Canada’s Free Speech Union has launched a petition to get rid of all our anti-democratic Human Rights Tribunals in the wake of a BC man being penalized three-quarters of a million dollars for not bending the knee to the trans madness:
February 26, 2026
Abolish all Human Rights Tribunals in Canada
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December 28, 2025
It may seem petty to deny entry to EUrocrats, but it’s all they will understand
At first, I thought it was just another bout of Trump being deliberately petty over trivial stuff, but on reflection, it’s actually a neat way to bring home the message to the EU bureaucrats personally that they will be held responsible for their actions:
RE: Free Speech & Denying Visas to Euro Autocrats
The very most Orwellian mind game happening in the world today is the way authoritarian globalists are attempting to redefine the concept of “free speech”.
In America, “free speech” has long meant that we are free to say or write virtually anything without fear of government intervention or suppression. It is this ability to express whatever we want that makes it “free”.
The authoritarian globalists, however, have stood this on its head. They have decided that in order for their citizens to be “free”, they must be free of ever hearing or reading any speech that might offend someone or sow doubt as to government policies. To these fascists, “free speech” means GOVERNMENT MODERATED speech which somehow — through its moderation — sets people “free” from ever hearing conflicting views. As I said — straight out of Orwell.
Europe is, of course, the hotbed of this fascist redefinition of what free speech means, but we in America have only narrowly escaped this plague by electing Trump. Remember, Biden and his team were reliant on institutionally stamping out so-called “disinformation” as a means of control over the populace. We must be ever vigilant here in the USA that such thuggish government criminality never again be allowed to prosper.
I think it is very important that every citizen of the USA and the world understand the depths of depravity these people will sink to in order to control ordinary people. This is about mind control, and nothing else.
Ultimately, the value of true free speech is that it embraces the idea that we all have agency over ourselves; that we are free individuals who can and should hear conflicting views, and decide for ourselves what is true and just, and what is untrue and unjust. This is sovereignty over the self, and unfortunately Europe has never let go of the concept of serfdom, so self-sovereignty is a threat that must be stamped out.
The Trump Administration has been prescient, bold and effective in denying visas to the Eurotrash autocrats who would see free speech reduced to whatever speech unelected bureaucrats deem acceptable. I cannot commend Trump enough for the thoughtfulness and importance of that action.
In a world where almost all humans are linked by essentially the same communications platform, only one world leader is truly standing for free speech: Donald Trump. And I thank him for it. We all should — even the TDS sufferers.
For a relevant example, Dries Van Langenhove:
Update, 29 December: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
December 11, 2025
Your words are violence to an astounding 91% of US college students surveyed
J.D. Tuccille presents some depressing poll results from American college students who have massively bought into the illogical position that words can be the same as actual violence:
Of all the stupid ideas that have emerged in recent years, there may be none worse than the insistence that unwelcome words are the same as violence. This false perception equates physical acts that can injure or kill people with disagreements and insults that might cause hurt feelings and potentially justifies responding to the latter with the former. After all, if words are violence, why not rebut a verbal sparring partner with an actual punch? Unfortunately, the idea is embedded on college campuses where a majority of undergraduate students agree that words and violence can be the same thing.
Most Believe Words Can Be Violence
“Ninety one percent of undergraduate students believe that words can be violence, according to a new poll by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression [FIRE] and College Pulse”, FIRE announced last week. “The survey’s findings are especially startling coming in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination — an extreme and tragic example of the sharp difference between words and violence.”
The survey posed questions about speech and political violence to undergraduate students at Utah Valley University, where Kirk was murdered, and at colleges elsewhere — 2,028 students overall. FIRE and College Pulse compared the student responses to those of members of the general public who were separately polled.
Specifically, one question asked how much “words can be violence” described respondents’ thoughts. Twenty-two percent of college undergraduates answered that the sentiment “describes my thoughts completely”, 25 percent said it “mostly” described their thoughts, 28 percent put it at “somewhat”, and 15 percent answered “slightly”. Only 9 percent answered that the “words can be violence” sentiment “does not describe my thoughts at all”.
It’s difficult to get too worked up about those who “slightly” believe words can be violence, but that still leaves us at 75 percent of the student population. And almost half of students “completely” or “mostly” see words and violence as essentially the same thing. That’s a lot of young people who struggle to distinguish between an unwelcome expression and a punch to the nose.
