Quotulatiousness

September 11, 2022

“Learning is something we humans do, while schooling is something done to us”

Filed under: Education, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Kerry McDonald refutes the “learning loss” narrative we’ve been inundated with:

“Abandoned Schoolhouse and Wheat Field 3443 B” by jim.choate59 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

There are mounting concerns over profound learning loss due to prolonged school closures and remote learning. New data released last week by the US Department of Education reveal that fourth-grade reading and math scores dropped sharply over the past two years.

Fingers are waving regarding who is to blame, but the alleged “learning loss” now being exposed is more reflective of the nature of forced schooling rather than how children actually learn.

The current hullabaloo over pandemic learning loss mirrors the well-worn narrative regarding “summer slide”, in which children allegedly lose knowledge over summer vacation. In 2017, I wrote an article for Boston NPR stating that there’s no such thing as the summer slide.

Students may memorize and regurgitate information for a test or a teacher, but if it has no meaning for them, they quickly forget it. Come high school graduation, most of us forget most of what we supposedly learned in school.

In his New York Times opinion article this week, economist Bryan Caplan makes a related point: “I figure that most of the learning students lost in Zoom school is learning they would have lost by early adulthood even if schools had remained open. My claim is not that in the long run remote learning is almost as good as in-person learning. My claim is that in the long run in-person learning is almost as bad as remote learning.”

Learning and schooling are completely different. Learning is something we humans do, while schooling is something done to us. We need more learning and less schooling.

Yet, the solutions being proposed to deal with the identified learning loss over the past two years promise the opposite. Billions of dollars in federal COVID relief funds are being funneled into more schooling and school-like activities, including intensive tutoring, extended-day learning programs, longer school years, and more summer school. These efforts could raise test scores, as has been seen in Texas where students receive 30 hours of tutoring in each subject area in which they have failed a test, but do they really reflect true learning?

As we know from research on unschoolers and others who learn in self-directed education settings, non-coercive, interest-driven learning tends to be deep and authentic. When learning is individually-initiated and unforced, it is not a chore. It is absorbed and retained with enthusiasm because it is tied to personal passions and goals.

September 10, 2022

In a stormy and uncertain world, at least the New York Times remains consistent

Filed under: Britain, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ed West on hearing the news that the Queen had died:

“Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II” by Tinker Sailor Soldier Spy is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 .

Unusually for me, being a cold-blooded Englishman whose emotional range is somewhere between Peter Cushing in Star Wars and Tywin Lannister, I found myself crying over the news yesterday evening. I cry more as I get older – presumably it’s all the testosterone draining away – and I shed tears for the Queen.

Her Majesty’s death was announced around 6.30 GMT. Soon after 9pm the New York Times pops up on Twitter, in its usual sanctimonious, scolding told, telling us that “We should not romanticize her era”, because, according to a Harvard professor “The queen helped obscure a bloody history of decolonization whose proportions and legacies have yet to be adequately acknowledged.”

Our Queen has died, a deeply-loved, politically-neutral figure who many saw as being like another grandmother. She was someone we all knew throughout our lives, who felt like a protective figure, associated with the political stability that our island has enjoyed for so long.

Yet for some inexplicable reason, the voice of America’s progressive establishment thought it appropriate to immediately publish this article, with the headline “Mourn the Queen, Not Her Empire”, something literally no one even considered or thought about. The British Empire may be long dead but it lives on, timeless and immortal, in the minds of New York Times editors.

Much has been written about the changing social mores of the Queen’s reign, but I think it’s still generally accepted that you wait until a person is buried before launching criticisms of their legacy; at the very least a couple of days. Yet while even the Kremlin managed to send some kind words on Queen Elizabeth’s passing, the New York Times went straight in with the yes-she-will-be-mourned-but.

As head of the Commonwealth, the Queen “put a stolid traditionalist front over decades of violent upheaval. As such, the queen helped obscure a bloody history of decolonization whose proportions and legacies have yet to be adequately acknowledged.”

“We may never learn what the queen did or didn’t know about the crimes committed in her name,” the historian concludes, but “xenophobia and racism have been rising, fueled by the toxic politics of Brexit. Picking up on a longstanding investment in the Commonwealth among Euroskeptics (both left and right) as a British-led alternative to European integration, Mr. Johnson’s government (with the now-Prime Minister Liz Truss as its foreign secretary) leaned into a vision of ‘Global Britain’ steeped in half-truths and imperial nostalgia.”

Andrew Sullivan found himself similarly moved at the news (after a bit of mandatory Trump-bashing to start the column):

[In the 2016 TV show The Crown] I found myself watching the life of an entirely different head of state: a young, somewhat shy woman suddenly elevated to immense responsibilities and duties in her twenties, hemmed in by protocol, rigidified by discipline. The new president could barely get through the day without some provocation, insult, threat or lie. Elizabeth Windsor was tasked as a twenty-something with a job that required her to say or do nothing that could be misconstrued, controversial, or even interestingly human — for the rest of her life.

The immense difficulty of this is proven by the failure of almost every other member of her family — including her husband — to pull it off. We know her son King Charles III’s views on a host of different subjects, many admirable, some cringe-inducing. We know so much of the psychological struggles of Diana; the reactionary outbursts of Philip; the trauma of Harry; the depravity of Andrew; the agonies of Margaret. We still know nothing like that about the Queen. Because whatever else her life was about, it was not about her.

Part of the hard-to-explain grief I feel today is related to how staggeringly rare that level of self-restraint is today. Narcissism is everywhere. Every feeling we have is bound to be expressed. Self-revelation, transparency, authenticity — these are our values. The idea that we are firstly humans with duties to others that will require and demand the suppression of our own needs and feelings seems archaic. Elizabeth kept it alive simply by example.

With her death, it’s hard not to fear that so much she exemplified — restraint, duty, grace, reticence, persistence — are disappearing from the world. As long as she was there, they were at the center of an idea of Britishness that helped define the culture at its best. Perhaps the most famous woman in the world, she remained a sphinx, hard to decipher, impossible to label. She was not particularly beautiful or dashing or inspiring. She said nothing surprising. She was simply the Queen. She showed up. She got on with it. She was there. She was always there.

