Author: Mick Hartley

sionals. It is a social stratum that attempts to entrench itself within the elite, elbowing out others already there, by using the language of social justice to gain status and accrue “cultural capital”. Theirs is a struggle within the elite presented as a struggle against the elite on behalf of the poor and the dispossessed.

This is not simply cynicism or hypocrisy, Al-Gharbi argues. Symbolic capitalists have constructed myths about their social roles that allow them genuinely to believe in fairness and equity while entrenching inequality and injustice, myths that have been accepted by many social institutions and power-brokers. The consequence is that the language of social justice has helped “legitimize and obscure inequalities”, allowing sections of the elite to “reinforce their elite status… often at the expense of those who are genuinely vulnerable, marginalized and disadvantaged”.

Out here on the 19th.

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[Photos © Cafe Royal Books/Andreas Bleckmann]

as far as we could see looking fine. But for the BBC there are only good oppressed Palestinians, and bad oppressor Israelis…

font-size: 11pt”>Much of the Left has lost its mind, and its moral compass, when faced by entitled men masquerading as “victims”. Politicians parrot claims about trans-identified males not having full human rights, ignoring their own complicity in giving them access and influence women can only dream of. Biden welcomed Dylan Mulvaney, an actor who has made a career out of his journey to “girlhood”, to the White House, while Harris wrote a letter congratulating him on “living authentically” as a woman for a year. Mulvaney subsequently tanked sales of Bud Light when the company employed him as a brand ambassador, a warning that the Democrats ignored.

Trump’s suggestion that he will take on the trans lobby from day one appears to be a calculated reversal of one of Biden’s first acts as president. On 20 January 2021, Biden signed an executive order extending what’s known as Title IX, preventing publicly funded schools from excluding transgender students from toilets and changing rooms that align with their “gender identity”. It was the beginning of a cascade of legislation that’s resulted in girls losing sporting scholarships and medals, while female athletes have been injured in the process of playing against adult men.

It’s an open goal for Trump — and a horrible dilemma for women who detest his character and his politics. Trump proudly takes credit for destroying Roe v. Wade, leading to severe restrictions on abortion in many states. To the eternal discredit of the self-indulgent Left, however, he may also be the politician who finally dismantles the privileges of men who claim to be women.

With Trump, of course, what he says and what he does often bear little resemblance – but it's such an obvious area for reform that it'd be a surprise if he didn't move on this.

I wrote the words below in April, about the UK left, and I'm retweeting them today for the benefit of some of the numbskulls in my mentions.

Women like me, and there are a lot of us, aren't and never have been far-right. We simply want the left to wake the hell up, because we're… pic.twitter.com/zGqBxiodGt

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) November 8, 2024

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Full text:

Women like me, and there are a lot of us, aren't and never have been far-right. We simply want the left to wake the hell up, because we're watching it do its utmost to alienate people it used to represent.

I'm not saying Trump's win was down to the gender stuff – I'm not an American voter, so can't judge. In any case, the Labour Party won the last UK election and they've embraced gender identity ideology whole-heartedly (although they won against a Tory government so enfeebled and unpopular it would have been miraculous if they hadn't, and their popularity since gaining office has plummeted.)

What I do know is that millions of women in the UK and across the developed world are extremely angry about men in women's sport, men in women's jails and the erosion of single-sex spaces. Parents are angry at being demonised because they don't want their troubled kids to undergo irreversible medical treatments of extremely questionable benefit. People are sick to the back teeth of being bullied and threatened for refusing to embrace an elitist, academia-generated ideology that's having severe real world consequences.

Large swathes of the left continue to be threatening and abusive to anybody who resists their attempts to impose ideological language or bully them out of wrongthink. Leftist activists jeer and sneer at erstwhile female allies for the crime of believing biological sex is real and matters. And leftist leaders still appear more interested in sucking up to gender activists than – to take a topical example in the UK – female nurses whose crime is not wanting to undress in front of a fully intact male.

So to those screaming 'bigot' and 'fascist' at me, you should know two things. Firstly, I'm completely indifferent to your disapproval, as I'd have thought you'd have realised by now. Secondly, and far more importantly, the only thing more harmful to your cause than your pseudo-religious belief in gender identities is your astounding, self-righteous arrogance.