Depressingly, 34 percent of the general public “completely” or “mostly” agree. Fifty-nine percent at least “somewhat” believe words can be violence.
In 2017, when the conflation of words and violence was relatively new, Jonathan Haidt, a New York University psychology professor, worried that the false equivalence fed into the simmering mental health crisis among young people. He and FIRE President Greg Lukianoff wrote in The Atlantic that “growing numbers of college students have become less able to cope with the challenges of campus life, including offensive ideas, insensitive professors, and rude or even racist and sexist peers” and that the rise in mental health issues “is better understood as a crisis of resilience”.
Conflating Words and Violence Encourages Violence
Telling young people who haven’t been raised to be resilient and to deal with the certainty of encountering debate, disagreement, and rude or hateful expressions in an intellectually and ideologically diverse world plays into problems with anxiety and depression. It teaches that the world is more dangerous than it actually is rather than a place that requires a certain degree of toughness. Worse, if words are violence it implies that responding “in kind” is justified.
“At a time of rapidly rising political polarization in America, it helps a small subset of that generation justify political violence,” Haidt and Lukianoff added.
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November 27, 2025
We’re not quite at the point that we get trigger warnings for trigger warnings, but …
On her blog, Sarah Hoyt discusses the continued expansion of trigger warnings in fan fiction, but not because the readers demand it:
Image from According to Hoyt
… I’ve noticed a creep up of trigger warnings in fanfic. Some of these would be incomprehensible to non-Jane-Austen fans and are actually not so much trigger warnings as sub-genre warnings. There are subgenres some fans (sometimes I’m some fans) hate, like “Lizzy is not a Bennet” or “Bingley is evil” or … whatever. That’s fine. It saves me the trouble of reading a fanfic that’s going to annoy me. Unless I’m in the mood to be annoyed, in which case I will read it so I can grit my teeth and mentally yell at the writer. (Bingley is evil is a problem because it usually turns into a revenge-fest on EVERYONE. Everyone is evil. Etc. I don’t think there’s ever a time I want to read that. You find yourself wanting to take a shower for the soul. With a wire scrub brush.)
We make fun of trigger warnings, often, but it’s a real measure of how stupid things have gotten. When I’m having to read a trigger warning for say “kissing without consent.” or “violence against children” (Okay, you’ll think that last makes perfect sense, until you find out it’s because a kid gets slapped once in the novel) or “verbal violence” or –
And you start wondering, on the serious, if the ideal novel for these people has no plot at all, just people sitting around having a nice meal and talking.
This is disturbing, because the whole point of a novel is to make you feel emotions and experience things you either can’t in your real life, or which wouldn’t be safe to experience in your real life, followed by resolution and catharsis. That’s what a novel offers you. The opportunity to be the someone else far away experiencing “Adventure” (which as we all know is really a series of unpleasant events.)
Anyway, I’ve slowly come to the conclusion all this demand for warnings and screeching about offense isn’t by real readers.
No, seriously. Real readers know that no one can insulate them against all surprises in a book (or blog) and that in fact the point of reading is to get out of your head and experience different things, different events, different emotions and different points of view. You might disagree vehemently with them (I actually do with most of the really old science fiction. Really, scientists in charge? Who thinks that’s even safe? Oh, yeah, the Soviet Union. But even they didn’t DO IT. They just paid lip service. They might have killed a lot more people if they’d done it, at that.) but that forces you to think about why you disagree and how you’d do it differently. If you’re of a certain frame of mind, you [might] end up becoming a novelist and writing your response to what you disagree with. Though if you are worth spit, even then, your “response” will be less of a response and more of this whole new thing it became, with the response buried somewhere inside it. And if you’re not of that frame of mind, you’ll still end up a more considered and self-reflective thinker than you were before. For one, while you might think that the other POV is stupid, if you read a whole novel with it, you’ll be aware that thought went into it, and might even have to confront that the worst stupid takes a lot of thought and self deception.
Anyway, the point is, I don’t think the offense-monsters read. Because the whole point of their screeching is to shut down the thinking and prevent ANYONE ELSE from being exposed to the material, and maybe thinking.