Whatever else happened to the other royals, she stayed the same. And whatever else happened in Britain — from the end of Empire to Brexit — she stayed the same. This is an achievement of nearly inhuman proportions, requiring discipline beyond most mortals. Think of a year, 1992, in which one son, Andrew, divorced, a daughter-in-law, Sarah Ferguson was seen cavorting nude in the tabloids, a daughter, Anne, separated, another son’s famously failed marriage, Charles’, dominated the headlines, and your house burns down. Here is how Her Majesty “vented”:

    1992 is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure. In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an “Annus Horribilis“.

Dry, understated, with the only vivid phrase ascribed to a correspondent. Flawless.

She was an icon, but not an idol. An idol requires the vivid expression of virtues, personality, style. Diana was an idol — fusing a compelling and vulnerable temperament with Hollywood glamor. And Diana, of course, was in her time loved far more intensely than her mother-in-law; connected emotionally with ordinary people like a rockstar; only eventually to face the longterm consequences of that exposure and crumble under the murderous spotlight of it all.

Elizabeth never rode those tides of acclaim or celebrity. She never pressed the easy buttons of conventional popularity. She didn’t even become known for her caustic wit like the Queen Mother, or her compulsively social sorties like Margaret. The gays of Britain could turn both of these queens into camp divas. But not her. In private as in public, she had the kind of integrity no one can mock successfully.

Magical Monetary Theory (MMT) – You’re soaking in it

Filed under: Economics, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

At the Foundation for Economic Education, Kellen McGovern Jones outlines the rapid rise of MMT as “the answer to everyone’s problems” in the last few years and all the predictable problems it has sown in its wake:

“Inflation & Gold” by Paolo Camera is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) was the “Mumble Rap” of politics and economics in the late 2010s. The theory was incoherent, unsubstantial, and — before the pandemic, you could not avoid it if you wanted to.

People across the country celebrated MMT. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democrat Congresswoman from New York heralded MMT by proclaiming it “absolutely [must be] … a larger part of our conversation [on government spending].” The New York Times and other old-guard news sources authored countless articles raising the profile of MMT, while universities scrambled to hold guest lectures with prominent MMT economists like Dr. L. Randall Wray. Senator Bernie Sanders went as far as to hire MMT economists to his economic advisory team.

The most fundamental principle of MMT is that our government does not have to watch its wallet like everyday Joes. MMT contends that the government can spend as much as it wants on various projects because it can always print more money to pay for its agenda.

Soon after MMT became fashionable in the media, the once dissident economic theory leapt from being the obscure fascination of tweedy professors smoking pipes in universities to the seemingly deliberate policy of the United States government. When the Pandemic Hit, many argued that MMT was the solution to the pandemics problems. Books like The Deficit Myth by Dr. Stephanie Kelton became New York Times bestsellers, and the United States embarked on a massive spending spree without raising taxes or interest rates.

Attempting to stop the spread of Covid, state and federal governments coordinated to shut down nearly every business in the United States. Then, following the model of MMT, the federal government decided to spend, and spend, and spend, to combat the shutdown it had just imposed. Both Republican and Democrat-controlled administrations and congresses enacted trillions of dollars in Covid spending.

It is not hard to see that this spray and pray mentality of shooting bundles of cash into the economy and hoping it does not have any negative consequences was ripe for massive inflation from the beginning. Despite what MMT proponents may want you to believe, there is no way to abolish the laws of supply and demand. When there is a lot of something, it is less valuable. Massively increasing the supply of money in the economy will decrease the value of said money.

MMT economists seemed woefully unaware of this reality prior to the pandemic. Lecturing at Stoney Brook University, Kelton attempted to soothe worries about inflation by explaining that (in the modern economy) the government simply instructs banks to increase the number of dollars in someone’s bank account rather than physically printing the US Dollar and putting it into circulation. Somehow — through means that were never entirely clear — this fact was supposed to make people feel better.

In reality, there is no difference between changing the number in someone’s bank account or printing money. In both cases, the result is the same, the supply of money has increased. Evidence of MMTs inflationary effects are now everywhere.

September 9, 2022

“Far from fighting against the establishment, the woke are the establishment”

Filed under: Books, Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Spiked, Andrew Doyle discusses the reactions to his announcement that he was writing a book about the ongoing culture wars:

“Titania McGrath” and Andrew Doyle

My new book is about intolerance. I am fascinated by those who prefer only to associate with people who share their own identical worldview, and who interpret the slightest point of political disagreement as evidence of evil. The new religion of group identity and “social justice” has driven once rational people into a state of frenzied bigotry. I want to understand why.

So, back in May, when I announced I was working on a book called The New Puritans, I wasn’t all that surprised to see so many self-proclaimed advocates of “social justice” rush to demonstrate the very phenomenon that I was attempting to explore. Some suggested that they would acquire copies only to burn them. One said that he intended to kick it under the bookshop shelf “so that it could rot in darkness”. Another simply declared that I was “pure scum”. Were any of these people aware that they were proving my point?

Byline Times even claimed that I was waging “a perpetual battle against social justice – fighting against a contrived present world of aggressive ‘woke snowflakes’ in order to return to an imagined past”. This was news to me, given that my book is a defence of progressive and liberal values, and it explicitly criticises those who resort to the “snowflake” slur. I particularly enjoyed the suggestion that my book was an example of someone imagining enemies into existence in order to fight them. It takes some chutzpah to make such a claim of a book you haven’t actually read.

It would seem that the title alone – The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World – was enough to stir the ire of these culture warriors. In a sense, this is unsurprising. One of the key aspects of this ideological movement is that its adherents treat all challenges as a form of heresy that must be quashed. For all that they like to smear their detractors as “bigots”, they forget that the main definition of the word – “a person who is utterly intolerant of any differing creed, belief or opinion” – applies most accurately to themselves.

Why is it, for instance, that JK Rowling can be so routinely monstered as “hateful” and “transphobic” despite having never said anything hateful or transphobic? Only this week, the Harry Potter author found herself in an exasperating Twitter exchange with someone claiming she had been “outwardly hateful of an entire community”. Rowling quite rightly asked for evidence, to which her detractor replied: “I don’t know where you said it, but I bet you do.” For those taking part in the witch-hunt, the total lack of evidence is simply an inconvenience to be brushed aside.

