Defend Free Speech
Published 15 Aug 2018The forerunner of the Defend Free Speech campaign was called “Reform Section 5”. This speech by Rowan Atkinson at the launch event in Parliament in 2012 should be heard by every politician, journalist and campaigner before they start calling for laws to silence those they regard as “extremists”.
At SDA, Kate shares part of an email she sent to a friend who works in the national media:
We watched pipelines get cancelled, LNG plants yanked, Caledonia thrown to the wolves — and Spendy McBlackface take a knee over some dead guy in Minneapolis.
Did the national media and professional left really think the business of bringing government and industry to a standstill would always remain the exclusive jurisdiction of Liberal rent-a-mobs?
And that’s the real problem, yes? There’s no one to call them off. Think about that. The professional protests of the left have structure, a chain of command and big money funders to direct them.
These protests don’t. They’re completely organic, which means they can spread and grow without the help of a Soros backed foundation. And it’s fucking glorious.
In The Line, Matt Gurney‘s latest update from Ottawa:
At the start of this week, I spent two days among the protesters in downtown Ottawa, wandering the lines of trucks on Wellington, on Kent, and the other roads all around Parliament Hill. I’ve tried to convey for readers what it’s like to be there — at least, what it’s been like for me to be there. This is a complicated protest and a complicated event. It has layers.
Are there good, frustrated people just trying to be heard in the crowd? Yes. Are there bad people in the crowd, including some who’ve waved hate symbols and harassed or attacked others? Yes. Are there people taking careful care of the roads, sweeping up trash and shovelling ice and snow off the sidewalk? Yes. Are there hard men milling about, keeping a wary eye on anyone who seems out of place? Yes. Is it a place where some people are having good-natured fun? Yes. Is it a place some other people would rightly be afraid to go? Yes. And so on.
But it’s even more complicated than it looks. And Ottawa Police Services chief Peter Sloly wants you to know that.
Sloly is in a tough spot. I don’t honestly know the backstory of the how and why the Ottawa protest was allowed to settle into the downtown core the way it did. It was obviously a massive intelligence and planning failure, but what kind of failure? And whose? Did they not have enough information? Bad information? Did they have good information that, for whatever reason, they didn’t accept or trust? That’s not the sort of thing you can discover wandering the site. But I can tell you that some of the protesters themselves are surprised by how easy it was for them to set up shop.
I have the terrible feeling, and I’ve spoken with five separate sources in government roles or in adjacent security positions who all confirmed this, that Sloly is one of the damn few people in Ottawa who understands the situation he’s in, and he’s trying to get everyone else to notice, or at least to catch up to his understanding. My sources, alas, seem to think that most others involved in decision-making are only just now starting to realize the enormity of the challenge in the capital. Sloly figured it out last week.
The chief is very political. I say that with no disrespect. Becoming the chief of a major police force isn’t something that happens because you catch the most bad guys. It happens because you’re good at working your way up through the power structures of a very particular institution. Sloly talks like a politician. But if you listen closely, and if you follow along across his briefings, you start to see a theme. From the moment he first mentioned that there might not be a policing solution to this protest, and hinted that we need the armed forces, he’s been signalling to the public that Ottawa, as a city, has lost control of itself. That’s a blunt description, but as I noted in a Twitter thread after a pretty remarkably stark Ottawa Police Services Board meeting on the weekend, Sloly was clear: the city needs to be rescued. It has lost control, it is outnumbered, and it cannot fix this problem with the resources on hand.
A round-up at SteynOnline of various “elites” in Canada and elsewhere rising up against the sexist, hate-speechin’, Islamophobic, transphobic, Putin-controlled white supremacists who are demanding an end to rule-by-decree:
In Ottawa, attempts by agents provocateurs to provoke violence at the Freedom Rally have gone nowhere. So last night, “anti-hate” buffoon Bernie Farber, friend to censors everywhere, was reduced to hate-hoaxing for Justin by circulating “anti-semitic flyers” sent to him by a “friend” “in Ottawa”. Inevitably, within moments, they were revealed to be from something entirely different in Florida some weeks ago. So Bernie explained that his imaginary friend in Ottawa had seen actual hate flyers in Ottawa but had accidentally emailed him a similar flyer from America or something … These days Farber disgraces even himself.
Meanwhile, the Ottawa police have begun arresting citizens trying to deliver food to the truckers. There is no basis in Canadian law for the actions these goon coppers are taking, but the attitude of their dreadful police chief is: hey, the law is whatever I say it is. So he has ordered the arrest of citizens for “mischief”. By mischief, he means bringing sustenance or heat to protesters passing the night in temperatures of twenty below.
~Many parts of the western world are in a very dark place right now, but none more so than Canada. Its unseen prime minister, who came into office promising “sunny ways”, can no longer appear in public and sweepingly, tweetingly declares that he doesn’t need to because the sort of chaps you run into out there are rubes who don’t even know they’re Islamophobes, transphobes, thisaphobes, thataphobes, too dumb even to be aware they’re working for Putin.