That’s not what they say, of course. They say “I’m offended”. And “I’m hurt”. And “You’re mean because you offended me”.
But what they really mean is “this you cannot think” “This you cannot see” and “this you cannot read” and “this you cannot write”. And “this you cannot say”.
They have, you see, completely surrendered their very core to the herd. They have given up their right to think and feel and be, in favor of belonging completely to the herd. (They used to have a term for this and said it as though it were praiseworthy: “mind-kill”.) So being exposed to contrary things hurts, and they have no defense, because they have taught themselves not to think and/or reason through things.
The pain they feel at the slightest hint of disagreement is true. It is also a symptom of what they have done to themselves, and has nothing to do with being mentally or emotionally healthy.
Just like the pain of withdrawal of a chronic alcoholic denied alcohol is real, and continued and too fast withdrawal might kill him, however continuing to feed his drinking habit will also kill him, faster.
To give them trigger warnings, apologize for any offense and handle them with kid gloves is not only bad for them but bad for society in general.
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October 9, 2025
Britain is only a few steps further than Canada in the war on free speech
In The Line, Peter Menzies looks at the worsening situation for freedom of speech and freedom of expression in Britain, noting that what’s happening over in Blighty is our immediate future with current Liberal bills before Parliament to give government bureaucrats more power to silence us:
Everyone may know, for instance, that Kimmel got suspended by ABC for a week following statements made in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. But not a lot of people consuming Canadian media know that in the U.K., comedians weren’t just getting one-week suspensions. Nope. Last month they were getting arrested.
Right-wing icon Katie Hopkins, best known for her Batshit Bonkers Britain clips and Silly Cow tour, hadn’t been charged at the time of writing, but was arrested and, as they say in Blighty, “interviewed under caution”. Previously, Graham Linehan was arrested upon his return from the United States by five armed police officers at Heathrow Airport. At issue were posts he had made on X in April.
“If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space,” one Linehan post declared, “he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.”
Currently on bail, Linehan returns to court on Oct. 29. The charges are harassment, criminal damage and suspicion of inciting hatred.
The merits of the cases can be debated, but my point today is that when it comes to digital policy and policing you, and the internet, Canadians and their media should be paying a lot more attention to the U.K.
Because it is there that the true illiberalism of modern Western so-called liberalism is most menacingly embraced. Even prior to the U.K.’s Online Safety Act coming into effect, pre-existing British legislation had been used to, for instance, convict six retired police officers for making comments “deemed to be offensive” within their private WhatsApp chat group. Following the Southport mass stabbing murders of little girls, at least two women with no prior history with police were given prison sentences — one for 15 months for a Facebook post calling for a mosque to be blown up, another 31 months for a tweet calling for hotels full of migrants to be burned. While their comments were certainly worthy of vigorous condemnation, the intervention of the state into private, closed conversations and the involvement of police, courts and the penal system has taken matters in the U.K. to a level inconsistent with liberal traditions.
Now that the Online Safety Act has supplemented those laws, hundreds of people have been arrested and dozens so far convicted for social media posts. The government calls the act a “new set of laws that protect children and adults online” in much the same way Justin Trudeau explained Canada’s own Online Harms Act. It’s all about “safety”.
Online Harms may have died when Parliament was prorogued last winter, but a successor is anticipated and, given Prime Minister Mark Carney’s obvious Anglophilia, it’s easy to speculate — fear is a better word — that he is taking inspiration from the Brits. After all, up until a few months ago, he was one of them.
Fighting back in the U.K. is, among others, Lord Toby Young, the Conservative peer, associate editor of The Spectator and founder of the Free Speech Union, which now has a Canadian branch featuring, among others, journalist Jonathan Kay. Young has protested that criminalizing disinformation hands governments the power to determine truth. Nevertheless, while Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has muttered that maybe the police have more important things to do, he shows — despite the meteoric rise in the polls of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party — no inclination to order a digital retreat.
In fact, Starmer just doubled down with the introduction of legislation imposing mandatory digital IDs. A petition opposing it and the potential to enable mass surveillance and state control has already gathered close to three million signatures.
There’s a good chance the Canadian Free Speech Union will be similarly engaged in the years ahead. The Trudeau government’s instincts when it came to digital legislation were not as extreme as Britain’s. And there are very real differences in the legal structure of free-speech rights in Canada and the U.K. — we have the Charter, and the British don’t. So our laws would be enacted and enforced differently here than they can be the the U.K.