This is why my book draws comparisons between the hysteria of the “woke” movement and the witch hunts of Salem in the late 17th century. In a burst of collective madness that lasted a little over a year (from February 1692 to May 1693), 20 people were executed for witchcraft on the basis of the testimony of local girls. All of the prosecutions were secured on the basis of “spectral evidence” – what today we might call “lived experience”. The girls simply declared that they had seen these innocent people sign the devil’s book, or that they had been “sending out their spirits” to torment people. This was their “truth”, and so it had to be believed.

Britain’s “Lord of Misrule” at the end of the “Borisarchy”

Filed under: Britain, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Quillette, John Lloyd considers the parts of Boris Johnson’s personality that allowed him to achieve the premiership but not to retain it:

The respectable consensus on Boris Johnson’s resignation is that the Lord of Misrule was an opportunist who rose to power amid the mayhem of Brexit that he’d helped to create, but that his fecklessness finally caught up with him. There’s something in that, but more in what’s not. Although his critics will refuse to admit it, what’s mostly missing is the laughter, which is now a more important factor in British public life than before.

Much of public and media life in the UK — and it isn’t unique in this — is a search for laugh lines, and Johnson — instinctively but also with calculation — played heartily into this. He always had. In a largely affectionate biography, Andrew Gimson, Johnson’s former colleague at the Spectator and the Daily Telegraph, writes that, “To make people enjoy being led by him was an aspect of leadership which Boris mastered at a very young age. He made people helpless with laughter, and so great was their enjoyment that they scarcely cared what he did with their support, as long as he kept on amusing them.”

With the laughter came Johnson’s inchoate libertarianism — a strong aversion to condemning activities in which others like to indulge, especially those in which he likes to indulge himself, such as adultery. He is fond of telling the story of when Churchill, Johnson’s lodestar as a public figure, was taken aside during his second administration (1951–55) by his chief whip and told that a cabinet minister had been discovered having sex with a guardsman in Hyde Park at 3am on a freezing morning in February. The press had found out, which the whip advised, meant the minister would have to resign. “Caught with a guardsman?” Churchill asked. “Yes Prime Minister.” “In Hyde Park?” “Yes Prime Minister.” “On a park bench?” “That’s right, Prime Minister.” “At three o’clock in the morning?” “That’s correct, Prime Minister.” “In this weather! Good God man, it makes you proud to be British!”

To Johnson, this is evidence of Churchill’s goodhearted tolerance and defiance of narrow prejudice (this was a time when homosexual acts were quite severely punished), which are matched only by his own in generosity and wit. To be generous and broadminded in his speech (he is said to be quite mean with his money) is attractive to the many sinners among us. We see in the Prime Minister a person with the moral outlook of Casanova and yet (or, and so) finds attractive women willing to dally with him — a cheering thought. As one of these, Allegra Mostyn-Owen, who became his first wife, later admitted, “at least he made me laugh.”

[…]

Accustomed to lying to wriggle out of embarrassments like the discovery of an adultery, he continued to mislead when he joined aides for impromptu parties at No. 10, when the strictest lockdowns and prohibitions on the public were in force. How could a man of such intelligence fail to realise that his bluster would unravel almost as soon as they were uttered? He had, it seemed, an inbuilt arrogance — a conviction that he was able to avoid consequences that brought others down, but which only made him stronger.

In the end, he ran out of that road. Ironically, what finished him was denying that he knew that a government whip, Chris Pincher, had a history of groping other men. Johnson refused to take the scandal seriously enough to fire Pincher, as his senior colleagues pressed him to do — an echo of the Churchill joke he liked to tell, and a reaction which accorded with his libertarian instincts. However, his colleagues finally wearied of delivering statements to the media that made them look ridiculous within days or even hours. It was the last straw.

When Lord Dannatt, a former head of the British Army, was confronted with the (admittedly faint) possibility that Johnson would be considered for the post of NATO Secretary General, he was quoted as saying: “There is no doubt that [Johnson] has done a lot of good, and our full support for Ukraine is just fantastic. But I am afraid that these are personal things, a lack of integrity, a lack of trust. Frankly, we do not want to put Boris Johnson on the international stage for further ridicule. He is a disgrace to the nation.”

QotD: The BBC behind-the-scenes in 1983

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

By 10pm on the night of 9th June 1983 BBC Television center was humming. In Studio Two, amid a beige version of the set from Alien, David Dimbleby and Robin Day were about to start the election results show, though everybody already knew Thatcher was going to walk it.

I was in the studio next door, which had been transformed into a vast Green Room, tables stacked high with food and booze. Us trainees had been brought in to help organise the guests and manage the hospitality.

And that party was only getting started. As the night wore on and the politicians, academics and journalists came and went, but mostly came and stayed, the whole place, and the labyrinth of corridors, scenery docks and stage lifts surrounding it, began to resemble something between a University May Ball and the last days of Rome.

People were being sick in corridors, being discovered “in flagrante” in lifts or sneaking off into unlocked offices. Some, bearing an uncanny resemblance to their Spitting Image puppets, became far too slurry and unsteady on their feet to go before Dimbleby and co at the appointed time.

Back then, juniors like me were often sent to pick up politicians and other public figures, because if they were not physically guided they’d forget to turn up altogether or go to the wrong place. We’d arrive rather sheepishly outside clubs, parties and private homes — sometimes not the private homes that they were supposed to be living in. We’d gently lead them away from whatever drunken dinner they were at and take them to the studio where more free alcohol was always available. And everyone was smoking.

For politicians and journalists alike, it was an especially louche time. And secrets, by and large, were kept along an arc of tolerated misbehaviour that ran from Westminster through St James’ to Notting Hill and White City. Albertines Wine Bar and Julie’s restaurant both had booths you could dissolve into during lunches that slipped toward early evening, and the “cinq a sept” trade in the local hotels was always healthy.

There was a BBC chauffeur driving company run by a man called Niven, and a late night “Niven Car” was the ultimate perk when the White City and Lime Grove bars finally closed. I’m not the only BBC veteran who’ll remember when a certain public figure left an item of intimate female clothing on the back seat of her “Niven” after an over-enthusiastic snog on her way home. It was duly recovered, popped into a plastic bag and discreetly couriered back to its proper owner.

I’m making it sound more fun than it was. There was a lot of awful behaviour that went unremarked and unpunished, especially the leering, groping and grabbing that my female colleagues had to put up with endlessly, some of which would today rightly be called sexual assault. And, of course, this permissive culture was the ideal environment for celebratory predators, the Jimmy Savilles, Stuart Halls and Cyril Smiths (one of David Dimbleby’s guests that very election night). We all heard the gossip, but nobody made a challenge.

