What are human rights?

It’s clearly meant to shock. What next? Rishi Sunak tweeting promises of concentration camps? Gas chambers? Mass graves?

The Guardian notes that it’s calculated…which is pretty clear if you think about it, because nobody more intelligent than Donald Trump would say that accidentally. Sunak is definitely not stupid, let alone as stupid as Trump.

The problem with the government’s illegal migration bill is not just that it is inhumane and unworkable. It is that the inhumanity and unworkability look calculated. They are not simply bugs of the project; they may even be features.

…

If the aim [were] truly to cut costs to taxpayers and save lives by curbing dangerous small boat crossings, there would be two obvious places to start. The first would be to tackle the sclerotic Home Office bureaucracy, where mismanagement and inadequate resources have created a logjam…

There is no legal requirement for people to seek asylum in the first safe country they reach. The government’s own actions are of questionable legality, as it has acknowledged. It has briefed that there will be a “brake” on rights, raising the question of how it can avoid obligations under the European convention on human rights.

Pretty much the way the Nazis did what they did, is my guess.

Glinner urges readers to try to buy a copy of Hannah Barnes’s book Time to Think. A reader reports on one such attempt:

So on Tuesday last week (28 Feb), I looked for ‘Time to think’ in Waterstones Broadgate (Liverpool Street station). I was told that they had one copy, but that it had been ordered specifically for a customer. I was told that the nearest branch with a copy was Gower Street. (I didn’t look there…)

One copy. Why just one copy? I don’t think that’s how these things work. I think normally bookstores get several (or hundreds if they know it will fly off the shelves). They seem to have just One Copy only when it’s a book by some wicked feminist like Kathleen Stock.

On Friday (3 Feb) I looked in Waterstones Piccadilly – the biggest bookshop in London – where the front section as you enter is full of new releases and recommended books.

Been there done that. The Piccadilly one is the first place Jeremy and I went when the fashionable nonsense dictionary was published. (There were several copies.) Anyway – they didn’t have a single copy. Our reporter expressed surprise and one of the assistants snapped at him. Yeah that’s totally normal. The other assistant said it was an order but didn’t say when it would be in, and was vague about it when asked.

I then went to Foyles on Charing Cross Road (Foyles is now owned by Waterstones btw), who also didn’t have it on display in the front of the shop along with the new releases and recommendations. The assistant there said they had sold their allocation and were waiting for more copies, but again didn’t offer when it would be in stock. He looked up to see where I might find it nearby, and said that Waterstones Trafalgar Square had a copy.

One copy.

It could be that they’re just selling faster than Waterstone’s expected, but that seems unlikely, being as how Waterstone’s can pay attention to the news just as well as we can. And even if that is the case, why are they being so lackadaisical or just rude about it? We probably know why.

I couldn’t see it in Waterstones Trafalgar Square either, despite there being a two-unit display headed ‘In the media’. When I asked, I was told that I could find it in the ‘New social sciences’ section.

I found it and bought it. That might have been the last copy in a Waterstones store in London (!).

Suppress suppress suppress.

Yet another example of how we’re living under the rule of…Tucker Carlson.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Monday released security video from the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, using footage provided exclusively to him by Speaker Kevin McCarthy to portray the riot as a peaceful gathering.

So much wrong in that one sentence. A tucker carlson should not be in a position to “release” such security video. McCarthy should obviously not be giving it to him at all, let alone exclusively. Tucker Carlson should not be trying to portray the January 6 horror as a “peaceful gathering.”

Carlson acquired the tapes as part of a push by McCarthy, R-Calif., to win the speaker’s gavel. When McCarthy was struggling to gather the votes to lead the House, Carlson used his program to list two “concessions” he could make to win over far-right Republicans.

Carlson should not be doing that. Fox shouldn’t be doing that.

Carlson announced in late February that McCarthy had given him exclusive access to 44,000 hours of security video from the deadly riot before he unveiled some clips of the video on his show Monday night.

I know we’ve already seen this. I can’t leave it alone.

“The footage does not show an insurrection or a riot in progress,” Carlson told his audience Monday. “Instead it shows police escorting people through the building, including the now-infamous ‘QAnon Shaman.’”

That is, the particular footage that Carlson selected. Other footage very much does show a riot-insurrection in progress.

Video that Carlson didn’t air shows police and rioters engaged in hours of violent combat. Nearly 1,000 people have been charged in connection with the Capitol attack. About 140 officers were assaulted that day, and about 326 people have been charged with assaulting, resisting or impeding officers or employees, including 106 assaults that happened with deadly or dangerous weapons. About 60 people pleaded guilty to assaulting law enforcement. Two pipe bombs were also planted nearby but were not detonated.

