Author: Mick Hartley

d in great disorder: excellent situation!” (天下大乱形势大好). This impulse to disrupt or “overturn” (翻身) China’s class structure proved massively destructive. But Mao justified the resulting violence and upheaval as essential elements of “making revolution” (搞革命革命) and building a “New China.”

The Trump administration has an equally voracious appetite for disruption and chaos. Palantir CEO Alex Karp, whose co-founder Peter Thiel is also a Trump acolyte, recently described the new president’s overhaul of the United States government as a “revolution” in which “some people will get their heads cut off.” And this revolution’s executioner-in-chief would appear to be the world’s richest person, Elon Musk.

Despite obvious differences, Musk is more than a little reminiscent of Kuai Dafu, who was deputized by Mao himself to lead Tsinghua University’s Red Guard movement. Kuai not only brought chaos to his campus, but led 5,000 fellow Red Guards into Tiananmen Square shouting slogans against Liu and Deng, before attempting to lay siege to the nearby leadership compound, Zhongnanhai – much as Trump’s own version of the Red Guards did at the US Capitol in 2021….

Trump may lack Mao’s skills as a writer and theorist, but he possesses the same animal instinct to confound opponents and maintain authority by being unpredictable to the point of madness. Mao, who would have welcomed the catastrophe now unfolding in America, must be looking down from his Marxist-Leninist heaven with a smile, as the East wind may finally be prevailing over the West wind – a dream for which he had long hoped.

Lovely. America's very own Cultural Revolution currently kicking off. With Make America Great Again perhaps as the new Great Leap Forward? Though I doubt even Trump could aspire to Mao's 30 to 40 million or so deaths. Still, early days…

Baroness Falkner of Margravine to the rescue. Watchdog tells NHS Fife to provide single-sex changing rooms:

​A top UK human rights body has written to “remind” an NHS board at the centre of a single-sex spaces row that changing rooms must include separate facilities for men and women.

Baroness Falkner of Margravine, chairwoman of the ​Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), has intervened in the legal battle involving NHS Fife over the use of female changing facilities by a transgender doctor….

Falkner has written to NHS Fife and Scottish ministers to reiterate their duty to “have an accurate understanding of the operation of the Equality Act as it relates to the provision of single-sex services and spaces”.

In a statement, Falkner said the letter highlighted obligations under the Workplace Regulations (Health, Safety and Welfare) of 1992 which state that changing facilities will not be suitable “unless they include separate facilities for, or separate use of facilities by, men and women where necessary for reasons of propriety”.

A separate letter has also been sent to the Scottish government.

The human rights body revealed it has requested a meeting with Neil Gray, the health secretary, to discuss a forthcoming “guide to transitioning” document which insists transgender staff must be allowed to use their “preferred facilities” including changing rooms and lavatories unless there is a particular “case by case” reason.

The guidance suggests it could be unlawful to prevent a transgender person from using the lavatories or changing facilities of their chosen gender.

​Helen Joyce, director of advocacy at human rights charity Sex Matters, said it had warned SNP ministers earlier this week that the guide “misrepresented the Equality Act and was legally wrong”.

​“It was extraordinary to then see the Scottish first minister stand up in Holyrood on Thursday and refer to the guidance as if these flaws did not exist,” she said.

“The EHRC’s speedy intervention is a clear sign that in defending this error-strewn guidance, John Swinney was committing as serious an error of judgment as when his health minister, Neil Gray, said that the leadership of NHS Fife had his ‘full confidence’.​”

Having to tell the Scots where they've got it wrong. It's becoming quite an industry.

The BBC's obsession with drag queens and transvestites plumbs new depths. Jo Bartosch at Spiked:

CBeebies, the BBC’s platform for pre-school children, has run a bizarre puff piece lionising two transvestite prostitutes.

Ahead of this year’s International Women’s Day, CBeebies’ staff saw fit to include the late Ray ‘Sylvia’ Rivera and Marsha P Johnson in a list of ‘Inspirational Mums’ – alongside figures like poet Maya Angelou and Irena Sendler, the Polish heroine who rescued thousands of Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto. Today, no BBC list of high-achieving women would be complete without some drag queens, and so Johnson and Rivera are lauded for supposedly providing ‘a home, food, clothing and a sense of family to many LGBTQ+ kids made homeless by their biological families’.

