s a fascist.
This being Britain, people have taken the piss out of the game, because that’s what Brits do. The establishment is not taking the pisstakes well.
There are many people on the social media site formerly known as Twitter sharing Amelia memes and stories, including @Amelia, sharing bits of English and British history in bite-sized morsels:
GM Britain ☕
In 1696, England’s currency was in crisis. Coin clippers were shaving silver off the edges of coins, melting it down, and spending the debased coins at full face value. Around 10% of the nation’s currency was counterfeit. Riots broke out 🔥
Britain’s solution? Put Sir Isaac Newton in charge of the Royal Mint 🪙
Not just gravity, you see.
Newton recalled every coin in the country. Melted them all down. Reminted them with a reeded edge – ridges along the rim that made clipping instantly visible.
Before Newton arrived, the Mint produced 15,000 coins a week.
He had them turning out 50,000.
Then he went undercover. Disguised himself. Visited taverns and dens. Built networks of informants. Prosecuted over 100 counterfeiters.
At least two dozen were hanged at Tyburn.
The man who gave us gravity also saved the British economy.
That’s British ingenuity. 🇬🇧
One of the many variations of this image (original by John Carter, I think) amused me:
And another snippet of history via @Amelia:
GM Britain ☕️
In India, the practice of Sati was a custom that saw widows burned alive on their husbands funeral pyres. This awful tradition continued for centuries until Britain banned it in 1829. 🔥
Hindu priests protested: “It’s our religion!”
The British commander in India, General Charles Napier, replied;
“Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.”
The practice stopped.
🇬🇧
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February 1, 2026
How to End Democracy in 60 Days – Death of Democracy Q1 1933
World War Two
Published 31 Jan 2025This episode of the history documentary series “Death of Democracy” covers Q1 1933 with Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, the Reichstag Fire, Reichstag Fire Decree, Enabling Act, rise of Nazi terror, Gleichschaltung, and media control, explaining how Weimar Germany’s democracy collapsed in just sixty days.
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The Agora of Athens | A Historical Tour
Scenic Routes to the Past
Published 3 Oct 2025The Agora was the political and economic heart of ancient Athens. This tour explores its long history and evocative ruins.
Chapters
0:00 Introduction
0:47 Bouleuterion
1:44 Tholos
2:22 Monument of the Eponymous Heroes
2:56 Temple of Hephaestus
5:28 The Hellenistic Agora
6:16 Stoa of Attalos
6:57 Augustus and the Agora
8:06 Odeon of Agrippa
9:26 Herulian Wall
10:56 Overview
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January 31, 2026
“… nations are what Kurt Vonnegut would call a ‘granfalloon'”
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen responds to an older tweet about the replacement of “original” Romans during the Republic with other ethnicities over the course of the Empire:
Any time a nation allows slavery, de jure or de facto, the business owning class immediately tries to replace the working class with slaves.
If they succeed, the nation collapses and everyone dies. A nation cannot survive if it’s populated by slaves.
Why?
Because nations are what Kurt Vonnegut would call a “granfalloon” … his word for an association that only exists because people believe in it.
Now Vonnegut, who was a liberal and therefore wrong about everything important, meant to mock the concept of nations and tribes by coining this term. He believed them to be unnecessary throwbacks to humanity’s primitive past … a delusion he was able to sustain because he never had to try existing without one.
Granfalloons are indeed arbitrary — you could base them on anything — but humans cannot survive without them. Because humans are a pack animal.
If you drop your cat off somewhere in the woods at night, assuming he is a healthy and physically fit cat, he will likely survive, regardless of his unhappiness at the sudden deficiency of chin scratches and clean laundry to sleep on.
Try that experiment with your dog, and he’ll die.
Why? It’s not because cats are smarter than dogs. They’re about the same.
It’s because cats are not a pack animal. A cat doesn’t need other cats to survive. The basic unit required to execute all cat survival strategies is one cat.
Dog survival strategies work just fine, too, but they require multiple dogs. A lone dog will die because he cannot execute his survival strategies by himself.
And so it is with humans.
The great error of the classical liberal worldview is that, because history is full of tribes fighting wars over scarce resources, that it was the tribes, not the scarcity, that caused conflict.
So they decided they were going to get rids of tribes, and nations, and religions, all the granfalloons, and just glue everything together with economics. And there would somehow be world peace.
Kurt Vonnegut was a dreamer.
Unfortunately for all of us, he was not the only one.
So the experiment was carried out, and in every single place it was carried out, things got observably, obviously worse. Sometimes “gosh the boomers had it way easier than us” worse, and sometimes “what shall we do these corpses, Comrade Commissar” worse, but always worse.