A few more autumnal shots, this time from Highgate:

From MEMRI TV:

In an October 18, 2024, lecture at the Islamic Society of Central Jersey, American Islamic scholar Suhaib Webb stated that student activism can go “hand in hand” with Islamic practice. He praised Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and other student groups for inviting imams to lead prayers at their encampments. Webb highlighted that imams like Imam Farhan Siddiqi of Dar Al-Hijra Islamic Center in Falls Church, Virginia, along with other imams from Washington D.C., Maryland, and Virginia, regularly visited these encampments to lead prayers and offer Islamic lessons. He commended these imams for their fearlessness in asserting that Zionism is equivalent to white supremacy, and that being a Zionist is no different from being a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

We need a dissolution of the universities https://t.co/TqkG7oDo3U

— Helen Joyce (@HJoyceGender) November 9, 2024

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A better view of that abstract (click to enlarge):

Janice Turner in the Times today, in praise of Kemi Badenoch:

How, some asked in wonder, did this Lagos-raised young woman with braided hair win over the Tory membership: the whitest, oldest, and by definition, most conservative of electorates? The answer was clear in her interview last Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg: she didn’t run on her identity. Indeed she dismissed the idea that being the first female black leader of a major UK political party mattered very much.

“I think the best thing will be when we get to a point when the colour of your skin is no more remarkable than the colour of your eyes or your hair,” she said. “We live in a multiracial country. We have to work very hard to make sure this works, and … people don’t see themselves as groups rather than all being British.” (Then, in combative Kemi style, she goaded Rachel Reeves for boasting about breaking “the very, very low glass ceiling” of first female chancellor.)

Hers was once the anti-racist position. Martin Luther King, whose words Badenoch seemed to echo, dreamt of a nation where people “will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character”. Badenoch asks to be judged by her politics not her “identity”, yet to some her politics betray her identity. The Labour MP Dawn Butler retweeted a post by the academic Kehinde Andrews saying Badenoch is “the black face of white supremacy”. They see people of colour as a homogeneous voting bloc: anyone who thinks differently is a traitor.

Even if you abhor Badenoch’s views, her stance is refreshingly egoless. Compare her with Labour’s most senior black politician, the foreign secretary David Lammy, who couldn’t even put aside his identity when addressing the UN about war in Ukraine. “I stand here,” he said, “also as a black man whose ancestors were taken in chains from Africa, at the barrel of a gun to be enslaved.” With no relevance to Putin’s atrocities or Britain’s interests, this was purest self-aggrandisement.

It's an interesting contrast. Whatever you may think of their politics, the Tories have featured on their front bench a number of intelligent outspoken women from immigrant backgrounds – Pritti Patel, Suella Braverman – while on the Labour side we have the lamentable Dawn Butler and the hopelessly over-promoted David Lammy, who do little but play the race card at every opportunity. 

Unison boss Steve North's dismissive comment on the Darlington Five – "anti-trans bigotry" – has not gone down well:

During her battle with Darlington NHS trust, Lisa Lockey, a nurse, says she has been threatened and intimidated, all because she does not want to undress in front of a man.

But it was criticism from Steve North, president of Unison, after her meeting two weeks ago with the health secretary Wes Streeting, which left her particularly aghast.

North accused Streeting of “pandering to anti-trans bigotry” by sitting down with Lockey and other nurses — one a survivor of sexual assault — who want to make their changing room a space for biological women only.

In light of North’s social media post, Lockey, a working mother who insists she is “standing up for other women”, cancelled her Unison membership, which she has held for 33 years.

She told The Times: “One of the things that really bothers me is the minute any female dares to complain about sharing a changing room with a man, they are instantly labelled as transphobic and a bigot. That’s what [North] did. We aren’t transphobes and we aren’t bigots. It absolutely boiled my blood that he has the audacity to label us that.

“He doesn’t know us. He knows nothing about us. He’s a man — he has no idea how it feels to be a woman in a changing room with a bloke in there. He doesn’t have a clue.”