As Tucker and I used to joke five years back, across the developed world the elite rise up against the masses: it’s like an anti-1848, prefiguring the post-democratic era that the 2020s will usher in. The present showdown between the Bollywood Bridesmaid and the truckers who deliver his quinoa has made it about as explicit as you can get. The good humour in the face of elite contempt is impressive. Here are a couple of typical “angry” “hate-filled” “white supremacists”:
Who are the real “Sunny Ways” guys? A serial blackface fetishist is calling the masses racist and the court eunuchs of Canada’s state-funded media dutifully tag along.
~The truckers are rallying against “vaccine mandates”, which have no justification in science: The Prime Minister, who is as vaxxed, jabbed and boostered as any mammy singer on the planet, is supposedly hors de combat because he’s down with a second dose of the Covid.
Oh, but don’t worry! To be sure, the common understanding of the word “vaccine” is that you won’t catch what you’re being vaccinated against. But what we really mean is that, if you do get it, it won’t be serious, you won’t be in the ICU, and you certainly won’t die of it.
And by “certainly” we mean, well, probably. Israel, en route to be the world’s first entirely fourth-jabbed nation, currently has a daily death toll higher than before it started giving anyone the first jab. There is no public-health justification for making liberty conditional on compliance with the developed world’s failed strategy of coerced vaccines and constant testing.
At SDA, Francisco provided some quick notes on the situation on the streets in Ottawa over the last couple of days:
Looks like the cops got a couple of slip tanks and some jerry cans. A couple of pickup trucks got towed for having slip tanks on them. Nothing major. The new rule is if you have the paperwork to prove you’re a trucker you can transport fuel to your own vehicle but not to someone else’s. A campaign has started to get everyone on the hill to carry an empty jerry can with them at all times. Let the cops figure out which ones have fuel.
There was a show of force by police. Estimate was up to 100 officers in one group. They got their photo-op for the corporate press. Looks great on TV but it had no real impact. Everyone is still there.
Word on the street is that the goal for the police is to get everyone out of there today, clean things up tomorrow and have parliament resume on Wednesday. To which I say good luck.
Morale amongst the protesters is high.
Again take everything I just wrote here with a grain of salt. It’s a fluid situation and good intel is hard to come by in the heat of the moment.
I am not a lawyer, but I’m deeply puzzled at what part of the Criminal Code the Ottawa police are depending on for these imposed restrictions on fuel, food, and other supplies being provided to the truckers by ordinary Canadians. I don’t recall any provision in the law allowing police to confiscate the legal goods of ordinary people on a whim.
Brendan O’Neill on the shitshow that was the original fundraising campaign to help the truckers on their way to Ottawa:
We need to talk about GoFundMe’s withholding of millions of dollars from the Canadian truckers protesting against vaccine mandates. This is union-busting 21st-century style. This is a multimillion-dollar company using its corporate clout to starve working-class activists of funds. This is a signal from Silicon Valley, clear and loud, that it will wield its power to crush any form of political agitation from “the lower orders” that pushes too hard against the political consensus. Anyone who thinks this clash between a profit-making fundraising website and drivers pissed off at being pushed around by Covid authoritarians is just another weird online spat needs to think again. This is far more than that. It is a scoping out of the battlelines over freedom and power that are likely to define the internet era.
GoFundMe’s deprivation of funds to the truckers protesting against Canada’s vaccine rules is, to my mind, one of the most egregious and anti-democratic acts yet carried out by the California-based elites who oversee the World Wide Web. These truckers, such essential workers, are revolting against Canadian PM Justin Trudeau’s introduction of a new rule earlier this month stipulating that truckers who cross the Canada-US border will need to be vaccinated or else go into quarantine after every trip. This is a mad demand. It would severely undermine some truckers’ ability to earn a living. So truckers have risen up. They drove their vast rigs across Canada in what came to be known as the Freedom Convoy before stopping in the capital Ottawa where they have been blocking roads and causing fainting fits among middle-class liberals who cannot understand why these oiks won’t just carry on dropping off sacks of kale to the local Whole Foods and stop going on about their pesky rights.
There has been an outpouring of support for the truckers. Canadians and Americans tired of corona-authoritarianism are cheering the truckers for honking a huge collective horn at the elite consensus on Covid. Despite the best efforts of woke politicians and columnists to depict the truckers as QAnon on wheels, as a motorised version of Mussolini’s March on Rome, many people know that in truth they are decent working people who simply object to the state making their lives that bit harder. People also know that the woke set’s attempts to delegitimise the Freedom Convoy by flagging up “far-right” comments made by a tiny handful of the truckers is a tactic as old as capitalism itself. Elite opponents of working-class organisation have always used smear and innuendo to try to nullify the throng. Seeing this smear campaign for what it is, lots of folk decided to give the truckers a few bucks. But GoFundMe had other ideas.
GoFundMe says the 10million Canadian dollars raised via its website, on a page titled “Freedom Convoy 2022”, will not be given to the truckers after all. It cited police reports about “violence” in the convoy. What violence? Where? Thousands and thousands of people have joined the truckers’ protest and yet there have only been three arrests. One person was arrested for being in possession of a weapon, one for causing “mischief”, and one for making a threatening comment on social media. As far as mass protests go, this is a staggeringly low level of allegedly criminal behaviour. I once visited the Occupy camp at St Paul’s in London and witnessed at least three misdemeanours in the one hour I was there (public urination, threatening speech, and a disturbing of the peace by a man on smack who kept shouting “GET TAE FUCK”). For a mass, angry, revolting movement, Freedom Convoy is uncommonly peaceful. GoFundMe’s “violence” blather is clearly a jumped-up pretext for its political decision to punish the truckers.