Because economic incentives alone cannot hold a society together.
Economic incentives, without ethnic or cultural solidarity, get you nothing but massive robbery and fraud.
It’s why the Biden Administration let millions of third world savages into America. It’s why Proctor and Gamble sells you poison food, and why the American Heart Association takes their money to lie to you and say it’s healthy. It’s why every product you buy, from your Tesla to your laptop to your security camera system, tries to spy on you and control how you use the thing you paid for and theoretically own. It’s why you’ve never held the same job for more than three years, because they either laid you off or gave you two percent raises every year until you had to find a new company to pay you what you’re actually worth.
When there is no granfalloon, there is no incentive not to cheat. And no, fear of punishment doesn’t work. The police cannot arrest, try and convict everyone. And when there is no granfalloon, the enforcers themselves have no incentive to actually perform, instead of looking just busy enough to get paid, or taking bribes to look the other way.
An atomized group of individuals, unconnected by a granfalloon, have no morality, because morality isn’t something an individual has. It’s something a tribe has, because what the word “morality” actually means is the system of behavior that tribe members display towards each other.
A slave has no morality. He has no sense of responsibility, not only for the nation, not only for his masters, but even for his fellow slave. He is homo economicus, the man who responds purely to incentives of reward and punishment.
A slave has no granfalloon.
Kurt Vonnegut famously wrote “If you wish to examine a granfalloon, just remove the skin of a toy balloon.” By which he meant that such associations are nothing but a puff of air, and therefore unimportant.
But having been surrounded by air all his life, in abundant supply, Kurt had forgotten that air is important.
You need it for breathing.
Try removing the skin of a SCUBA tank.
La trahison des comédiens (The treason of the comedians)
In the above-the-fold portion of this post, Andrew Doyle points out that it’s the comedians who should be leading the charge to ridicule the excesses of the powerful, yet they shrink from their cultural duties and avoid offending those who most need to be taunted:
Holly Valance is an unlikely satirist. Yet the pop singer’s latest track, “Kiss Kiss (XX) My Arse”, takes aim directly at the pretence that human beings can change sex, and that a man need only declare himself a woman for it to be true. Upon its release the song immediately reached the top of the iTunes bestsellers chart, only to be swiftly deleted by Apple Music. Valance had committed the cardinal sin of ridiculing the establishment.
The song is based on Valance’s 2002 number one hit “Kiss Kiss”, now reworked with new lyrics for Pauline Hanson’s animated satire A Super Progressive Movie. This is the song’s opening verse:
They say that I’m a he but I’m a she,
Cos I gotta V and not a D,
And I don’t care what people say,
I’ll never be a him or them or they.Unsubtle? Perhaps. But let’s not forget that its target is the least subtle ideology that has ever been birthed. This is satirical mimesis; the essence of parody. For Apple Music to delete the track (only to reinstate it after multiple news outlets drew attention to the deletion) surely proves Hannah Arendt’s point that the “greatest enemy of authority” is “contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter”.
It is an indictment of the state of the comedy industry that pop singers are left to do the work of comedians. Television panel shows are now bland affairs thanks to the sheer lack of courage on display. The woke movement represents one of the most authoritarian, intolerant and illiberal developments in the recent western world. It demands conformity, peddles fantasy at the expense of truth, and punishes freethinkers. And yet most of today’s comedians are eager to prop it up rather than see it tumble.
They are called “regime comedians” for good reason. They have willingly turned themselves into cheerleaders for the powerful, bolstering those who have bullishly set the agenda, or – as the satirist Chris Morris once put it – “doing some kind of exotic display for the court”. It is a great shame that so many of Morris’s former collaborators now fall squarely into this category.
To put this cowardice into perspective, consider the example of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Just one year before he was gunned down by Islamic terrorists, the cartoonist and editor-in-chief Stéphane Charbonnier (known as “Charb”), was profiled in Le Monde. Was he not worried, the interviewer asked, about possible reprisals for drawing cartoons of Mohammed? For his answer, he paraphrased the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata: “I would rather die standing than live on my knees”.
If a man like Charb refused to back down from criticising an oppressive ideology – in spite of the death threats he received on a daily basis – why is it that so many of our comedians are too afraid to tackle the woke? These activists may talk tough online, but in real life they are about as intimidating as a sea sponge. While the impulse to preserve a mainstream career is understandable, it does suggest a lack of genuine vocation if that means ignoring the target that is most in need of skewering.
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