But if I could have any part of that world back it would be this: we didn’t expect, need or want our MPs, ministers or their shadows to be plaster saints.

Phil Craig, “I’m done with po faced politicians”, The Critic, 2022-05-18.

September 8, 2022

Liz Truss replaces Boris Johnson

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill looks at some of the many, many tasks already piled on new British PM Liz Truss’s desk in the wake of Boris and the pandemic:

So it’s prime minister Truss. No big surprise there. What we need next, though, is something that would be very surprising, almost unfathomably so. We need a PM who can buck the crisis of political will and take clear, firm action to save the country from economic collapse and existential malaise. Is that Truss? I’m sceptical, but we shall see.

At first glance, Truss would seem to be singularly unsuited to the task at hand. That task is nothing less than a revolution of will, a rediscovery of the political mettle that has been glaringly absent in Britain these past few decades. We live under a political class that is cautious, bereft of daring; which is hyper short-termist, more concerned with dodging controversy in the present than laying out a plan for the future. The energy crisis is the bastard offspring of this evacuation of vision from politics.

And in Truss we seem to have a leader who is more technocratic than visionary, more given to following the political consensus than to shaking things up. As the Telegraph put it, Truss has been a “dutiful servant”. Despite being something of a Tory party outsider – considered by many insiders to be “a bit odd” – Truss has always “diligently backed the consensus within the party”. She seems overly media-oriented, too. She’s clearly had her gauche edges smoothed by media training and she devotes a lot of energy to “savvy social-media use”. A politician who prefers consensual calm to bold action, and who is more concerned with virtual likes than real-world impact, is not what crisis-ridden Britain needs.

And yet, Truss is far from alone in lacking political audacity, in seeming to prefer the small bureaucratic task of managing public life rather than overhauling it. In this, she’s fairly typical of today’s managerial elites. Also, Truss’s political clarity seemed to improve during the leadership contest. She even became a little more daring in what she said – for instance, by bristling against Net Zero policies. No, this doesn’t prove she’s the leader we need, but it is a reminder that politicians often find themselves, and their cojones, in the heat of battle. Will the pressures of the crisis similarly bring out Truss’s slightly edgier side? We should hope so.

On that crisis, let us be clear: it is incredibly serious. It is the most serious crisis Britain has faced in decades. The political and media elites seem unwilling to acknowledge just how deep and menacing the crisis is. Even their focus on households’ rising energy bills suggests they do not appreciate the enormity of what is unfolding. Yes, millions are worried about how to keep the lights on this winter, but the impact of the energy crisis on business and industry will be graver still. Numerous businesses look set to go under, precipitating economic collapse and mass unemployment. Choosing between heating and eating will be a luxurious memory in the event of the joblessness and poverty that would follow such a calamity in British capitalism.

On a somewhat lighter note, it turns out that Liz Truss isn’t the same person as @LizTruss on Twitter:

September 5, 2022

“In this version of the story, the little boy points out that the naked emperor has no soul, and the people begin to notice”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Bray uses the example of a new Disney show featuring the literal daughter of Satan — for the LULs — to illustrate just how unhinged our culture has become:

Give me a minute, and let me show you something without framing or a narrative. Then I’ll talk about it, but first just notice it. The company founded by Walt Disney has a new show about a middle school girl who has an awkward dilemma: She’s the Antichrist (as her mom reveals to her one day, after a weird day at school), and her Cool Dad is Satan, who has lots of funny lines about what a wild guy he is. Funny teen girl dilemmas follow, like this one time her parents show up to a party — which, like, super bummer and everything, but it’s even funnier when your dad is actually, literally Satan.

[…]

But no lines are being crossed, because there are no lines. Satan is a television character; immorality is impossible in a culture without morality, without a moral framework and moral anchors. Lacking principles, no one in power can violate any. They’re completely adrift, completely free, and completely ruined. They can go anywhere, and they often do. You can’t sin when nothing is a sin. Well, except for using the wrong pronouns, but more or less.

Now: There are people who are not adrift, who have moral reference points. I continue to believe they’re the majority, geographically prevalent and often thick on the ground, morally attuned as communities and families in a global and national milieu of amoral disconnectedness.

So we have people who see no lines, traveling freely across discarded boundaries, watched by people who are appalled by line-crossing that the line-crossers don’t perceive at all.

See also this essay from Dr. Robert Yoho, “Guess Who Passes the Psychopath Test?”

    Psychopathic lying is successful because normal people do not believe that anyone lies as a routine. Debates with sociopaths are useless. No matter what we say, no matter how much evidence is given, it has no meaning for them. Their sole goal is to fool us into classifying them as normal so they can continue to deceive, control, and use us …

    When major positions of power in business, government, industry, and society are filled by sociopaths, a downward spiral begins. The normal people eventually recognize what their leaders are and devise survival strategies.

We’re there, though it’s hard to place “there” on a map. We can see that a significant share of power and status — in politics, in economics, and in culture — belongs to people who have no perception of social rules or moral limits at all. And we see that some lines need to be reimposed, urgently and firmly.

After a few years of, “but these are the experts, right?” it feels like the beginning of the phase in which everybody finally knows the game and the stakes. In this version of the story, the little boy points out that the naked emperor has no soul, and the people begin to notice. And then?

September 4, 2022

Extreme Ultra-MAGA terrorist Trump voters are endangering “our” democracy!!!1!

Filed under: Media, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Perhaps I exaggerate a tiny bit in my headline … but events here in Clown World metastasize so quickly that parodists and satirists are becoming an endangered species because it’s nearly impossible to come up with more incredibly stupid stuff than the political class do for real:

Over the past couple of weeks, it seems that the Regime has really been ramping up its rhetoric against its political and ideological enemies. In a coordinated rollout, talking heads across the media have been stating that “MAGA Trump voters” are “threats to democracy”, “trying to take away our freedoms”, “stochastic terrorists”, and so forth. This all has been timed to culminate with the pResident himself going on national television to explicitly state that the entire half of the country that didn’t vote for him are mortal enemies of the state. This takes on a somewhat more ominous tone when we remember that just a few days previous, this same pResident essentially threatened to use F-15s to bomb patriotic Americans who believe in the Constitution.