On Friday, GoFundMe issued a statement saying that Freedom Convoy was a peaceful movement when it first started but it has since “become an occupation”. And so, “no further funds will be directly distributed to the Freedom Convoy organisers”. Instead, the $9million that remains in GoFundMe’s coffers will be distributed to “credible” charities or refunded to the people who donated if they fill in a form. As if to make it super clear that this is all very political, Facebook has now removed a page promoting a Freedom Convoy in Washington, DC and deleted the personal account of the trucker who set it up. “It’s censorship at its finest”, he said, and he’s not wrong. This looks like a cut-and-dried case of the new capitalist oligarchies siding with the political establishment – in this case, Justin Trudeau – to shrink and silence the consensus-threatening cries of ordinary people.
I didn’t donate to the original crowdfunding campaign for the truckers on GoFundMe, but after that company attempted to quite literally steal $10 million away from the truckers and donate the money instead to causes they approved of, I scraped up a few bucks to add to the replacement fundraising efforts with GiveSendGo and I will actively avoid ever sending GoFraudMe a penny.
Matt Gurney has driven in from Toronto to see for himself what the protest looks like:
Depending on which person you’re using as your explainer of the local vibe, you could reasonably walk away convinced that most of what was happening in Ottawa was a pretty big party, or a hostile invasion by thugs and harassers. I wanted to find out which one it was, so on Sunday, I drove in from Toronto, arriving early Monday morning. I spent hours wandering the city, particularly the area immediately around Parliament Hill, trying to answer that question. Is this a huge group of friendly people? Is this a mob of unruly, dangerous types?
The answer is yes.
The following is my view of the situation in Ottawa, and should be seen entirely in that light. I should also note that I’m a tall, unsmiling white dude with a buzzed head who wandered the area in a gigantic and delightfully warm NFL hoodie, and it’s very possible that my experience was skewed by the fact that I blended in. There are other protest sites at other parts of the city, as well, and I’ll be heading out to some of them later. The observations below are what I saw around Parliament, and within perhaps a 10-minute walk of it.
The first thing you should know is that the protest is, in the main, friendly, at least to someone like me. The photos you’d have seen do it justice. Large transport trucks and smaller personal vehicles are packed tightly together along major streets around Parliament, and the road space and surrounding sidewalks have been colonized by the occupants. Booths and folding tables are everywhere, some selling trinkets, others for supplies or flyers and leaflets. I suspect this will anger locals tired of the protest, but I have to call it as I see it: the overall vibe was quite friendly. I spent about two hours wandering the largest sites, and was struck by the amount of direct eye contact. There’s none of the usual practiced disinterest in those around you that you internalize when you live in a big city (Ottawa is big enough, in that respect). The protesters are eager to make eye contact and to chat, about everything — the weather (warmer!), the Superbowl, and, oh, how Trudeau has to go and the pandemic is a lie. And how about those Maple Leafs?!
[…]
For all the friendly chatter, there is another element in the group. I haven’t owned any bars, but I’ve spent some very pleasant evenings in them, plus an entire career observing people, and I have passable danger-spotting skills. (My success rate at avoiding getting suddenly sucker-punched at dive watering holes hovers at very near 100 per cent!) There is a harder, nastier edge to this group, what my bar-owning friend would have called “the hard men.” It’s not large, at least not in the area immediately around Parliament during daylight — there are other areas I’ll be checking out later today, and the vibe may well change. The group around Parliament is overwhelmingly quite pleasant and, as noted, unusually friendly and eager to chat. But anyone who denies there’s another element there, though, is blind to it, wilfully or otherwise.
Again, I’m a big white guy, and I blend in by default, but more than once I felt myself being calmly but directly observed by exactly the type my bar-owning friend spoke of. There are hard people there, often in small groups, talking quietly by themselves, or standing silently, watching the comers and goers. If you know what to look for, and not all of us do, they’re easy to spot. The more friendly, chatty types give them a wide berth. I spent a few interesting moments standing by a folding table stacked high with hygiene supplies, observing three stone-faced men participating in a kind of staredown with one of the roving police units. The police simply stopped and stood in place. No one said a thing. After maybe a minute, the hard men left. The police marched off. A woman behind the table with the toilet paper and tooth paste tubes looked at me with relief.
In The Critic, Josephine Bartosch outlines some of the problems with Britain’s approach to “hate crime” policing:
Photo from The Critic
When campaigner Harry Miller was questioned about comments he’d made online, the dutiful copper on the other end of the phone clearly thought he was just doing his job. Apparently unaware of the raging debate around the reform of the Gender Recognition Act, the officer explained that he knew he was right because he’d been on a training course. This small exchange, which was referenced in the recent case won by Miller at the Court of Appeal, underscores a wider problem: the ill-conceived concept of hate crime is tempting police officers away from law enforcement towards making moral judgements.