All of which Carlson of course knows perfectly well. He’s doing everything he can to make this country ever more Nazi-like and out of control, all for the sake of his personal paycheck. What a guy.

At long last.

NHS must reinstate ‘woman’ in cancer and pregnancy webpages, staff demand

The NHS must reinstate the word “woman” in its cancer and pregnancy webpages, more than a thousand staff in the health service have demanded.

Yes! Finally!

At least 19 women’s health pages on the NHS website fail to mention women either at all or in addition to non-gendered language, including for guidance on ovarian and uterus cancer, menopause, childbirth and heavy periods.

As if those items were gender-neutral.

So now around 1,200 doctors, nurses and health practitioners have said stop doing that, pointing out that it harms women.

The NHS online overview for womb cancer previously opened by referring to “the female reproductive system” that is “more common in women who have been through the menopause”, but the new version contains no reference to women or females.

Censored medical information. Brilliant move, yeah?

The clinicians’ letter, seen by The Telegraph, says: “Removal of sex-based language is discriminatory and could leave the NHS open to legal challenge… We call for the reinstatement of sex-based, respectful communication that meets the healthcare needs of women.

“Specifically, the NHS must use women’s words for women’s bodies and women’s health problems… NHS.UK healthcare messaging shows a lack of concern for women, is disrespectful and insults women.”

Thank you. That’s exactly what it does.

Dr Louise Irvine, a spokesman for the Clinical Advisory Network on Sex and Gender, told The Telegraph: “These changes have occurred by stealth across the UK, over the past couple of years. NHS communications exist to promote and support the health and wellbeing of the UK population, of which over half are women.“

Our guiding principle as clinicians is ‘first do no harm’ and yet these underhanded, ideologically-driven changes in the NHS, which trump evidence-based healthcare, carry real risks and impact real lives.”

That is heart-warmingly blunt.

An NHS spokesman said: “The NHS website provides information for everyone and we keep the pages under continual review to ensure they use language that is inclusive, respectful, and relevant to the people reading it.”

No they don’t. Of course they don’t. We all know they don’t. What an idiotically obvious lie.

Insulting tits guy has been placed on leave.

A Canadian teacher has reportedly been placed on leave after months of criticism from parents about her size-Z prosthetic breasts.

Kayla Lemieux, an industrial arts teacher at Oakville Trafalgar High School in Ontario, Canada, was reportedly photographed by a newspaper outside school, dressed as a man and without the prosthetics.

Dressed as a man? How could they tell? I was outside today dressed in black jeans, a turtleneck and couple of sweaters, and a windbreaker. Was I dressed as a man? (I know, it’s not fair – it’s easier for a woman to wear jeans and t shirts than for a man to wear dresses and high heels.)

At a board meeting last month, Julia Malott, a transgender mother, said that what Ms Lemieux was wearing in class was “absolutely not appropriate for school”.

She said: “It is fetish wear used in sex work and the drag industry or people in their own houses who enjoy it. It is certainly not something I would want my daughter to see.”

Can’t a guy have a hobby?

Young-adult novelist and Washington Post columnist Monica Hesse takes the bold and original step of calling JK Rowling a bigot.

Things are said that sound reasonable. You would only know they were unreasonable — they were, in fact, wrong — if you had the patience to fact-check, or if you had the personal experience of counterevidence.

Like believing, or saying you believe, that men can be women? That kind of personal experience?

Is it common for transgender rights activists to virulently protest “feminist” conferences, as the podcast asserts?

To answer that last question, you would have to already know — because the podcast won’t tell you — that the “feminist” conferences protested by transgender rights advocates are typically gatherings that specifically exclude transgender women from the umbrella of the feminist movement.

There is no such umbrella. It’s a contradiction in terms. White people are not “excluded from the umbrella of the Black Lives Matter movement” because there is no such umbrella. Feminism is for and about women: that’s what the “fem” part means. We don’t exclude men, they just aren’t in the frame. Definitions are not invidious exclusion. Tigers aren’t “excluded” from the umbrella of “rabbits”; tigers just are not rabbits.

You would have to know that there are many feminist organizations and individual feminists, such as myself, who find this exclusion unconscionable.

Then you and they don’t understand the word “feminism.”

That transgender women don’t want to take down feminism; they want to be a part of it.