While these could be dismissed as the senile ramblings of a doddering old dementia patient, the thing to keep in mind is that Biden himself is merely a sock puppet. What he says reflects the words put into his mouth by the progressive theatre kids who staff his administration, as well as other elements within the Regime. Indeed, all of the huffinpuffery about how “your hillbilly AR-15 can’t take on tanks and fighter jets hurr durr!!” is basically the sort of thing you’d have heard on Reddit for years. But the fact that official channels are now openly talking about using the military against their own people for mere ideological purposes suggests that there is an acceleration going on in the Left’s subversion of this country.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — if there is to be an open civil war in the USA, it will almost assuredly be instigated and started by the Left. However, it is not one that they are likely to win, for a number of reasons that I will elaborate briefly below. They are ones that I suspect the Regime itself knows, which makes the current trajectory they seem to be setting appear all the more desperate. Common sense would dictate that they should try to keep the repression at just a high enough level to intimidate the citizenry into compliance without actually provoking a broad response, even if not a violent one. Yet, the Left is dynamiting what is left of the social contract because once they’ve got started down this path there’s no stopping.

So briefly, let’s talk about why the Regime would not win a war against Red America, despite the hopes and expectations of thousands of redditards across the country. First and foremost there is the unreliability (from the Regime’s perspective) of the current military. Simply put, most military personnel below the O-4 or O-5 levels are not ideologically indoctrinated into woke progressivism and are unlikely to be willing to wage war on their own countrymen. They’re especially not likely to go along with wokester fever dreams of bombing Red cities into oblivion and turning the heartland into ashes just to stick it to those Trumpsters. So there would be deep fractures, mutinies, fragging incidents galore.

Of course, that’s why the Regime is trying to wokify the military to be more ideologically compatible with the Left. In a sense, for the Left the drastic recruiting shortfall that the military is currently experiencing is a feature, not a bug, since it provides them with the justification to make up the difference by recruiting foreigners with no connexion to the American people (and thus no compunctions about shooting at them). Which then introduces a further competency factor in that when you recruit a third world army, you … have a third world army, so you’re sacrificing competency for reliability. Nevertheless, as it currently stands most enlisted men and lower-level officers are not going to be inclined to incinerate their buddy’s parents for believing in the second amendment.

As Severian posted right after the “Triumph of the Shrill” speech by Biden:

I’d like to address the “they’re going in for the kill” argument, eloquently argued by MBlanc46 and others. I agree, there is exactly as much, if not more, evidence for this thesis then there is for my “they’re panicking” thesis. And whatever else they thought Brandon was doing last night, there’s definitely a “throw down the gauntlet” aspect to it.

The reason I favor “panic” over “going in for the kill” is that as hard as it is to believe, the Left always see themselves as the heroic underdog, struggling against a rigged system. Even when they’re throwing you into boxcars, they’re bewailing the fact — and in what passes for their minds it IS a fact — that you forced them to do it.

They cry out in pain as they strike you, as another demented shitbag collectivist said about a different group in an eerily similar context.

What all this — Biden’s big “My Struggle” speech (hereafter to be known, as Mmack put it, as “the Triumph of the Shrill”), the hiring of a zillion new IRS agents, the works — is designed to do is: provoke a reaction. To put it bluntly, there is no “domestic extremism”. Of course there really are some retards out there doing retard shit, but as we all know, the typical “Klan” meeting is an ATF agent trying to entrap a DEA agent who’s trying to entrap an FBI agent who is trying to entrap his own informant. Hello, fellow patriots!

But they keep failing to do roll-the-tanks-level shit. Which is a problem for the Apparat, because the ATF agent can’t get permission from the DEA to provide enough guns to the FBI agent to really kick things off (not least because he’s going to be foiled by the other undercover FBI agent who’s trying to entrap the other DEA agent and so on).

So they just keep upping the ante, hoping that maybe this time, finally, somebody will do a terrorism.

If they’re confident enough to put Brandon in a Darth Vader suit on national TV, in other words, they long ago passed the point where anyone not crippled by the psychological compulsion to see himself as a victim would’ve said “fuck it, drop the hammer”. We wore diapers on our faces for two fucking years, for Christ’s sake, and shot ourselves up with mystery goop because the same evil little goblin who turned AIDS from an easily containable plague of deviants into a legit public health crisis told us to.

September 2, 2022

The winner in 1932 campaigned against high taxes, big government, and more debt. Then he turned all those up to 11

Filed under: Economics, Government, History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At the Foundation for Economic Education, Lawrence W. Reed notes that we often get the opposite of what we vote for, and perhaps the best example of that was the 1932 presidential campaign between high-taxing, big-spending, government-expanding Republican Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who ran against all of Hoover’s excesses … until inauguration day, anyway:

Top left: The Tennessee Valley Authority, part of the New Deal, being signed into law in 1933.
Top right: FDR (President Franklin Delano Roosevelt) was responsible for the New Deal.
Bottom: A public mural from one of the artists employed by the New Deal’s WPA program.
Wikimedia Commons.

If you were a socialist (or a modern “liberal” or “progressive”) in 1932, you faced an embarrassment of riches at the ballot box. You could go for Norman Thomas. Or perhaps Verne Reynolds of the Socialist Labor Party. Or William Foster of the Communist Party. Maybe Jacob Coxey of the Farmer-Labor Party or even William Upshaw of the Prohibition Party. You could have voted for Hoover who, after all, had delivered sky-high tax rates, big deficits, lots of debt, higher spending, and trade-choking tariffs in his four-year term. Roosevelt’s own running mate, John Nance Garner of Texas, declared that Republican Hoover was “taking the country down the path to socialism”.

Journalist H.L. Mencken famously noted that “Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.” If you agreed with Mencken and preferred a non-socialist candidate who promised to get government off your back and out of your pocket in 1932, Franklin Roosevelt was your man — that is, until March 1933 when he assumed office and took a sharp turn in the other direction.

The platform on which Roosevelt ran that year denounced the incumbent administration for its reckless growth of government. The Democrats promised no less than a 25 percent reduction in federal spending if elected.

Roosevelt accused Hoover of governing as though, in FDR’s words, “we ought to center control of everything in Washington as rapidly as possible.” On September 29 in Iowa, the Democrat presidential nominee blasted Hooverism in these terms:

    I accuse the present Administration of being the greatest spending Administration in peace times in all our history. It is an Administration that has piled bureau on bureau, commission on commission, and has failed to anticipate the dire needs and the reduced earning power of the people. Bureaus and bureaucrats, commissions and commissioners have been retained at the expense of the taxpayer.