Hate crime does not exist in itself as an indictable offence; it is comprised of “non-crime hate incidents” (NCHI) and considered as an aggravating factor during sentencing. Developed as a response to the institutional racism exposed in the Macpherson report, hate crime is an attempt to give a voice to those too easily side-lined by a majority white, straight and male police force. The College of Policing (CoP) identify five specific “strands” which designate people at risk from hate: disability, race, religion, sexual orientation or transgender identity.
A new form of prejudice is baked into this touchy-feely approach: provided complainants tick the requisite boxes to show social disadvantage, they are not credited with the wit to be vexatious. Consequently, the police have found themselves unwitting foot soldiers in a culture war which has seeped from social media into real life. The good intentions of officers have been weaponised by unscrupulous whingers who claim offence to muzzle their ideological opponents. Miller was far from the only person targeted by police for exercising his freedom of speech — numerous others have been questioned, arrested and in some cases dragged through the courts for doing nothing more than sharing their opinions online.
Miller’s well-publicised victory against the CoP will force a rethink. It is estimated 124,091 NCHI have been logged since 2014. Many of those with NCHIs recorded against their names have no idea about it.
Looking outside at the cheerless drizzle, it’s easy to understand why police officers might prefer to sit inside cosy offices logging tweets rather than pounding the streets or breaking-up bar room brawls. At a time when much of the left-leaning press has tarred the law enforcement officials as “baddies”, notching-up hate crimes serves as a reminder that law enforcement is on the side of the righteous.
One can only suspect some insidious intent – or trolling, if one wishes to call it by its proper name – when the Scottish police force had to rename the operation designed to protect Boris Johnson in his current visit to the country. It now rejoices in the unexceptional title of “Operation Aeration”, but until it attracted adverse publicity, its original name was “Operation Bunter”.
Although a spokesman for the Scottish police said, with tongue so far in cheek that it was astonishing they could speak, “Operational names are auto-generated by computer and can be changed if they are deemed to be inappropriate”, the comparison between the Prime Minister and Frank Richards’ legendary creation Billy Bunter, the “Fat Owl of the Remove” is a far from flattering one.
In Richards’ stories, Bunter is a gluttonous, lazy, dishonest and academically negligible student at Greyfriars School in Kent, forever attempting to obtain loans from his fellow schoolboys on the promise that a non-existent postal order is going to arrive from his wealthy relatives at “Bunter Court”. It is made clear that, for all his fantasies of wealth and success, Bunter’s home is in fact the considerably more modest “Bunter Villa”, which possesses merely one maid and one cook. Richards therefore invites his readers to condemn Bunter as an arriviste to the English public school system, amongst his many other sins. He is repulsive in appearance, significantly overweight, perpetually dirty and often given to thoughtless instances of racism and xenophobia. And his famous catchphrases – “I say, you fellows!” and, when he is being beaten, kicked or otherwise abused, “yarooh!” – are irritating, rather than witty or charming.
Needless to say, the books that featured him as their lead character were hugely successful for decades, but now, in our more censorious and self-aware image, have fallen into obscurity. None of them are currently in print, and the last time that any of the novels were reissued was in the early Nineties. When the news story about Operation Bunter broke, many papers had to explain exactly who the character was, and why the allusion was apposite. While the milder likes of Jennings and William continue to be much loved by parents and grandparents of a certain generation, Bunter and his fellow denizens of Greyfriars have found themselves condemned to a kind of literary Siberia, and show few signs of coming in from this particular cold. Is there any hope that some literary-minded minister will intervene and aid the Fat Owl’s rehabilitation? Or are the books simply too outrageous and un-PC for our contemporary tastes?
Alexander Larman, “Boris Bunter”, The Critic, 2021-08-09.
In The Critic, Harry Miller decries the comfortable middle- and upper-middle-class wokesters who can posture and protest and cause mass disruptions to the workers and lower-middle-class with impunity, because on the very few occasions they are brought to court, the judiciary demonstrate that their hearts are with the posh protest movements, not with the people:
Of course, there is a risk when elected leaders burn up the air miles to feast with the Bacchanalian elite, whilst simultaneously preaching that climate armageddon will only be avoided if the hoi polloi ditch their cars and, once a week, take the peasant wagon to Lidl. When “let them eat cake” becomes “let them eat insects and plant based mash”, there is a heightened risk that the working class will take to the streets to sing “One Day More” with a spare rib in one hand a pitchfork in the other. And it is the working class which poses the threat as the middle class can afford to make a virtue of its suffering. Trading in the Discovery Sport for a hybrid Mini Countryman and a bag full of social bragging rights is substantially different from having to choose between putting on the heating and a week on the beer in Faliraki.
In anticipation of the backlash the government has turned a blind eye to the politicisation of the police and is now recruiting exclusively from the middle class. Why else do you suppose a career in the police is now only open to those with a degree? The ruling class needs a woke paramilitary vanguard, well versed in the etiquette of uncritical obedience, for when the people revolt.
When the police embrace a political cause, there is no expression of support that is too extreme. Humberside Police endorsed a lunatic with connections to organised crime who once told Julie Burchill, a writer of Jewish heritage, that Hitler had the right idea. And the national lead on Hate Crime, Paul Giannasi OBE, recently introduced the concept of laudable hate, provided it serves middle class preoccupations such as gender identity or preserving the tundra.
And then there is the obscene spectacle of politically sponsored riot shields being paraded by the police through the streets of Leicester. We are meant to swallow the lie that this is a benign display of support for a marginalised community when, in reality, it is an emblematic reminder to the working class to Remember The Battle Of Orgreave. On the 18th of June, 1984, ordinary working people lent their support to the picketing miners and were met with a baton charge, preceded by the pounding of riot shields, in scenes reminiscent of Zulu. Lest they forget.
Photo from The Critic
The crimes of the woke middle class, where they are prosecuted at all, come with the safety net of a judiciary that is also in on the racket. When six XR zealots found themselves in the dock for progressing the cause of Greta Thunberg by taking hammers to the glass frontage of Shell’s London Headquarters, Judge Gregory Perrin advised that their actions had no defence at law. Nevertheless, he offered gratitude for the care and diligence taken by the jury when it returned a not-guilty verdict. Last week, three activists were found guilty of criminal damage for graffitiing “Lies, lies, lies” on the Westminster Office of the Global Warming Policy Foundation in response to its sin of climate scepticism. Before being slammed with peppercorn fines, the criminals — Clare, Jessica and Rupert — were praised by the bench for their openness and honesty. It is yet to be seen whether similar leeway will be afforded to working class criminals who, in pursuit of Net Zero, begin half inching insulation from Travis Perkins.
In The Critic, Andrew Tettenborn believes it can be traced back to a change in the oath that new police constables take and the changed emphasis in police training to support that change:
Metropolitan Police at G20 protests in London, 2009-04-01
Photo via Wikimedia Commons
Last week Insulate Britain magnanimously announced it would suspend its forcible road-blocking campaign. Apart from noting the impudence of this announcement (remember the IRA sanctimoniously calling its Christmas ceasefires, as if this were something we should be grateful for?), commentators on Twitter, the tabloid press and indeed many of the general public, have found another question troubling. Why, in the face of deliberate criminality aimed at discommoding ordinary people (most of whom will have been less well-off than many of the protesters), did the police hold back, at times apparently chatting with the obstructionists and threatening with arrest any exasperated driver who tried to take steps to remove them? We aren’t told, but we can make some educated guesses.
[…]
Nearly twenty years ago in 2002, there was a subtle, little-reported but very symbolic change in the oath sworn by all constables on appointment. Instead of the 19th century undertaking to serve the Queen “without fear or favour, malice or ill-will” in the course of keeping the peace and preventing crime, there is now a much more tendentious promise preceding the duty to keep the peace: namely, to act with “fairness, integrity, diligence and impartiality, upholding fundamental human rights and according equal respect to all people”. This requirement, thoroughly reflected as it is in police training today and imbued in policing culture, has two effects.
One is that all officers must keep at the front of their minds not only the law of the land but also two other guidelines: considerations of fairness and equality (whatever those mean), and human rights laws — something peculiarly complex and frequently opaque, even to lawyers. Human rights laws involve a subtlety well beyond the average constable called out to police a tense situation. Put yourself in the position of a policeman, faced with a choice whether to intervene in a case involving illegality and an intent to inconvenience people, but where no-one is actually engaging in violence — exactly the situation with Insulate Britain or Extinction Rebellion. You might well think that, if you wish to avoid future trouble and possible complaints of discrimination or unfairness, discretion and inaction would be the better part of valour.
Thanks to the pervasiveness of human rights culture, the constable’s traditional function of upholding the law ceases to be a black-and-white matter, and becomes a potential mire of conflicting duties. Even if the letter of the law says you should arrest a middle-aged protester or at least drag them off the M25 to prevent them obstructing it, there is always a possibility that someone somewhere will hold that this was contrary to their human rights. Once again, a cautious police officer intent on avoiding disciplinary hearings and a possible black mark, may well conclude that it is better to let sleeping dogs lie (at least for the moment), condone the illegality and avoid possible violence.
The police constable on the scene is extremely well advised to avoid doing anything that might possibly be construed as infringing on the human rights of everyone at the scene, for fear of becoming the scapegoat if clever lawyers convince a judge or jury that the police acted contrary to their revised oath.
And everybody was like, wait, what?
Of course the congressman is now saying that using nuclear weapons on American gun owners was an exaggeration, he just wanted to rhetorically demonstrate that the all-powerful government could crush us peasants like bugs, they hold our pathetic lives in their iron hand, and he’d never ever advocate for the use of nuclear weapons on American soil (that would be bad for the environment!), and instead he merely wants to send a SWAT team to your house to shoot you in the face if you don’t comply.
See? That’s way better.
Larry Correia, “The 2nd Amendment Is Obsolete, Says Congressman Who Wants To Nuke Omaha”, Monster Hunter Nation, 2018-11-19.
Forgotten Weapons
Published 1 Jun 2021William E. Fairbairn is best known for his work with Eric Sykes and their “Commando” knife design during World War Two. However, Fairbairn spent some 33 years in the Shanghai Municipal Police, working his way up from a beat constable to Assistant Commissioner. There he was responsible for the SMPD adopting truly forward-thinking fighting methods, and he essentially invented the modern SWAT team (the “Reserve Unit”, which Fairbairn led for 10 years). He combined expertise in formal marksmanship, instinctive practical shooting, and hand-to-hand combat schools (including jiu-jitsu and judo) into a comprehensive training program like no other on earth at the time.
Book references:
The World’s First SWAT Team, by Leroy Thompson:
https://amzn.to/2TrYiNvGentleman & Warrior, by Peter Robins:
https://amzn.to/3vuODn9http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
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In City Journal, Heather Mac Donald looks at the recent hysterical attacks on gubernatorial hopeful Larry Elder based on the notion that he is somehow a kind of stalking horse for white supremacists:
Larry Elder at Camp Pendleton for the ceremony presenting the Congressional Gold Medal posthumously to his father, Staff Sergeant Randolph Elder, U.S.M.C., 16 August, 2013.
US Government photo in the public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
The possibility that Larry Elder may win California’s recall election against Governor Gavin Newsom is generating acute anxiety in the mainstream media and among the activist Left. Elder’s foes are responding with their favored means of destruction: by playing the race card. Never mind that the nationally syndicated talk show host is black. A series of opinion columns and editorials have accused him of being a white supremacist, or at the very least a shill for other white supremacists. Elect Elder and California will reinstate Jim Crow, state senator Sydney Kamlager, a Democrat from Los Angeles, has warned.
The media have focused particularly on Elder’s views about crime and policing. The self-described “Sage from South-Central” maintains that criminals, not the police, are the biggest threat in the black community. According to Elder, the false narrative about lethal police racism has only led to more black homicide deaths. “When you reduce the possibility of a bad guy getting caught, getting convicted and getting incarcerated, guess what? Crime goes up,” he said recently at a campaign event in Orange County.
Elder also rejects the charge that white civilians are gunning down blacks, as LeBron James maintained in a tweet during the George Floyd riots: “We are literally hunted everyday, every time we step outside the comfort of our homes.” Elder has a different take. If a “young black man is eight times more likely to be killed by another young black man than [by] a young white man,” Elder told the Orange County Republicans, then “systemic racism is not the problem.”
Such statements are anathema to the establishment Left, deeply invested as it is in the idea that blacks have little agency in the face of ubiquitous white racism. Few subjects are more taboo in elite discourse than the elevated rate of crime among blacks, as it suggests cultural pathologies that — at the very least — complicate the victim narrative. To the Left, black crime is little more than a racist fiction. Los Angeles Times columnist Jean Guerrero claims that the crime statistics Elder has cited “over the decades to support his views and policy proposals are misleading, if not outright false, casting Black people as unusually crime-prone.” Black people are not “more inclined toward violent crimes,” nor do blacks “disproportionately victimize whites,” Guerrero wrote, citing Columbia law professor Jeffrey Fagan and other criminal experts. (Fagan was the plaintiff’s expert in a trilogy of lawsuits against the New York Police Department in the 2010s.) Fellow Times columnist Erika Smith sneered that Elder “keeps trotting out statistics that purport to show that Black people are particularly prone to murdering one another.”
Unfortunately for Elder’s critics, the statistics showing vastly disproportionate rates of black crime and victimization come from some of the Left’s favorite sources. CDC data show that in 2015, for example, the homicide victimization rate for blacks aged 10–34 (37.5 per 100,000) was 13 times the rate for whites (2.9 per 100,000). That disparity is undoubtedly much greater now, given the record-breaking increase in homicides since the George Floyd riots — an increase disproportionately affecting blacks.
Those black victims of homicide are not being killed by cops or whites. They are being killed by other blacks. In Los Angeles, blacks this year have committed 46 percent of homicides whose offender is known, even though they are just 9 percent of the Los Angeles population. Whites make up 28 percent of the Los Angeles population but have committed 4 percent of homicides, mostly involving domestic violence. These data, reported by the Los Angeles Times, mean that a black Angeleno is 35 times more likely to commit a homicide than a white Angeleno. Homicide data are the gold standard for crime statistics. Alas for Jeffrey Fagan and the Los Angeles Times‘s other experts, the statistical conclusion that blacks are “more inclined toward violent crimes” is indisputable.
When all that matters is not performance but performance art:
On the day that twelve US Marines and some 150 civilians were blown apart by suicide bombers, it was heartening to learn what real heroism is.
Until January 6th, the highlight of Michael Byrd’s “law-enforcement” career was leaving his loaded Glock in a congressional men’s room and paying no price. He “serves” with the grotesquely misnamed “Capitol Police”, which is not a police department but a praetorian guard – a personal security team for the praetors of Congress. Lieutenant Byrd shot and killed Ashli Babbitt, a 5’2″ unarmed woman, because “she was posing a threat to the US House of Representatives”.
All that has been known for months by anyone who wanted to know. The only real news in NBC’s Byrd exclusive was the level of his self-congratulation:
I believe I showed the utmost courage on January 6.
His interviewer, Lester Holt, did not respond: “Er, hang on, isn’t that the kind of thing you’re meant to leave for someone else to say about you?”
And did he have to say “utmost”? Even in as unutterably vulgar an age as ours, is even Michael Byrd incapable of imagining any “courage” greater than his own?
Ah, well, don’t over-think it; it’s just one of those phrases, half-remembered by Byrd from some Rose Garden medal ceremony he caught on TV: “utmost” goes with “courage” like “white” goes with “supremacist” and “domestic” goes with “terrorist”.
America is a land that tends to the utmost in all things. At the end of the nineteenth century, Bernard Shaw popularized the term “chocolate soldier” — the dashing hussar who is useless in battle but looks good in a uniform. We have the tutti-frutti generals: Thoroughly Modern Milley and his chums, whose diversity ribbons from shoulder to scrotum advertise their own utmostness even as they explain why everything going wrong merely demonstrates how everything is going right.
The tutti-frutti generals report to the ice-cream commander-in-chief melting all over the lectern every afternoon. His predecessor was on telly all day every day; Mr Biden was sold to head-in-the-sand Americans as the quiet-life guy who wouldn’t be in your face. Unfortunately, when your countrymen get blown up by government blunders, the citizenry expects him to be in their faces at least every now and then. Across the Atlantic, Boris and the EU chaps were on the screen responding to an all too predictable atrocity. But in the White House Joe Biden’s meds hadn’t yet kicked in — or, conversely, they’d shot him the juice too early and it had worn off. So, as has become familiar, the melting waffle cone was hours late in tottering across the room, squinting into the camera and reading with woozy and wooden defiance. This time he gave it the full Corn Pop:
To those who carried out this attack, as well as anyone who wishes America harm, know this: We will not forgive. We will not forget.
But Joe, a man who cannot reliably name his own Defense Secretary, has already forgotten.
John McWhorter on a recent study on interactions between the police and the general population:
“Police stop” by San Diego Shooter is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
A fascinating, and depressing, new study will be celebrated as revealing the subtle but powerful operations of racism. It also reveals, however, the pitfalls in the way we are taught to address that racism these days.
The study shows that police officers tend to talk in a less friendly way to black people they stop than white ones. People were played slivers of body-cam audio of the officers talking to citizens, with the content of the exchange disguised. People could tell with dismaying regularity what color person the officer was speaking to simply by the tone of voice. It wasn’t that officers outright sneer at black people. Rather, their tone with whites tends to be more pleasant, to have a hint of cheer, whereas with black people it is more impersonal, flat, unwarm.
The study also shows how these things fashion a vicious cycle. People tested who had negative experiences with cops and/or less trust in them processed even the exchanges the cops had with white citizens as less positive than other people tested did. That is, their life experience has implanted in them a distrust of the cops, that can anticipate actual interactions with them – and certainly, of course, unintentionally pollute them.
* * *
This study reminds me of something else that goes in the other direction. To whites, subtle things about black communication, including vocal tone, can come off as threatening when no threat is intended.
I once happened to hear two 30-something black men talking about a misunderstanding one of them had had at work. They were just unwinding, but there was what many might process as a tinge of impending battle in their voices, inflections and gestures. “Man, I wanted to ‘Mmmph!’ [jab of the arm, click of the tongue] Gimme a break! An’ I was like … [putting on a challenging glare] don’t even start.”
No black listener would assume these guys actually meant the hints at violence literally. However, outside listeners can hear this way of talking as edgy. Kelefa Sanneh’s term for this twenty years ago, writing about rap and its lyrics, was perfect: a certain “confrontational cadence”.
Yes, all people trash-talk. But this particular way of talking has a special place in black American culture. No, that’s not stereotyping: sympathetic black academics have documented it. CUNY’s Arthur Spears, today one of the deans of the academic study of black American speech, has written about what he calls “directness”. Speech “that may appear to outsiders to be abusive or insulting is not necessarily intended to be nor is it taken that way by audiences and addressees,” Spears noted. He then quoted a father-child exchange: Father: “Go to bed!” Little boy: “Aw, Daddy, we’re playing dominoes.” Father: “I’m gonna domino your ass if you don’t go to bed now.” Notice how awkwardly this, or Eddie Murphy’s routine about the mother throwing the shoe in Delirious, would translate into the world of Modern Family.
This “confrontational cadence” can inflect even casual exchanges between black and white people. Aspects of black intonation, steeped in a lifetime’s experience in a language culture that values performative aggression as a kind of communal élan, can sound cranky, disrepectful, and even aggressive to a white person. It is all but impossible that this does not color encounters between black people and white cops; I highly suspect a study like the first one I mentioned would reveal it.
Stick around long enough and you’ll notice this phenomenon happen every few years. You’re sitting there, minding your own business, and the next thing you know, friends from work or church or the book club who know you as “The Gun Expert” are coming up to you and asking about this bullet that’s being hyped in the mainstream media as either the surest felon-stopper since Wyatt Earp or the biggest menace to society since John Dillinger.
It’s rare for something as esoteric as a projectile design to come to the attention of the non-gun press. Generally, for that to happen, it takes one of two things: either a mainstream manufacturer made an unusually poor PR choice in the bullet naming *cough*BlackTalon*cough*, or someone has launched a buzzword-laden press release with all the discrimination of a desert island dweller putting notes in bottles.
[…]
When a new Magic Bullet is launched and makes media waves, I always apply two filters as to whether it’s worth chasing down. The first filter is “Are the police using this?” This is not necessarily because I think that the police are all-that-and-a bag-of-chips in the gear-selection department, but they’ve generally been okay with bullets for the last 15 or 20 years and, should I ever have to justify my choice of rounds in a courtroom, it would be nice to be able to say “You, alright! I learned it by watching you!” like the kid in the commercial.
The second filter? The second filter is “Is this cartridge sold in six-round blister packs with pictures of explosions and rappelling ninjas on them?” Because if it is, well, I’m just not Operator enough.
Tamara Keel, “No Magic Bullet”, GunsAmerica Digest, 2018-11-27.
Jay Currie considers the constant barrage of distractions that appear to be preventing most people from noticing what is actually going on in Canada:
Kamloops Indian Residential School, 1930.
Photo from Archives Deschâtelets-NDC, Richelieu via Wikimedia Commons.
The remarkable thing about all of these little snippets of news is that they seem to be regarded as business as usual. Being taxed by an inflation rate which is well into the double digits does not cut through the COVID hype. Vandalism and arson purportedly in rage over residential school deaths which we have known about for decades attracts very little comment – though many First Nations people are not very happy that reservation churches which have served their communities for years are being burnt. People seem to shrug off the heat wave deaths and ambulance delays.
I expect very little from government at any level. A reasonably sound currency, a degree of public order and emergency services which can deal with the inevitable surges in demand.
The emergency services issue is probably the most easily fixed. Yes, having more para-medics is part of the solution but planning a reponse to these sorts of surge emergencies which tries to avoid the need for an ambulance in the first place is important too. Most of the dead were old, in many cases, very old. It should not be impossible to identify those older people and have a plan for these sorts of emergencies. Something as simple as a “Helpful Neighbour” program on a voluntary basis would be a good first step.
Restoring public order is more complicated. First, you have to have the political will to actually take on the problem. As we saw a couple of years ago, when it comes to people purporting to act on behalf of First Nations/environmental causes that will is absent. But even if the politicians decided that enough was enough there needs to be an investigation and an understanding of how the “spontaneous” vandalism and arson and blockades are driven. That is going to require rooting around in the activist community which will be, to say the least, difficult. The people who are actually creating the public disorder pay close attention to operational and communications security. Suffice to say this stuff is not being organized on a Facebook page.
Restoring order is also going to require a look at who benefits from disorder. To take an example: was it co-incidence that the sad fact of the Kamloops residential school graveyard came up just as the inquiry into Canada’s Winnipeg Lab’s connection to the Wuhan virology lab was heating up? The fact of there being a graveyard had been know for decades. The ground radar was being used to determine the boundaries so a new fence could be built. Yet, somehow, the number of bodies became headline news. I suspect, but cannot prove, that this was no accident. Public order will be restored when disorder is no longer in anyone’s interest.
Gawain Towler on the sudden, unexpected — and undoubtedly unwelcome to self-appointed guardians of the official narrative — appearance of what sounds surprisingly like common sense from a top police officer in Britain:
“A Safe Escort” by Harry Payne (1858-1927), first published in August 1911 but possibly painted a few years earlier. From the back of the card: “Among the hundred and one duties of the London Policeman he is here depicted as a kindly protector, halting the traffic as he escorts a Lady across the congested streets. This is essentially a London incident, and has no parallel in any other Police Force in the world.”
Photo of the Tuck’s Oilette by Leonard Bentley via Wikimedia Commons.
Has Robert Peel been reincarnated as the Chief Constable for Manchester?
“But officer, if you are not on your knee, and wearing a rainbow lanyard, how do we know that you are on the side of the oppressed, the intersectional, the poor, downtrodden graduates of minor universities?”
“I’m sorry madam, may I call you madam? I am on the side of the law.”
The promotion of Stephen Watson as the new Chief Constable for Manchester comes as a shaft of light cutting through the murk of muddled thinking. He has said two things that will resonate with millions and will cause consternation amongst thousands:
I would probably kneel before the Queen, God and Mrs Watson, that’s it … The public are getting a little bit fed up of virtue-signalling police officers when they’d really rather we just locked up burglars.
It sounds like the first blast of the trumpet, but not only does it strike an astonishingly different note than the honky tonk tunes played by other constabularies. Stentorian and self confident it also marks a huge departure in that he makes a very public statement that he would kneel before God. A very courageous statement in the current climate in itself. But it is his approach to policing that strikes the eye.
One almost feels that as was once the case, each new officer in the Manchester Metropolitan Area will be issued with Sir Robert Peel’s 1829 Nine Principles of Policing. It is worth our while looking at those principles and deciding whether or not to accept that they should remain at the core of policing, or be junked as impossibly dated.
What is clearly apparent is that Peel’s principles are at heart about consent. Famously it described the police as merely the citizens in uniform, or that “the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence”.
Underlying this basic thought is an understanding that the police rely, entirely on the goodwill of the populace, if they wish to carry out their basic duties. In order to fulfil their functions and duties they are “dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect”.
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