They “want to be a part of it” whether we like it or not, whether we consent or not. What does that sound like?

The piece goes on for many many more paragraphs but there’s nothing worth quoting – it’s all hand-waving and repetition.

H/t Sackbut

Ohhhhhhh yes it is.

Of course it’s a belief system. What else would it be? There is no physical test for it or physical symptom of it. It’s an idea. It’s a feeling, an interpretation, a story, an (attempted) explanation.

Also, yet another of those “reminders” that aren’t reminders because they’re not true. “Reminder that the sun is smaller than the earth.”

Also people don’t “just happen” to be trans. It’s about the least “just happen” way to be you can imagine. It’s something people decide to call themselves. They don’t “just happen” to make that decision; they make it because they’re alive now as opposed to a century ago or a century in the future, so they have absorbed the contemporary delusion that people can change sex by the power of thought.

The Washington Post on taboo teachings:

Excerpts from Mary Wollstonecraft’s “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.” Passages from Christopher Columbus’s journal describing his brutal treatment of Indigenous peoples. A data set on New York police’s use of force, analyzed by race.

These are among the items teachers have nixed from their lesson plans this school year and last, facing pressure from parents worried about political indoctrination, administrators wary of controversy, and a spate of new state laws restricting education on race, gender and LGBTQ issues.

The “TQ” issues of course complicate things.

The quiet censorship comes as debates over whether and how to instruct children about race, racism, U.S. history, gender identity and sexuality inflame politics and consume the nation.

Notice what’s missing. Sexism/misogyny didn’t make the cut. Mary Wollstonecraft leads the article but her subject matter gets lost again. It always gets lost these days.

The Washington Post asked teachers across the country about how and why they are changing the materials, concepts and lessons they use in the classroom, garnering responses from dozens of educators in 20 different states.

…

Greg Wickenkamp began reevaluating how he teaches eighth-grade social studies in June 2021, when a new Iowa law barred educators from teaching “that the United States of America and the state of Iowa are fundamentally or systemically racist or sexist.”

Return of sexism! But only for the purpose of forbidding mention of it.

Wickenkamp did not understand what this legislation, which he felt was vaguely worded, meant for his pedagogy. Could he still use the youth edition of “An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States”? Should he stay away from Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi’s “Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You,” especially as Kendi came under attack from conservative politicians?

Well, yes, I think he should steer clear of Kendi, but on grounds of quality, not content. He’s just not a very good writer or thinker; there are other, better ones. Anyway that’s what I think but I wouldn’t demand a law enforcing it.

Wickenkamp was fielding unhappy emails and social media posts from parents who disliked his enforcement of the district’s masking policy and his use of Reynolds and Kendi’s text. A local politician alleged Wickenkamp was teaching children critical race theory, an academic framework that explores systemic racism in the United States and a term that has become conservatives’ catchall for instruction about race they view as politically motivated.

Yes! We have to talk about race without any political motivation!

For 14 years, a North Carolina social studies teacher taught excerpts of Christopher Columbus’s journal without incident. The point was to show how Columbus’s marriage of enslavement with his quest for profit helped shape the world we live in today.

The teacher, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of harassment, directed children to the first chapter of Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States,” titled “Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress.” Throughout the chapter, students encountered paragraphs taken from the explorer’s journal in which Columbus delineated his views of, and interactions with, the Native peoples of America.

“As soon as I arrived in the Indies, on the first Island which I found, I took some of the natives by force,” Columbus wrote in October 1492, in a slice of the journal quoted by Zinn. “They would make fine servants. … With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want,” he also wrote.

But last year a parent complained, so that was the end of that.

Oops, methane is leaking.

More than 1,000 “super-emitter” sites gushed the potent greenhouse gas methane into the global atmosphere in 2022, the Guardian can reveal, mostly from oil and gas facilities. The worst single leak spewed the pollution at a rate equivalent to 67m running cars.

Separate data also reveals 55 “methane bombs” around the world – fossil fuel extraction sites where gas leaks alone from future production would release levels of methane equivalent to 30 years of all US greenhouse gas emissions.

Methane emissions cause 25% of global heating today and there has been a “scary” surge since 2007, according to scientists. This acceleration may be the biggest threat to keeping below 1.5C of global heating and seriously risks triggering catastrophic climate tipping points, researchers say.

“May be” “seriously risks” – as if there’s some chance we’re suddenly going to decide to reverse the process now.

To console us, there is one quite witty photo.