    Now, I read in the past few days in the newspapers that the President is at work on a plan to consolidate and simplify the Federal bureaucracy. My friends, four long years ago, in the campaign of 1928, he, as a candidate, proposed to do this same thing. And today, once more a candidate, he is still proposing, and I leave you to draw your own inferences. And on my part, I ask you very simply to assign to me the task of reducing the annual operating expenses of your national government.

Once in the White House, he did no such thing. He doubled federal spending in his first term. New “alphabet agencies” were added to the bureaucracy. Nothing of any consequence in the budget was either cut or made more efficient. He gave us our booze back by ending Prohibition, but then embarked upon a spending spree that any drunk with your wallet would envy. Taxes went up in FDR’s administration, not down as he had promised.

Don’t take my word for it. It’s all a matter of public record even if your teacher or professor never told you any of this. For details, I recommend these books: Burton Folsom’s New Deal or Raw Deal; Murray Rothbard’s America’s Great Depression; my own Great Myths of the Great Depression; and the two I want to tell you about now, John T. Flynn’s As We Go Marching and The Roosevelt Myth.

For every thousand books written, perhaps one may come to enjoy the appellation “classic”. That label is reserved for a volume that through the force of its originality and thoroughness, shifts paradigms and serves as a timeless, indispensable source of insight.

Such a book is The Roosevelt Myth. First published in 1948, Flynn’s definitive analysis of America’s 32nd president is arguably the best and most thoroughly documented chronicle of the person and politics of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Flynn’s 1944 book, As We Go Marching, focuses on the fascist-style economic planning during World War II and is very illuminating as well.

August 30, 2022

The plasticity of language, slippery definitions, and the ongoing gender wars

Filed under: Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Allan Stratton considers some of the reasons for misunderstanding, argument, and anger in the suddenly huge gender wars in western culture:

Two people at EuroPride 2019 in Vienna holding an LGBTQ+ pride rainbow flag featuring a design by Daniel Quasar; this variation of the rainbow flag was initially promoted as “Progress” a PRIDE Flag Reboot.
Photo by Bojan Cvetanović via Wikimedia Commons.

From my perspective, much of the controversy stems from academic redefinitions of language and concepts over the past 60 years. As these changes affected a small subculture, mainstream society paid them no mind. But language has consequences.

I’m a gay man in his early seventies, who’s paid close attention to the decades of linguistic manipulations that have turned sense into nonsense. Once, words and concepts had clear understandings that helped to create widespread support for LGBT rights. More recently, they have been conflated and inverted, and threaten to negatively affect the rights of women, the safety of gender-nonconforming children, and the lives of gays, lesbians, and transexuals.

A quick primer on the change in key terms may help to clarify our current mess and suggest a way forward:

Today the trans umbrella is understood to be a single movement within the Alphabet alliance, but in 1960s North America, it referred to three specific groups: self-identified transsexuals, transvestites and transgenders. There was some overlap, but none of the three were specifically attached to the fight for gay rights at all.

Transsexuals gained public prominence thanks to American Christine Jorgensen. After serving in the United States Army, Jorgensen had a sex change operation in Denmark before returning to America in 1953. She never identified as homosexual, but, rather, said she had born in the wrong body. Jorgenson was extraordinarily popular. I urge you to watch these two interviews, one from the ’60s and the other from the ’80s. Her wit, charm, self-assurance and intelligence demonstrate the power of persuasion, especially notable at a time far less tolerant than our own.

Transvestites (a term now considered derogatory) dressed and used the pronouns of the opposite sex, but fully acknowledged the material reality of their biology. Some were gay like the legendary Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Norman, who co-founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. Most, however, were straight men like Virginia Prince, who published Transvestia Magazine, founded the Society for the Second Self, and published the classic How to be Woman Though Male. They distanced themselves from the gay community, fearing the association hurt their image. “True transvestites,” Prince assured, “are exclusively heterosexual … The transvestite values his male organs, enjoys using them and does not desire them removed.”

The term transgender, coined by psychiatrist John Oliven in 1965, was designed to distinguish transsexuals, who wanted to surgically change sex, from transvestites, whose inclinations were limited to gendered feelings and presentation. But its definition soon morphed to ungainly proportions. By the ’90s, trans academic Susan Stryker had re-re-re-defined it as (deep breath) “all identities or practices that cross over, cut across, move between, or otherwise queer socially constructed sex/gender boundaries (including, but not limited to) transsexuality, heterosexual transvestism, gay drag, butch lesbianism, and such non-European identities as the Native American berdache (now 2 Spirit) or the Indian Hijra.”

It’s key to remember that, at this time, trans people typically considered themselves the opposite sex spiritually and socially, but not literally: To repeat, trans women like Virginia Price insisted they were straight male heterosexuals, and would have been outraged at the suggestion that they were lesbians. As a result, women’s rights were never infringed. No one insisted that “sexual attraction” and “biologically sexed bodies” be defined out of existence. Nor were “tomboys” and “sissies” expected to seek gender clinics or consider puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgery.

Under those circumstances, trans people gradually gained public support for human and civil rights protections. It’s easy to empathize with the distress of feeling trapped in the wrong body, and the horror of wanting to claw one’s way out. And how can a live-and-let-live world justify discrimination against people for simply wanting to imagine and present themselves as they wish? Progress, though imperfect and incomplete, was real.

But, as we have seen practically every day in the last few years, for true Progressives, mere “progress” isn’t enough and there are no waypoints on the road to Utopia…

NYT op-ed – “Maternal instinct is a social construct devised by men to keep women subordinate”

Filed under: Health, Media, Science — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Jerry Coyne responds to a New York Times op-ed by Chelsea Conaboy (author of a forthcoming book from which the op-ed was adapted):

The recent article […] from the New York Times (of course), is one of the worst of the lot. It bespeaks a lack of judgment on the part of the author — who ignores biology because of her ideology — as well as on the part of the newspaper, which failed to hold the author’s feet to the scientific fire. Let this post be my rebuttal.

Author Conaboy, who apparently hasn’t done enough scientific research, maintains that “maternal instinct” doesn’t exist, but is a social construct devised by men to keep women subordinate.