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August 9, 2025
Alert the non-crime hate incident police: soccer star proclaims pride in being English!
In Spiked, Obadiah Mbatang discusses a recent disturbing incident of a member of the Lionesses (England’s female national soccer team) saying something completely unacceptable to the great and the good:
So the Lionesses were victorious in the UEFA Women’s Euros, holding the title they won in 2022. England forward Chloe Kelly, who scored the decisive penalty in the final against Spain, declared after the match: “I am so proud to be English”.
To hear a sports star make such a simple and patriotic statement was, for most of us, a pleasant breath of fresh air. Just as refreshing has been the muted response to her declaration of national pride. In the week or so since, there have been no online campaigns denouncing Kelly’s views as “problematic”. This raises the question: is it just the Lionesses who are allowed to be patriotic?
Compare the response to Kelly’s post-match comment with the recent treatment of Courtney Wright, a 12-year-old schoolgirl from the West Midlands. A few weeks ago, she wore a Union Jack dress inspired by the Spice Girls to her school’s “Culture Day”, in which pupils were encouraged to “proudly represent their heritage”. Courtney, who had also prepared a speech celebrating Shakespeare and fish and chips, was put into isolation by her school and then sent home. Essentially, she was told it was unacceptable to express pride in being British.
What followed next gave us a fascinating, if depressing, insight into the online left. Aaron Bastani, co-founder of Novara Media, came out in defence of Courtney. “A white British person being proud of their country and its accomplishments does not make them racist”, Bastani said on X. “Either all groups get to celebrate identity and culture, or none.” Yet for striking a fair-minded and consistent approach, he was attacked by his largely left-wing audience.
One notable assault came from Eleanora Folan, who runs the hugely popular “Stats for Lefties” X account. Folan said celebrating British culture “literally does” make someone racist because “the concept of white ‘identity’ is inherently exclusionary and racist”, adding that “all of Britain’s ‘accomplishments’ were built on racism and imperialism”.
Now, I suspect Eleanora and many on the left would never say that Nigerians should view their heritage as “evil” because of the Biafran War and the anti-Igbo pogroms of the 1960s and 1970s. Does anyone on the left talk about King Ghezo’s determined efforts in the 19th century to maintain slavery, even as the British tried to stamp it out in his West African kingdom? Would they say that British people of Arab descent should be ashamed because of Arab slavery of Africans, which still persists to some extent today? Should British people of Rwandan Hutu descent be ashamed because of the Rwandan genocide? Of course not.
Admittedly, there is no shortage of right-wing whataboutery that uses the histories of other countries to avoid discussing the darker aspects of Britain’s past. But that is not what is going on here. Courtney’s treatment by her school, and those online leftists blasting her as racist, reveals that self-loathing oikophobia remains one of the dominant prejudices of the left.
July 16, 2025
Offensensitivity over a 12 year-old wearing a Union Jack dress to school
I’m not in the least bit surprised to hear that a 12 year-old girl has triggered the sensitive souls at her school for choosing to wear a Spice Girls style Union Jack dress to her school’s Cultural Diversity Day:
Photo from The Daily Sceptic
Another month, another glaring example of toxic activism sweeping through the British workplace, and this time, it’s no less than shocking.
On July 11th, 12 year-old Courtney Wright was sent home from Bilton School in Rugby, Warwickshire, simply for wearing a Union Flag dress and hat for the school’s Cultural Diversity Day. She had put effort into her costume, even writing a speech celebrating British culture: Shakespeare, fish and chips, tea, the Royal Family. Yet for what was a harmless celebration of her national culture, she was excluded.
The school’s response? A sanctimonious head of year, presumably with the support of management and colleagues, told her: “You get to celebrate your culture every day. This is for everyone else.” Then ordered her to remove her outfit and wear a second-hand uniform or go home. So she, rightly, called her father, who came to collect her.
Stuart Field, her father, a 47 year-old Marine Engineer, alleges she was not alone. A boy was reportedly sent home for wearing a farmer’s costume, illustrating a broader, troubling trend: the suppression of British symbols and pride in the name of “diversity”.