About 40% of human-caused methane emissions come from leaks from fossil fuel exploration, production and transportation. These rose by almost 50% between 2000 and 2019. Another 40% comes from agriculture, dominated by burping cattle, and 20% from rotting waste sites. All are forecast to rise.

Nicely done.

Men who pretend to be women are so INSPIRING.

Diana Sarosi is Director of Policy & Campaigns at Oxfam Canada. She retweeted Oxfam Canada’s obnoxious tweet about celebrating “the diversity of all identities” with an even more obnoxious version of “trans women are BETTER than women” bit of drivel.

I’m proud to work for an organization that is trans inclusive and has the superb @FaeJohnstone on our board! Her courage and determination inspires us all to fight even harder for the rights of all women.

Or to put it another way, “Fuck you, women.”

We’re supposed to be impressed and deeply moved by Fay Johnstone’s “courage and determination” to shove women aside and take center stage himself. We’re not. We wouldn’t be impressed and deeply moved if a white person tried to take center stage in an anti-racism organization. We wouldn’t be impressed and deeply moved if a plutocrat tried to take center stage in a labor union. We wouldn’t be impressed and deeply moved if a WASP tried to take center stage in a Native American organization. There is nothing impressive or moving about people who have the upper hand trying to steal the spotlight from people who are stuck with the lower hand. Nothing.

Schools shouldn’t have “blasphemy” rules.

The home secretary has agreed to issue new guidance on ‘blasphemy’ incidents at schools, following concerns raised by the National Secular Society.

In a letter sent last week, the NSS asked Suella Braverman to work with the Department for Education towards “an improved understanding of blasphemy and its role in the wider threat posed by Islamism” in the context of state schools.

Writing in The Times this weekend, Braverman said schools should answer to “pupils and parents” rather than “self-appointed community activists”.

“I will work with the Department for Education to issue new guidance spelling this out”, she added.

Ms Braverman’s article continues: “We do not have blasphemy laws in Great Britain, and must not be complicit in the attempts to impose them on this country. There is no right not to be offended. There is no legal obligation to be reverent towards any religion. The lodestar of our democracy is freedom of speech.”

That’s a good sentence – “There is no legal obligation to be reverent towards any religion.” I don’t think any comparable US head of department would say that.

Her pledge comes in the wake of events at Kettlethorpe High School in West Yorkshire, where four pupils were suspended last week after one of them brought in a scuffed copy of the Quran. The episode was recorded as a “hate incident” by the police and one of the boys, who has high functioning autism, has been subjected to death threats. His mother said she had been left “absolutely petrified”.

The police persecute people for being skeptical of religion, including the religion of TransWomenAreWomen, while turning a blind eye to colleagues who rape women. Skewed priorities.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Will we be queering queer?

Queer in the queer theory/new queer movement sense is the worst word, because it represents self-contradiction. It implies a confusing, a muddying, a cognitive dissonance built right into it. To queer a concept isn’t to prove it or disprove it; it’s neither hardening the rules nor softening them; it’s neither clarifying the boundaries nor eliminating them; it’s neither respectful or disrespectful. It’s putting something in almost a quantum state exactly so that it can’t be inspected accurately.

“Queer” is applied to sexual orientation by straight people most of all, because they both want to be a part of the gay rights movement (which would make them imposters), and they simultaneously want to respect the rights of gay people. “Queer” is the sharp, jarring word that blares over that hypocrisy so nobody quite notices it.

“Queer” is applied to sex (which they of course call “gender”, as in “genderqueer”) to cover over the fact there are two completely contradictory impulses behind transgender ideology: the belief that gender stereotypes are unimportant and completely unrelated to sex, and the belief that gender roles are the most important things in the world and they completely define what sex we all are. Sex is everywhere you look and nowhere at all; it both doesn’t exist and exists, simultaneously. “Schrödinger’s dick” is a wisecrack often made about gender identity ideology for this reason.

I dislike the word queer for a number of reasons, but mostly because it represents a social idealism that is supposed to be a reaction against the strict social hierarchies and rules espoused by social conservatism — sexism, homophobia, etc. But in practice the outcome is no different than social conservatism. It’s a fact that humans come in two sexes and three sexual orientations which can’t be changed; to try and blur these facts doesn’t eliminate discrimination along these “axes of oppression”, it just makes it impossible to measure or talk about the ways women and gays face oppression.