The immediate problem is that Conaboy never defines “maternal instinct”. It could mean any number of things, including a greater desire of women than men to have children, a greater desire of women than of men to care for those offspring, the fact that in animals mothers spend more time caring for offspring than do fathers, a greater emotional affinity of women than of men towards children (including offspring), or the demonstration of such a mental difference by observing a difference in caring behavior.

I will define “maternal instinct” as not only the greater average tendency of females than males to care for offspring, but also a greater behavioral affinity towards offspring in females than in males. The term involves behavioral response, not “feelings”, which are demonstrable only in humans. Thus one can look for difference in “parental instincts” across various species of animals.

But even in this sense, Conoboy is partly (but far from wholly) correct when she discusses humans. It’s undoubtedly true that women were socialized into the sex role as offspring breeders and caretakers, with men assuming the “breadwinning” role. It’s also true that women were often denied access to work or education because their vocation was seen as “reproducer”, or out of fear that they would spend less time working and more on children, or even that they’d get pregnant and would leave jobs. Further, it’s also true that this role difference was justified by being seen as “hard-wired” (i.e., largely the result of genes, which, I argue below, is true), and that “hard-wired” was conceived as “unable to be changed”. The latter construal, however, is wrong, and that is what really held back women. The socialization of sex roles, which still occurs, goes on from early ages, with girls given dolls and boys toy cars, though, as society has matured, we’re increasingly allowing girls to choose their own toys and their own path through life. I of course applaud such “equal opportunity”.

But to claim that women don’t have a greater desire than men to care for offspring, or have a greater emotional affinity towards offspring, is to deny biology, and evolution in particular. (I freely admit that many men love their kids deeply, and that some men care for them as much or more as do mothers, but I’m talking about averages here, not anecdotes.)

There are two reasons why Conaboy is wrong, and both involve evolution.

The first is theoretical, but derived from empirical observations. It thus explains the second, which is wholly empirical and predictive. How do we explain the fact that, across the animal kingdom, when members of only one sex do most of the childrearing, it’s almost invariably the females? (Yes, in many species males share the duties, and in a very few, like seahorses, males provide more parental care; and there are evolutionary reasons for that.)

The reasons for the statement in bold above involves the biology of reproduction. It is the female who must lay the eggs or give birth, and there is no way she can leave her genes behind unless she does that. It’s easier for males to take off after insemination and let the females care for offspring. Given that females are constrained to stick with the fertilized eggs, their best strategy is to take care of the gestation and resultant offspring, which of course allows males to seek other mates. Not only must females carry the fetuses, lay the eggs, and so on, but they are also constrained to see out the pregnancy until offspring are produced and then suckle or tend them in other ways. In some cases it’s the best evolutionary strategy for a male to stick around and share the child-rearing, but often it’s not.

This disparity in behavior holds not just in humans, of course, but in many animals: it’s a prediction — largely verified — of evolutionary psychology.

August 29, 2022

“Follow the science!”, “No, not like that!”

Filed under: Government, Health, Media, Science, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Bray recounts his experiences when he “followed the science” over the Wuhan Coronavirus:

It’s happening again, and so is the response. It’s becoming our one persistent cultural cycle.

During the first availability of the Covid-19 “vaccines” — which don’t prevent transmission or infection, but we changed the meaning of that word, so shut up shut up shut up — I did what I usually do: I thought about the past to try to make sense of the present. If we’ve instantly produced safe and effective vaccines for SARS-CoV-2, I wondered, why didn’t we do the same for SARS-CoV-1? It took less than five minutes to answer that question:

So scientists did come up with a vaccine for SARS-CoV-1, but when they gave it to animals, it made the animals extremely susceptible to severe illness when they were “challenged” with the virus again — “suggesting hypersensitivity to SARS-CoV components was induced”. And so, the authors of that 2012 paper argued, “Caution in proceeding to application of a SARS-CoV vaccine in humans is indicated.”

Because I believe in science, I followed that advice, and I told my doctor that I was following that advice — and that I wasn’t terribly concerned about Covid-19 anyway, so whatever. I would be cautious about injecting a novel medical product into my body: I would wait, calmly. She assured me that there was no scientific shortcutting at all in the development of the vaccines for SARS-CoV-2, which were absolutely known to be 100% safe and effective, but she also agreed that there was nothing wrong with watching and waiting for a few months.

I meant it. At that point, I hadn’t refused the vaccines — I had just decided that I would wait for a bit to see how they played out once they’d been injected into a few billion human lab rats.

And then the shaming started. I was uninvited from a family event, and ordered to stay away — and then, after a short pause, repeatedly shamed by email as a disgusting selfish pig who made the family sick with my ignorance and selfishness. (Distant family, thankfully.) The public sphere came alive with this message, and Joe Biden let me know that his patience was wearing thin for my kind. Social media was a daily fear bath, and consumed with shaming rituals.

It was exactly that message that turned my skepticism, my preference for watching and waiting, into a flat and permanent refusal. People said they were talking about science — in a vicious flood of hyperemotional shaming language, the hysterical tone and substance of which made it clear that they weren’t talking about science at all. They were talking about their fearfulness and their weakness; they were talking about their cowardice, and about the shame they felt at finding their fear of the air wasn’t shared. The shaming made me contemptuous; it secured my commitment to resist.

So now comes a new flood of shaming messages, assuring people that mere political disagreement is a sure sign of monstrous cruelty and hate.

“What did you do in the Covid War, Daddy?”

Filed under: Books, Cancon, Health, Law, Media, Science — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Janice Fiamengo hopes that the future isn’t female, for the sake of all of us:

If Covid was a war, as it was frequently depicted as being, it was one in which none of the typical masculine virtues required by war were in evidence. Gone was the valorization of stoicism, courage, forgetfulness of self, rational risk assessment, and the curtailment of emotionalism. In their place came generalized anxiety, self-righteous vindictiveness, and the longing for (an unattainable) safety at all costs.

In his book United States of Fear: How America Fell Victim to a Mass Delusional Psychosis, American psychiatrist Mark McDonald noted the disappearance of men from the Covid state as a key factor in our descent into social psychosis. Of course men remained in existence, but their roles were reduced to enthusiastic compliance with even the most trivial of health rules.