[…]
The aftermath saw the usual potted response from the school’s governing trust, the Stowe Valley Trust about how it values “diversity”, “respect” and so forth, yet its words ring hollow. It claims to regret “upset caused”, note, not the exclusion itself – only the distress that followed. It says it will “reflect on how this could have been handled better”. It then goes on to assure parents that it will be looking at the policies and training.
But what does that really mean? The trust refuses to admit that sending a girl home for celebrating her country was an appalling and divisive breach of common sense and, arguably, of law. Their language suggests an attempt to dodge accountability, to spin it as a mere mishandling rather than a fundamental failure.
At Spiked, Hugo Timms points out that this is merely a slightly more visible version of what British children learn in school … that there’s nothing at all to be proud about if you’re British:
British schoolkids have long been encouraged to be ashamed of their nationality and history. They’re taught “anti-racism” lessons and to constantly check their privilege as Brits. They study “decolonised” curricula, shorn of “triggering” British authors. Now, it seems, even dressing up as a Spice Girl and praising Shakespeare are being treated as beyond the pale.
[…]
You might say Courtney’s outfit was not exactly “traditional”, inspired by Geri Halliwel’s famous Union Jack dress from the 1997 Brit Awards. But that was clearly not the issue. What the school’s instructions really meant was that she should dress as any nationality or heritage, so long as it’s not British. According to Courtney’s father, Stuart Field, the school also turned several other pupils away at the gates on Culture Day, including a boy with a St George’s flag, a boy with a Welsh flag and a boy dressed as a farmer with a checked shirt and a traditional flat cap.
Courtney’s school also stopped her from giving a speech about what being British meant to her. “In Britain”, she would have said, “we have lots of traditions including drinking tea, our love for talking about the weather and we have the Royal Family”. “We have amazing history, like kings and queens, castles, and writers like Shakespeare.” It also praised British humour, “our values of fairness and politeness”, and fish and chips. Not exactly Enoch’s “Rivers of Blood“, is it?
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June 28, 2025
Punctuation microaggression
We appear to have an entire generation — Gen Z — suffering undue trauma from, checks notes, aggressive and distressing punctuation marks:
“American typewriter keyboard layout” by Любослов Езыкин is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 
.
What is more delicious than casting sweeping judgements over entire generations? Contrary to prevailing wisdom, studying and mocking the mores and manners of Generation Z is not only morally just but entirely natural. Not to mention good fun.
At the end of this paragraph, re-read this string of sentences. Study the punctuation. You’ll notice that each sentence ends with a satisfying symbol. What Americans call a period and what Britishers call a full stop signifies the end of the sentence — that the sentence contains a complete thought. How lovely.
That unassuming little dot was good enough for Shakespeare, Hemingway, Ibsen, Miller — every writer who mastered the well-mannered violence of the English Language. They understood, too, the writerly compulsion to kneel before that impossible mistress. Submission sets the writer free.
Submission, however, is not in vogue. Submission implies hierarchy, which implies standards — forbidden notions to anyone under 45.
Generation Z. The Zoomers. Those with the misfortune to have spawned here on Earth between 1997 and 2012. This swarm of digital natives has never known a world without the internet. Or, it appears, one with grammatical standards.
According to linguists, Zoomers view the full stop as Bill Clinton views a well-adjusted woman: with intrinsic horror. For Zoomers, the full stop is the mark of unbridled aggression. Zoomers refuse full stops — period.
In The Telegraph, one-linguist-cum-exorcist said that Zoomers find the full stop deeply troubling. That little dot before these seven words provokes a generational panic attack: “Full stops signify an angry or abrupt tone of voice”.
Another expert chimed in. Dr Lauren Fonteyn tweeted, “If you send a text message without a full stop, it’s already obvious that you’ve concluded the message. So, if you add that additional marker for completion, they will read something into it, and it tends to be a falling intonation or negative tone.”
To renew my sense of horror, I probed further. In a 2015 study at New York’s Binghamton University, undergraduates perceived text messages ending with a full stop as “less sincere” than the same message without one.
Language, like the fish, rots from the head. Researchers also found that exclamation marks, those hyperactive symbols of faux cheer, achieved the opposite of full stops. Those employing an exclamation mark appeared “more sincere and engaged”.
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June 25, 2025
It’s fine to refer to their bead-and-feather superstitious beliefs as a mythology, but not our holy revealed faith!
kulak responds to the “do you really believe this?” question:
One of the reoccurring critiques and challenges I get from Christians and others regarding Paganism is the accusation that I don’t “Really” believe in the Pagan Gods … that I believe or “believe” only as some calculated political/philosophical expedient or aesthetic choice and that really my professed “belief” is some sort of white or darker shade of lie or “LARP”, and that I must plainly KNOW that the Greek, Roman, Nordic, Celtic and other pantheons and only legends, mere mythologies, and cute stories …
I wish I could find it … but there was actually a twitter thread about a group of Christians and Jews responding with OUTRAGE when a group of academics, quite detachedly and seemingly meaning nothing by it, referred to Behemoth, Leviathan, the Flood, the Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, David’s defeat of Goliath, Adam and Eve, the Nephilim, the Plagues of Egypt, and Abraham and Issac as stories and figures of “Hebrew Mythology”.
“Mythology” to their mind was not a neutral term referring merely to cultural stories of a supernatural or historically unverifiable nature whose historicity, origin, and attachment to actual events cannot be verified to the standard of primary history — Stories of cultural import which may or may not be true or fictionalized to some extent we can’t differentiate (Imagine if Gone with the Wind was the last American book to survive and then arguing the Battle of Atlanta was fictional and never happened), the way Homer’s account of the sloped walls of Troy turned out to be shockingly accurate when Troy was found, whereas his accounts of Chariot warfare seemed to be confused by the subsequent 300 years without Greeks employing chariot archers. Rather “Mythology” to their minds denotes FALSE STORIES. SUPERSTITIONS with no attachment to reality, and thus to refer to even the most fantastical and supernatural of biblical stories as events or aspects of “Hebrew Mythology” was to state the Bible was false.
Troy, Gilgamesh, the Arthurian Legends, the Buddha, the conquests of Mohammed, the war of the Three Kingdoms, the Battle of Goths and Huns, the Hiawatha, the Wendigo, Quetzalcoatl (the God and the hypothesized historical ruler), the various unconfirmed Pharaoh stories, the Mormon Corpus … THESE ARE MYTHOLOGY. Even the stuff that’s been archeologically confirmed. Our collection of of texts and books though … you can’t call that mythology. It’s the truth!
Ironically many of these same people within nearly the same breath that they accuse me of being a “LARPER” will also accuse me of making pacts with “Demons” and claim that the beings I believe in are in fact vastly more real than I can possibly comprehend and that I am playing with the most dangerous of hellfire … so pressingly REAL and dangerous are the Ancient “Gods” who are actually Satanic Demons in barely concealed disguise.
Somehow I am simultaneously a cringe 90s mall goth playing at witchcraft and also a Later-Day Faustus dealing in a damnable deadly game with the Devil himself.
Amazing film BTW (Faust 1926)
“But do you actually believe in the Pagan Gods?”
Yes. Vastly more deeply and in more ways than the vast majority of Christian believe in their religion.
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April 26, 2025
QotD: “Woke”
… over the past few years the term has been appropriated and sloganised by the cult of social justice. “Woke” is no longer simply a matter of standing up to racism, but is irrevocably connected to the authoritarian mindset of the identitarian left. Rather than confront bad ideas through discussion, debate, ridicule and protest, those who self-identify as “woke” would sooner intimidate their detractors into silence through what has become known as “cancel culture”. More insidiously, they have sought to empower the state and strengthen hate-speech laws, which curb individual freedom. They do all this in the belief that theirs is a righteous cause, but their illiberal actions ultimately bolster the very ideas they purport to despise.
Moreover, this monomaniacal need to expose an ever-expanding set of “phobias” in society means that they end up detecting prejudice even where it does not exist. In the absence of evidence of racism the woke have a habit of simply concocting it; hence the continual emphasis on “unconscious bias”, “white privilege” and “institutional power structures”. Such ideas have germinated over many years in academia – particularly in the postmodern branches of critical theory – and have since seeped into the mainstream.
This is why the public is routinely confronted with absurd articles in the media grounded in an extreme form of intersectionality. One, for instance, claims that white women are “evil”, another that white DNA is an “abomination”. Barely a day goes by without some frenzied denunciation of a movie or a television series for its lack of diversity and positive representation, as though the function of the arts is to send a message that accords with identitarian values.
Few members of the public are entirely familiar with the jargon (“cisgender”, “mansplaining”, “toxic masculinity”), but are assured nonetheless that the premises are indisputable. There’s a very good reason why the Catholic Church resisted translating the Bible into the vernacular for so long. Those in power are always threatened when the plebeians start thinking for themselves and asking difficult questions.
Some commentators have recently raised concerns that “woke” has been weaponised by the far right as a slur against anti-racist campaigners. Afua Hirsch, for instance, has claimed in the Guardian that anyone using the word is “likely to be a right-wing culture warrior angry at a phenomenon that lives mainly in their imagination”. This strikes me as particularly odd, given the Guardian‘s own frequent use of the word, including in headlines such as “Can a woke makeover win Barbie and Monopoly new fans?” and “My search for Mr Woke: a dating diary”. Perhaps Hirsch’s colleagues are further to the right than is generally supposed.
Andrew Doyle, “Why I’m anti-woke”, Spiked, 2020-02-04.
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April 20, 2025
QotD: “Hate speech”
This is why they balk and protest when the words free speech are used against them. They detest the idea that they are enemies of liberty. But of course that is precisely what they are. Just consider that nonsensical chant “Hate speech is not free speech”. There are two profound moral problems with this idiotic tautology. The first is that, actually, even genuinely hateful speech, including racist gibberish and misogynistic blather, should be free speech. By its very definition freedom of speech should extend to all speech, even speech we detest. And secondly, “hate speech” has become a slippery, amorphous category that now covers not only foul old nonsense like Holocaust denial, but also trans-sceptical feminism, criticism of Islam, opposition to mass immigration, and so on. “Hate speech” really means thoughtcrime. It is an utterly ideological category used by the cultural and intellectual elites to demonise and censor ideas, beliefs and moral convictions they disapprove of. The war on “hate speech” is the new war on heresy, on free-thinking, on minority opinion, on challenging beliefs. It is blatant censorship.
The illiberal liberals’ conflation of genuine hatred with moral opinion, all of which then gets cynically collapsed under the name of “hate speech”, was beautifully captured in an exchange on the BBC’s Politics Live yesterday. Pushing back against the FSU’s Inaya Folarin Iman, Baroness Kennedy arrogantly predicted that the FSU would be embraced by “racists … people who hate homosexuals, who hate trans people, [and] people … who have hostile views towards Islam”. Hold on. One of these things is not like the others. What is wrong with having hostile views on Islam? Is hostility towards a powerful world religion now a form of “hate speech”? Yes, it is. Kennedy’s conflation of criticism of Islam with racism and homophobia perfectly encapsulated the way in which “hate speech” is now used to police not only genuinely hateful ideas, but also blasphemy against religious ideas. Even that key freedom human beings fought so hard for – the right to mock gods and prophets and religious ideology – is now threatened by the censorious ideology of “hate speech”.
Brendan O’Neill, “Why we must win the fight for free speech”, Spiked, 2020-02-26.
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April 8, 2025
QotD: The sad plight of the modern day “radical”
Whatever the cause, they cannot “smoak a jest”, recognize other forms of humour, or distinguish the parts of speech. This makes them appear batty (in the old sense, when it would have attracted institutional attention). They are frequently convulsed with anger, then sullen when they have exhausted themselves. Alas, they cannot be left in normal company, for they will immediately and raucously demand a “safe space”, and then not go away. They will accuse the normal person of “racism”, “fascism”, “sexism”, and “microaggressions”. Their spittle represents a health hazard.
It is hard to know what to do with these people, in the absence of the traditional arrangements. When world markets open again, we could sell them into slavery. But in the meantime, I suppose, we must keep them in group homes, ideally under armed guard. Maybe feed them okra; surely there is a surplus, and I’m told it has calming properties.
But that’s just me, always looking for solutions.
David Warren, “Keeping one’s peace”, Essays in Idleness, 2020-04-18.
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October 7, 2024
QotD: Social media mobs
More important, most mobs aren’t committed to the effort beyond flicking a thumb. Institutions that ignore the mob are often astonished at how little difference all the outrage makes to their business — and I’d bet Rowling won’t see much evidence of this controversy in her royalty statements.
The censorious power of Mrs. Grundys always depends on the cooperation of the governed, which is why their regime collapsed the moment the baby boomers shrugged off their finger-wagging. If Rowling provides an unmissable public demonstration that it is safe to ignore the current crop, we can hope others will follow her example, and the dictatorship of the proscriptariat will fall as quickly as it arose.
Megan McArdle writing in the Washington Post, quoted by Ed Driscoll at Instapundit, 2020-01-02.
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September 19, 2024
We’re approaching Halloween … expect the offensensitive inquisition!
Andrew Doyle with a timely reminder that Brits can — and have been — arrested, prosecuted, and (potentially) even imprisoned for wearing “offensive” Halloween costumes, and it’s likely to get worse:
The novelist Simon Raven once received a telegram from his wife which read: “Wife and baby starving send money soonest”. He replied: “Sorry no money suggest eat baby”. At the risk of sounding callous, I must admit that my first reaction on reading this was to laugh. It was involuntary, like the best of laughter. The reader should rest assured that this does not mean that I in any way approve of cannibalism and infanticide.
There is a brand of humour which relies on its sheer inappropriateness. It’s why we can find ourselves laughing during funerals or other solemn occasions. The social responsibility to take the matter seriously nags at our senses and dares us to rebel. John Cleese understood this all too well when he delivered the eulogy at Graham Chapman’s funeral and noted that his deceased friend would obviously have liked him to say: “Good riddance to him, the freeloading bastard. I hope he fries.”
The same principle applies, albeit in a cruder manner, to the convention of Halloween costumes that are intended to shock. It might seem puerile, but rather than donning the costume of a ghost or a vampire, many partygoers now celebrate this season of horror by dressing up as the most appalling human beings in history, such as Adolf Hitler, Myra Hindley, or Jedward.
The “gross out” is the whole point. The more outrageous the better, and the guest who displays the worst taste sometimes wins a prize. This is precisely what happened to David Wootton, who dressed as an Islamic terrorist, complete with Arabic headdress, and a t-shirt bearing the words “I love Ariana Grande”. To top it all, he carried a rucksack with “TNT” and “boom” written on it. This was in reference of course to the horrendous terrorist attack at an Ariana Grande concert at Manchester Arena in 2017 that killed twenty-two people, including many children, and injured a further thousand.
Bad taste? Offensive? Juvenile? I would agree with all of these assessments. But the partygoers understood the rules of the game, and Wootton later claimed to have been awarded the prize for Best Costume. Once his image was posted online, however, it became a police matter, and he was quickly arrested. He pleaded guilty and now faces up to two years in prison. He has also relocated and changed his name.
I have complete sympathy for anyone who found the images upsetting, grotesque, and not remotely funny. Nobody worth knowing would deny that the terrorist had committed an unforgivable crime. I find it particularly shocking that so many of us seemed to forget all about it with ease, as though we should accept that this kind of atrocity is simply an occasional aspect of living in modern Britain. Personally, I find this far more offensive than any tasteless Halloween costume.
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September 7, 2024
Trump’s visit to Arlington broke all the norms – no President has ever done this before!
Not being an American, I didn’t realize that sitting and former Presidents were banned from the grounds of Arlington National Cemetery, so Trump’s norm-obliterating visit has attracted widespread vilification from all corners of the nation:
If you read the news, Donald Trump recently did something so shocking and unprecedented that observers are staggered by his descent into evil:
He went to Arlington National Cemetery and brought a photographer, so the only possible comparison is to Literally Adolf Hitler. It was so outrageous for Trump to perform the Nazi maneuver of being photographed at Arlington that the son of the late Senator John McCain was forced to make an announcement to the world, revealing that the horror of the event had forced him to change his party registration and support the Democratic presidential candidate:
Sample framing from that story:
Jimmy McCain, who has served for 17 years in the military and is an intelligence officer, said he was angered by Trump’s conduct at the cemetery last week, adding “it was a violation.”
“It just blows me away,” he told CNN. “These men and women that are laying in the ground there have no choice” about being in a political ad.
See how evil Donald Trump is? No McCain man would ever stand for some bastard shooting a political ad at Arlington National Cemetery. Also, you can click here to watch the political ad that John McCain shot at Arlington National Cemetery.
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