You couldn’t possibly make up a worse way to try to improve inequality than Queer Theory. It’s so bad at what it’s supposedly intended to do I can’t help but suspect a deliberate con job. Every time I hear someone use the word “queer” I feel a little frisson of distrust. It’s an obfuscation; it’s a diversion. Someone’s trying to slip something past my radar.

Via What a Maroon I read a review by Jacob Brogan of a novel about lesbians which (as WaM noted) doesn’t use the word “lesbian” once. The word “queer” on the other hand appears nine times. I get that the word “queer” has been, according to some people, reclaimed or repurposed or seized or whatever you want to call it. There’s a parallel, I think, to the way the word “Negro” went out of favor to be replaced by its English language equivalent, “Black.” It was a move from the weirdly euphemistic to the blunt, because what the hell was there to be euphemistic about anyway? “Negro” came to seem tellingly squeamish. There’s also of course a parallel to the reclaiming (or claiming) of “dyke,” helped along by Alison Bechdel.

But…not all “queer” people endorse the reclaiming of “queer.” Many of them in fact hate it. I don’t really know what to think about it, myself.

Selby Wynn Schwartz’s first novel follows a meandering course through the late 19th century into the early 20th, focusing on the lives and overlapping connections of an array of real women. Many of them are boldface names from the queer and feminist cultural past — Virginia Woolf, Sarah Bernhardt and Colette, to name just a few — while others are less famous. 

…

For generations of queer writers, including many of the women who appear in “After Sappho,” deliberately composing in fragmentary styles — breaking their work into discrete, discontinuous chunks through grammatical, visual or narrative eccentricities — became a way to build new, more welcoming forms of community…

Sappho is an apt avatar for Schwartz’s project: The totalizing excess of queer art can overwhelm you with laughter or longing, blotting out the painful experiences it sometimes describes. But queer thought has most often thrived in fragments, its practitioners taking the world to pieces, the better to re-center those who’ve been pushed to the margins.

I wonder why the Washington Post decided to get a man to review this book. Maybe we could start queering that kind of thing a little?

In Argentina as in the US abortion is difficult or impossible to get.

María was 23 when she decided to have an abortion.

At the health centre where she had gone for treatment, she says she overheard one doctor saying to a colleague: “When will these girls learn to keep their legs closed?”

It’s always the girls who have to keep their legs closed, not the boys who have to keep their dicks in their pants.

María lives in Salta, a religiously conservative province in north-west Argentina, where many healthcare workers are still against abortion. She was eventually given a pill to end her pregnancy, but she says the nurses were reluctant to treat her and wanted to make her feel guilty: “After I expelled the pregnancy tissue, I could see the foetus.”

“The nurses put it in a jar to make sure I saw it and they told me, ‘This could have been your child.'”

It could have been, and so what? If you don’t want to have a child then you don’t want to. It’s the kind of thing you ought to want to do in order to do it well, because the consequences of doing it badly are so awful. Child-having of all the things humans do ought to be passionately voluntary.

Argentina relaxed its law on abortion in 2020, allowing a woman to choose to terminate her pregnancy in the first 14 weeks, Previously, it was only allowed in the case of rape or if the woman’s life or health was at risk.

Argentina is more liberal on abortion than the US.

A letter to the Guardian wants us to know that Mormonism IS NOT SILLY.

While it was heartening to read that Lucy Mangan found those featured in the documentary The Mormons Are Coming to be “lovely – gentle, kind, sincere” (TV review, 28 February), her comment that they were “fill[ing] people’s emotional voids with their lies” attempted to perpetuate the derogatory caricature that Mormons are hapless simpletons.

But supernatural religious claims are just that: supernatural.

The review took aim at what Mangan termed “the essential absurdity” of Joseph Smith’s claim to have received ancient records from an angel. I doubt such remarks would be used to describe Moses before the burning bush, or Gabriel’s appearance to the prophet Muhammad.

Sure they would. The ones that mention Mohammed might be scarcer in the Guardian, but there are plenty of unabashed atheists who write for it and say unabashedly atheist things.

Sorry, but essential absurdity is part of the package.

Washington Post cartoonist sums up:

Trump took his show on the road yesterday.

The former president spent his wide-ranging, nearly two-hour remarks rehashing the “America First” agenda that has played well with his base.

With “wide-ranging” meaning rambling and incoherent.

“In 2016, I declared I am your voice,” he said. “Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.”

He’s downright biblical!

Speaking with reporters before the speech, Trump said he would stay in the race even if he is indicted in ongoing criminal investigations of his handling of presidential documents and his role in instigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

…

After months of attacking Fox News, which aired his Saturday remarks, he said in his speech that television personalities Sean Hannity, Jesse Watters and Tucker Carlson should be awarded Pulitzer Prizes.

And Nobel Prizes and Oscars and a pony.

Bolsonaro was there too, and gave his own speech.

Bolsonaro was a fitting opener for Trump, given his numerous ties to the former president’s administration. He has been counseled by Trump advisers Stephen K. Bannon and Stephen Miller, and, like Trump, stoked anger among his base after he lost the election, suggested the win by his left-wing opponent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, was fraudulent. Critics say his comments helped foment a Jan. 6-style riot in Brasília on Jan. 8 of this year.

…

Brazilian prosecutors are investigating him for spreading election misinformation, interfering with the federal police and leaking classified information.

He is also under investigation for genocide, with Indigenous groups and their defenders arguing that his public derision of them, and his refusal to stop illegal mining in the Amazon, sparked a widespread environmental and public health crisis that killed dozens. 

Nice company.

That’s nice. That’s charming. Oxfam Canada thinks women don’t get to have a day for themselves. Other subordinated groups get to have a day for themselves, but women don’t. Why’s that? Because we’re such Karens? Is that it?

Fighting for what rights? What rights do trans people – especially trans women – want that they don’t have? What rights do they have to fight for? The right to shove women aside and take all our stuff? That’s not a right. That’s just a continuation of the same old arrangement where men are in charge and women obey or else.

Fae Johnstone doesn’t have a “right” to be celebrate on International Women’s Day. He’s not a woman. He should get out of women’s concerns, leave women alone, stop taking what belongs to women. Oxfam Canada should stop cheering him on.

Also what tf is “the diversity of all identities” supposed to mean?

Andrew Sullivan on Murdoch and Fox:

The great and obvious flaw in the political right’s legitimate criticism of mainstream media bias is that the most dishonest, cynical, postmodern, post-truth, “everything-is-power” media enterprise is Fox News. 

You only have to watch it for a few minutes to immediately grasp this, which is why most visitors from other democratic countries are shocked that it exists at all, when they see it.

Same.

But it’s rare to get real, actionable, behind-the-scenes proof of the deception, and thanks to the Dominion lawsuit, we have it. It will be important to watch the trial, of course, and see how Fox tries to counter the specific claims. But it seems indisputable to me that many Fox journalists absolutely knew they were peddling lies without any foundation, from top to bottom, and broadcast them anyway for the sole purpose of ratings and money. 

Well, look at it this way – doing things for the sole purpose of money is a form of politics, and doing things for other purposes, like getting the truth out there, is also a form of politics, so it all evens out.

It’s a pretty simple and old-as-time story of corruption. After their own election analysts called Arizona for Biden, the brass immediately understood that if they remained true to even the most cursory journalistic standards, their ratings and revenue would take a huge hit.

So they lied and lied and lied, knowing they were doing it.

And the topic they were lying about was not some minor culture-war controversy, or some genuinely vexing congeries of electoral glitches that could be aired out. It was the core foundation of democracy itself — the basic public legitimacy of our elections, the charge that the fraud was “massive” and comprehensive and that democracy was over. Rupert Murdoch decided to throw the full weight of his media empire to give this lie oxygen — and thereby helped foment an armed insurrection against the peaceful transfer of power. 

And the continuing belief of around half the population that Murdoch’s lies are truth.

Then the continuing bullshit: “I would have liked us to be stronger in denouncing [the election lie] in hindsight,” he says at one point. Well, what’s stopping you now, Rupert? Cat still got your tongue? Can’t get booked on your own network to say this? The rank pusillanimity and shamelessness of it all.

…

What was Murdoch’s motive in all this? Money. That’s it. Money. Murdoch’s value above all values. A man with something like $8 billion to his name in his nineties still needs more. Always more. He needs it so much he prioritized it over the most rudimentary requirements of ethical journalism and, yes, democratic citizenship. He fomented an attack on the very base of our system of government because he still believes he is not rich enough. And he is utterly candid about this. Asked why Fox continued to feature loony Mike Lindell on the air, “Murdoch testified that Lindell ‘pays us a lot of money’ in advertising. And when asked why Fox continues to give a platform to Lindell, Murdoch agreed that ‘it is not red or blue, it is green.’” 

Money money money, it’s a rich man’s world.

Billy Bragg has trouble making up his mind. Yesterday as we saw he was all “do women really get to say things?”

And today he’s all “right to protest!!!” and “right to free expression!!!!!”