But Rivera and Johnson were not only childless men, and thus not ‘mothers’ in any sense. They were also the kind of men that no loving parent would leave a child with. They were prostitutes known to be involved with the New York mob….

When alive, Johnson and Rivera were clear that they understood themselves to be gay men who cross-dressed and sold sex. Neither had easy lives, but this does not excuse what they allowed to happen to the vulnerable young people who found themselves at STAR House. The idea that these men were maternal figures can only make sense to the sort of fool who thinks Hamas only gets a bad rep because of ‘Islamophobia’ – in other words, your average BBC staffer….

The BBC long ago abandoned the Reithian values of educating, informing and entertaining. Everything the BBC does now comes with a political agenda, whether the endless stream of BBC News puff pieces about drag queens, or the tiresome attempts to normalise cross-dressing men in every daytime TV storyline. Yet this CBeebies incident marks a bizarre new low. When the BBC is directing trans propaganda at children, recasting transvestite prostitutes as loving mothers, it is waving a womanly willy in the face of every licence-fee payer.

Added:

How many drag stories this year by the BBC? It’s only Feb so….I am guessing… 935. Close?

— Jill Foster (@JournalistJill) February 22, 2025

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Augusta, Georgia, 1903. "A Southern fish vender."

[Photo: Shorpy/Detroit Photographic Company]

with regard to Ukraine and Russia come as a huge blow. We are in the midst of a global fight between Western liberal democracy and authoritarian government, and in this fight, the United States has just switched sides and signed up with the authoritarian camp.

What Trump has said over the past few days about Ukraine and Russia defies belief. He has accused Ukraine of having started the war by not preemptively surrendering to Russian territorial demands; he has said that Ukraine is not a democracy; and he has said that Ukrainians were wrong to resist Russian aggression. These ideas are likely not ones he thought up himself, but come straight from the mouth of Vladimir Putin, a man Trump has shown great admiration for. Meeting in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, the United States started a direct negotiation with Moscow that excludes both Ukraine and the Europeans, and has surrendered in advance two critical bargaining chips: acceptance of Russian territorial gains to date, and a commitment not to let Ukraine enter NATO. In return, Putin has not made a single concession….

Any peace agreement “negotiated” by the Trump administration and Russia now will not bring peace. There may be a ceasefire for a while, but the Russians will rearm and reopen the war once they re-equip themselves. They have no reason to honour existing ceasefire lines, but will want to reabsorb the whole of Ukraine at the right time.

Less noticed in the current furor is the policy announced by Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth to cut the U.S. defence budget by 8 percent a year for the next five years. This is the opposite of what the United States should be doing. Down the road there will be new Russian threats to every country on its periphery—Georgia, Moldova, the Baltic states, and Poland. The United States does not have to formally pull out of the NATO alliance; Trump has already signalled clearly that he will not honour the Article 5 commitment to mutual defence. America will be weakened both in terms of intention, and in terms of capacity to meet future great power threats….

The United States under Donald Trump is not retreating into isolationism. It is actively joining the authoritarian camp, supporting right-wing authoritarians around the world…

Times must be hard for Hizbullah supporters after the comprehensive demolition of their beloved organisation by Israeli forces. Not to worry: everything's fine. Their definition of victory, after the destruction of their homes and the deaths of their leaders, just happens to be a bit different from ours.

From MEMRI TV:

Hizbullah-affiliated academic Sadek Al-Naboulsi stated in a February 18, 2025, interview on Tafasil on YouTube that Hizbullah has not been defeated in the war and remains “strong and active.” He explained that Hizbullah’s notion of victory differs from others, and they do not view the destruction of their homes or the deaths of their leaders as a defeat. On the contrary, Al-Naboulsi explained that the killing of Hizbullah's leaders is seen as a “key to the greater victory.” He emphasized that Hizbullah will not surrender its weapons as long as Israel exists. Al-Naboulsi also confirmed that weapons have continued to reach Hizbullah even after the fall of the Assad regime.

More from David Collier:

An @BBC news thread – for those who do not understand JUST HOW BAD the BBC Hamas propaganda documentary was. There have been several key scoops – and I thought I would bring the issues together.

Thread ⬇️⬇️⬇️

— David Collier (@mishtal) February 21, 2025

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Added:

Breaking:

VICTORY!

The BBC has pulled the Gaza documentary off air. It is no longer available on iPlayer.

The BBC Hamas propaganda video has gone. pic.twitter.com/pDTG1IectS

— David Collier (@mishtal) February 21, 2025

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Hamas plumb new depths:

One of the bodies that were released to Israel from Hamas yesterday, belongs to an unidentified Gazan and not the 33-year-old mother of Ariel and Kfir Bibas, the Israel Defense Forces said on Friday morning.

The Israeli National Institute of Forensic Medicine and the Israel Police identified two of the four redeemed bodies as Ariel and Kfir, whom terrorists “brutally murdered” in captivity in November 2023, the Israeli military said. At that time, the boys would have been ages 4 and 10 months, respectively.

“This is a violation of utmost severity by the Hamas terrorist organization, which is obligated under the agreement to return four deceased hostages,” the IDF said. “We demand that Hamas return Shiri home along with all our hostages.”

Danny Danon, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, stated that “there are no words that can describe such an atrocity.”

Hamas “continues to violate every basic moral value,” Danon said, noting that the terror organization “returned an unidentified body, as if it were a worthless shipment.”

“This is a new low, an evil and cruelty with no parallel,” he added….

The Jewish Federations of North America stated that it is “appalled, outraged and disgusted by Hamas’s cruel and deceitful psychological warfare against the Bibas family, the State of Israel and the Jewish people.”

“Not only did these terrorists kidnap Kfir and Ariel Bibas, two young children—aged just nine months and four years—but forensic evidence shows that they brutally murdered them roughly a month into their captivity,” the Federation stated. “Further, they lied about returning the body of their mother, Shiri, adding to the immense pain of the family. In case it was not yet clear to anyone, Hamas cannot be allowed to remain in power.”

BREAKING: Hamas confirms—they did not release the remains of hostage Shiri Bibas yesterday.

— Hen Mazzig (@HenMazzig) February 21, 2025

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Added:

The use of dead as weapon of war is an age old behaviour but there is something additional here. The psychological warfare and the creation of forensic uncertainty has become as important in some forms of terrorism as the original killing https://t.co/rfuxmMdS0n

— Professor Lucy Easthope (@LucyGoBag) February 21, 2025

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Very strange. Trans doctors are allowed by the General Medical Council  to start all over again with their shiny new gender identity, and all past records wiped clean:

Wes Streeting has raised concerns after a Telegraph investigation found that doctors who change gender are able to have past wrongdoings scrubbed from the public record.

The Health Secretary said the General Medical Council (GMC), which regulates doctors, should urgently overhaul its practices, adding the situation should “not have been allowed”.

The GMC holds a public register of all doctors, allowing the public to check whether a medic has been subject to restrictions or suspensions, or has been struck off.

However, on Thursday the watchdog admitted that it erases the public disciplinary history of doctors who change their gender identities.

It raises the prospect that medics seeking to hide a chequered disciplinary history could exploit the system by choosing to change their gender identity in order to erase their past. It also means a female patient who specifically requested a female doctor would be unable to find out if their doctor was born a man.

More evidence of institutional capture. But good for Streeting, calling this out….

Trump is bad enough, but Elon Musk is off the charts:

Elon Musk has accused Kyiv of being a “massive graft machine feeding off the dead bodies of Ukrainian soldiers” and said President Trump was right to “ignore” President Zelensky in peace talks with Moscow.

The tech billionaire and close Trump adviser also echoed the US president’s call for elections in Ukraine, claiming that Zelensky’s people “despise” him…

Musk wrote on X, his social media platform: “If Zelensky was actually loved by the people of Ukraine, he would hold an election. He knows he would lose in a landslide. So he cancelled the election.”

A nasty little Robin to Trump's Batman.