As a psychiatrist with extensive clinical experience, McDonald was uniquely positioned to diagnose some of the underlying causes of Covid panic. He notes in the book that women, evolved to be hyper-attentive to the needs of infants and simultaneously aware of their own vulnerability as maternal caregivers, tend to be far more susceptible to anxiety disorders than men. Women evolved over millennia to look to men for protection of themselves and their children (p. 30-31), and men evolved to provide it.

Yet as Covid experts encouraged us all to worry about the safety of our families, with daily case counts and endless updates on (de-contextualized) death numbers, “men failed […] dismally in their duty to provide a sense of safety and security for the women in their lives” (p. 41). When some women insisted fearfully on rules to protect themselves and their loved ones — even irrational rules such as outdoor masking and limitations on how children played together — men, whose traditional role has been to “calm and ground women’s fears” (p. 39), either did nothing or went along. Some men, of course, led the charge.

The emasculation of men had been prepared for a long time, and under Covid it came to fruition. Men could not reassure the women in their lives or stand up to the infantilizing Mother State. They could not speak out to put the Covid threat in perspective. Most of them couldn’t even decide independently whether to go to work in the morning. McDonald is well aware of the social forces that have contributed to the feminization of men — he notes especially how “healthy expressions of masculinity […] have all been redefined as universally unhealthy” (p. 52) — but even he does not fully understand the depth of the anti-male attack that prepared the ground for Covid-enforced male passivity.

For decades now, with the advent of no-fault divorce, mother-favoring custody laws, the determination to stamp out (subjectively defined) alleged sexual harassment, and the mandate to “Believe Women”, it has been made clear to men that their lives and careers remain intact entirely at the pleasure of feminist ideologues or potentially vengeful ex-wives. One wrong move, an inappropriate comment, a gaze that is too intense, a tone-deaf request for a date, a sexual encounter where the woman is left unhappy, or merely having married the wrong woman, can lead — and too often does lead — to the ruination of a man’s reputation, a forced psychiatric evaluation, the garnisheeing of his wages, imprisonment on false charges, and the judicial kidnapping of his children. Scholar Stephen Baskerville has extensively documented the injustices in his devastatingly compendious Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family and his more recent The New Politics of Sex: The Sexual Revolution, Civil Liberties, and the Growth of Governmental Power. For a heartbreaking and fully researched personal account, see Greg Ellis’s The Respondent: Exposing the Cartel of Family Law.

For well over 20 years, it has been made more and more difficult for men to respond as men once did, firmly and unplacatingly, because many men now know that everything they have built in their lives — and their ability to continue to build, to contribute their gifts, to live a normal life, to be a father to their children — now hinges on their avoiding the fury of a state-supported complaining woman. It is this bedrock vulnerability, the reality that even guiltless men can be imprisoned on a woman’s word and can lose their life savings and children, that more than anything else has silenced and paralyzed many decent and brave men.

August 27, 2022

On the verge of leaving No. 10 Downing St., Boris is still Tory voters’ top choice

Filed under: Britain, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In UnHerd, Dominic Sandbrook discusses the astonishing popularity of disgraced Tory PM Boris Johnson among ordinary Tory voters:

Prime Minister Boris Johnson at his first Cabinet meeting in Downing Street, 25 July 2019.
Official photograph via Wikimedia Commons.

With just over a week to go until the climax of the Conservative leadership contest, the name of the people’s favourite is surely not in doubt. After five ballots of MPs, weeks of campaigning and more than ten public hustings, the will of the members could not be clearer. The punters have weighed up the two candidates, examined their pasts, studied their principles and reflected on their promises. And faced with a choice between Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss, the finger of fate points to … Boris Johnson!

Such is the implication of a recent YouGov survey, which found that fully 49% of Tory members would choose as their leader the darling of the Greek tavernas, if only he were allowed to run – a higher proportion than those backing Sunak and Truss put together. And as The Times reported earlier this week, this was echoed in findings of focus groups among swing voters, who seem exceptionally unenthusiastic about either of Johnson’s potential successors.

Again and again, in fact, the same theme appears: Boris was robbed. “I really liked Boris and I was really, really disappointed in the way he was treated,” said one swing voter in Esher and Walton, speaking for the rest. “They’re picking on minor things. You know, furnishings and wallpaper and making such a big deal about it. And it’s the media. The media are the ones that turn everyone against him.”

Was Boris robbed, though? You didn’t often hear that line in June and July, when he narrowly survived a no-confidence vote, led his party to crushing defeats in the Wakefield and Tiverton and Honiton by-elections and was forced to watch the collapse of his government as some 31 ministers from all sides of the party, equating to just over a quarter of his entire administration, resigned in protest. On 7 July, the day he finally threw in the towel, YouGov found that his public favourability had sunk to truly diabolical levels, with just 19% having a positive view, and fully 72% a negative one. That made Johnson even more unpopular than Theresa May just before she quit, and almost as unpopular as Jeremy Corbyn at his nadir. So much, then, for the populist hero of the Red Wall masses.

And yet, as extraordinary as it may sound, the Big Dog’s fightback began that very afternoon. The opening shots came as he stood outside 10 Downing Street, reminding the cameras of his “incredible mandate: the biggest Conservative majority since 1987, the biggest share of the vote since 1979”. Then came Johnson’s insistence that it was “eccentric to change governments when we are delivering so much”, and his dismissal of the Westminster “herd” that had moved against him. And then, in his final Prime Minister’s Questions appearance a fortnight later, came those ominous words “Mission accomplished, for now”, as well as that classic Johnsonian sign-off: “Hasta la vista, baby.” The only surprise is that he didn’t use another Terminator payoff: “I’ll be back.”

Ever since, the idea that Boris was robbed, cheated, stabbed in the back has been gathering force. The Tory tabloids insist that he was the victim of a “putsch“, while his adoring Culture Secretary, the ridiculous Nadine Dorries, maintains that he was removed by a “ruthless coup” led largely by Sunak. And among Tory activists, the idea that he was toppled by a sinister media campaign has almost visibly gathered strength — enthusiastically fed, it has to be said, by Liz Truss. When, at one Tory hustings earlier this month, the former Sun political editor Tom Newton Dunn asked if Johnson had been the author of his own downfall, an activist shouted that it was “the media”. “Sounds like you’re being blamed, Tom,” said Truss with a smirk, “and who am I to disagree with this excellent audience?”

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress