So the UK has its own Tucker Carlson, in the shape of Toby Young. Last January he got caught telling a whopper about the virus.

The Daily Telegraph must publish a correction over a “significantly misleading” column written by Toby Young, press regulator Ipso has ruled.

The July 2020 article claimed the common cold could provide “natural immunity” to Covid-19 and London was “probably approaching herd immunity”.

But on Thursday Ipso found the paper had “failed to take care not to publish inaccurate and misleading information”.

About a pandemic that kills.

I still find it hard to believe that people happily spout off on medical issues in ways that encourage people to catch a lethal virus, for the sake of politics or attention or laughs or all three.

He’s still doing it.

In our next episode of The War on Feminist Women, we have Index on Censorship publishing an article by a Gender-Special person saying that oh yes Maya Forstater is too so twanzphobic.

I guess Index on Censorship has decided “Let’s just censor her a little bit. To be on the safe side.”

Owen Jones wrote a long “I never did!!” post in response to Douglas Murray in The Spectator. He took pains to accuse Suzanne Moore of lying.

Hadley Freeman was in the room and she says it did happen, as Suzanne says it did.

That’s why we’re interested in it.

Rebecca Solnit addresses this constant puzzle of the politicization of death-avoidance in a pandemic:

Some of the most powerful conservatives in the United States have, since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, chosen to sow disinformation along with mockery and distrust of proven methods of combating the disease, from masks to vaccines to social distancing. Their actions have afflicted the nation as a whole with more disease and death and economic crisis than good leadership aligned with science might have, and, in spite of hundreds of thousands of well-documented deaths and a new surge, they continue. Their malice has become so normal that its real nature is rarely addressed. Call it biological warfare by propaganda.

It’s true and I never really will understand why. It just doesn’t seem worth it. The political payoff, if any, is so remote and conjectural while the deaths are so prompt and real that it doesn’t seem worth it by any earth-based standard.

Call Jared Kushner the spiritual heir of the army besieging the city of Caffa on the Black Sea in 1346, which, according to a contemporaneous account, catapulted plague-infected corpses over the city walls. This is sometimes said to be how the Black Death came to Europe, where it would kill tens of millions of people – a third of the European population – over the next 15 years.

Except not, though, because this isn’t sending infection to an enemy in wartime, this is sending infection to your own supporters as a matter of political rivalry.

Solnit’s explanation is that they thought it was going to hit cities that vote Democratic much harder than the other kind. Maybe so, but now they know they’re telling their own fans to expose themselves to the virus – in many cases (or most or all?) when they’ve been vaccinated themselves. “I’m vaxxed but you patriots out there, don’t you get that nasty antifa vaccination.”

The worst-hit areas in the country are now Republican-led states and regions. At one point recently, Florida under raging science denier Governor Ron DeSantis, with about 7.5% of the US population, accounted for 20% of all new Covid cases. The governors of Florida and Texas have banned mask mandates, making attempts to protect public health, including that of children, acts of defiance by cities and school districts. DeSantis’s supporters are peddling “Don’t Fauci My Florida” T-shirts and drink coolers with the text “How the hell am I going to drink a beer with a mask on?” On 27 July, as Delta infections proliferated, House minority leader Kevin McCarthy tweeted, “Make no mistake – The threat of bringing masks back is not a decision based on science, but a decision conjured up by liberal government officials who want to continue to live in a perpetual pandemic state.”

Where’s the payoff in that? I’m not seeing it. I think maybe it’s just that they’re so wedded to the habit of playing Opposite Everything that they can’t stop even when they know they’re telling their own voters to die in order to stick it to the libtards.

Call Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham the spiritual heirs of Lord Jeffery Amherst, the British military commander who in 1763 wrote to an underling, “Could it not be contrived to send the Small Pox among those disaffected tribes of Indians?”

…

It’s safe to assume that the Republican leadership knows better, and that some of their followers do and some don’t. Some have chosen to engage in biological warfare; some are merely tools being used in that warfare. That is, some of them are unwitting corpses being catapulted over the walls, unconscious smallpox blankets; some of them are Amherst in spirit. A friend of a friend of mine, a masseuse, had a client who laughed at the end of their session and revealed that her vaccination card was fake: definitely an Amherst.

I’ll never understand people.

Marjorie Taylor Greene urges her fans to murder more federal workers.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., suggested at a recent Republican fundraiser in Alabama that Southerners could threaten President Joe Biden’s “police state friends” with guns if they show up at their homes asking about their coronavirus vaccination status.

The late-July event in Dothan was closed to the media, but a video clip of some of her comments leaked, according to the Alabama Political Reporter.

What’s the world coming to when a pro-fascist member of the House can’t foment insurrection in private?

“You lucky people here in Alabama might get a knock on your door, because I hear Alabama might be one of the most unvaccinated states,” Greene told the crowd, prompting cheers and applause over the state’s low vaccination rate. “Well, Joe Biden wants to come talk to you guys. He’s going to be sending one of his police state friends to your front door to knock on the door, take down your name, your address, your family members’ names, your phone numbers, your cellphone numbers, probably ask for your Social Security number and whether you’ve taken the vaccine or not.”

She continued: “What they don’t know is in the South, we all love our Second Amendment rights, and we’re not real big on strangers showing up on our front door, are we? They might not like the welcome they get.”

The feds don’t know the South has a lot of gun nuts? Of course they know that. They’d have to be remarkably oblivious not to know it in the light of recent events, not to mention people like Greene shouting about it constantly.

In remarks last month, Greene made another Nazi-era comparison regarding the coronavirus response, saying people who knock on doors encouraging vaccinations are “medical brown shirts,” referring to the paramilitary organization that helped facilitate the rise of the Nazis and Hitler.

No the Nazis and Hitler are on her team, not ours. She’s basically trying to spark another Kristalnacht every time she opens her mouth.

The guy dressed as a baby at the “trans rights” protest is very indignant that people noticed he was dressed as a baby.

Is it?

I don’t know; maybe. For a day at the beach or a pool party it may be. For other purposes? I would think not. Mostly, adults don’t want to be seen as pretending to be children, or dressing up to look like children, for a whole host of reasons. Maybe that’s unfair, maybe we should be more relaxed about the self-presentation of adults just as we should be more relaxed about men who say they are women…but I don’t think that case has been made yet.

Meanwhile he says no you’re the pedophiles.

Me? I didn’t rape him. I’ll cop to boring, for sure, but raping Pastel Rompers Guy, no.

Anyway, never mind all that, the important thing is he looked FABulous.

Oops.

Oh how special: Fox News rodent Tucker Carlson is on a jaunt to Hungary to hang out with good ol’ boy Viktor Orban.

US guest of honour and Fox News host Tucker Carlson was granted a lightning visit by military helicopter to Hungary’s 175km (109-mile) high-tech, high-cost razor-wire border fence with Serbia this week.

Border wall! To keep the Untermenschen out! Makes a proud boy proud!

He liked what he saw. After praising the fence for being so “clean and orderly”, in contrast to the “chaos” on the US-Mexican border, he told his viewers: “It doesn’t require a GDP the size of the US, it doesn’t require high-tech walls, guns, or surveillance equipment. All it requires is the will to do it.”

Triumph of the will, baby.

“Because the lessons are so obvious, and such a clear refutation to the policies we currently have, and the people who instituted those policies, Hungary and its government have been ruthlessly attacked and unfairly attacked: ‘It’s authoritarian, they’re fascists…’ There are many lies being told right now, that may be the greatest of all.”

I’m definitely going to take Tucker Carlson’s word on that.

Sorry to cite Andy Ngô but sometimes it can’t be helped.

The recital of the creed:

I think the guy in the pastel play clothes identifies as a baby. For real.

There’s the trans baby again. I wonder what his demands are.

Oh the irony when even Woman’s Hour avoids the word.

WOMAN’S HOUR FFS.

Douglas Murray does an OJ-tease:

Does male privilege really exist? I did not used to think so. But in recent years, I’ve come to realise that not only might it exist, but that, at least in one respect, I may also benefit from it. That is, I have the privilege of being able to write about certain contentious issues without being singled out and demonised for doing so.

Quite.

On gender, for instance, as he goes on to say. He can be critical, women not so much.

After all, countless female authors have written articles expressing scepticism towards the transgender movement — many of them more moderate than my own. Yet almost every time, I have watched in horror as online and offline mobs are stirred up against them and not me. Julie Bindel, Kathleen Stock, Selina Todd, JK Rowling, Abigail Shrier, Helen Joyce — some of these women have been subjected to physical assault; the rest threatened with it.

Some women get hauled off to jail, some get summoned by the police, some lose their jobs, some get bullied by major institutions, and all who speak up get shunned and ostracized.

Another of the things that all these attempted witch-hunts have in common is that they are orchestrated by a small number of highly motivated activists who behave as they do precisely because they are so deliriously certain that they are on the right side. And no one is more certain in this regard than the YouTuber Owen Jones.

There is much laughter at “the YouTuber” because of course that’s not how OJ would describe himself.

[S]o high on certainty is Jones that he consistently uses his considerable social media platform to denounce “transphobes”, who invariably end up being women.

He doesn’t actually mean “invariably,” because in the next paragraph he admits that OJ does also go after the occasional man, including Murray himself.

But none of this bothers me. What does bother me is that he was one of the people — along with the very weird gays at a pseudo-publication Pink News — who has repeatedly tried to destroy JK Rowling’s reputation after the country’s most successful author had the temerity to say that women exist. Jones, Pink News and others consistently suggested that Rowling had said things she had not said, deploying one of the nastiest tactics of this inquisition. They pretended that rather than expressing a view they disagreed with — and that Rowling had every right to hold — she was, in fact, attacking trans people.

It’s what they do. They translate “men can’t become women” to “transphobia.” Period, end of discussion. Simple well-understood facts become a form of hatred, and everything proceeds from there. It’s not a useful or intelligent way to navigate disagreement.

Jones did it to Suzanne Moore last year, and now…

There is now a pattern. This week, Jones targeted another exceptionally talented female writer, Sarah Ditum, for the same reason: she disagreed with him about trans issues.

But this time, people started to notice the trend. As the Left-wing journalist Helen Lewis — formerly of the New Statesman — observed, it is becoming increasingly clear that Jones only seems to go for female journalists. She pointed out that a male journalist recently wrote something similar to Ditum, and did so in the low-circulation New Statesman to boot, yet Jones did not organise a pile-on against him.

There’s just not the same frisson in doing it to a man.

According to Helen Lewis, a number of her mutual friends with Jones no longer speak to him because they believe he has become a bully. She also observed that Jones has spoken publicly about feeling like an outsider, and about the times he’s been the victim of abuse in the past.

If that’s true, one might expect Jones to act with more compassion. But self-reflection has never been his forte — as countless women are starting to discover.

Jones’s supply of compassion is reserved for trans women – who have the massive advantage of not actually being women, which women don’t have and thus are not deserving of Jones’s limited compassion.

Anyway don’t worry, OJ is working on his reply as we speak.

What can these crazy evil feminist women possibly mean?

So this is a thing, is it? People feeling that they “don’t fit” within some category or other, and thus needing to move to a different one, and thus having a right to order the rest of the world to “validate” them as being in that category as opposed to the one they were “assigned” to at birth? It works across all categories, does it?

Well, no, it doesn’t. We know that. Some categories can be exchanged for different ones, but others can’t. People can join some categories via choice or work or both, and others they can’t. People can become builders or doctors or poets or engineers; people can’t become rabbits or gods or Shakespeare or motorcycles.

This isn’t some evil conspiracy by feminists. We’re not big meanies who just won’t let men become women. It’s not our doing, it’s not our fault, any more than it’s our doing or fault that we are women.

I think Laurie Penny is the one who needs to explain. I think she needs to explain why she thinks sex can simply be swapped the way one might swap jackets with a friend.

Ron DeSantis seems to want to kill off most of the people who vote for him.

With the highly contagious Delta variant spreading, a state comprising little more than 6% of the US population was accounting for one in five of the country’s new cases, recording 50,997 in the three days to Tuesday, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

DeSantis says the spike is “seasonal” and opposes lockdowns or new restrictions. The Republican governor followed up his executive order banning mask mandates in schools by dismissed the burgeoning crisis in Florida’s hospitals as “media hysteria”.

So it’s hysteria to report the stats?

“Our hospitals are open for business. We’re not shutting down. We’re gonna have schools open. We’re protecting every Floridian’s job in this state, we are protecting people’s small businesses. These interventions have failed time and time again throughout this pandemic,” he said, referring to mask mandates.

Protecting jobs and small businesses won’t do anyone much good if most of the workers and business owners and customers and consumers die of Covid.

This is scary: Scientists spot warning signs of Gulf Stream collapse

That won’t be good at all.

It’s one of the main potential tipping points.

The research found “an almost complete loss of stability over the last century” of the currents that researchers call the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC). The currents are already at their slowest point in at least 1,600 years, but the new analysis shows they may be nearing a shutdown.

Such an event would have catastrophic consequences around the world, severely disrupting the rains that billions of people depend on for food in India, South America and West Africa; increasing storms and lowering temperatures in Europe; and pushing up the sea level in the eastern North America. It would also further endanger the Amazon rainforest and Antarctic ice sheets.

In other words most people (and animals) won’t survive. Global famine won’t be pretty.

Scientists are increasingly concerned about tipping points – large, fast and irreversible changes to the climate. Boers and his colleagues reported in May that a significant part of the Greenland ice sheet is on the brink, threatening a big rise in global sea level. Others have shown recently that the Amazon rainforest is nowemitting more CO2 than it absorbs, and that the 2020 Siberian heatwave led to worrying releases of methane.

The world may already have crossed a series of tipping points, according to a 2019 analysis, resulting in “an existential threat to civilisation”. A major report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, due on Monday, is expected to set out the worsening state of the climate crisis.

And we still won’t do anything about it.

H/t Brian M.

Open Democracy wrings its open democratic hands over the tragedy of a man who identifies as a woman being deselected as a candidate for office.

Kathryn Bristow was named on 8 March as a Green Party candidate for the UK’s 2021 local government elections – the first openly trans woman to be put forward by a political party in Bristol City. But less than two weeks later the party formally suspended her and selected another candidate, who was not trans, to run in her place.

Here’s the thing: political parties should not be putting trans women forward for political office, because trans women are simply men (who call themselves women), and its women who need more representation, not men, no matter what they call themselves. Naming yet another man as a candidate for office is not a progressive milestone just because he “identifies as” a woman.

Bristow said she repeatedly asked the party to review its suspension decision in time for her to run in the local government elections, but it failed to do so.

“Having the chance to be a councillor meant so much to me, and it being taken away was a lot,” she told openDemocracy. “I got into politics to help people, that’s why I wanted to be a councillor […] to help local residents.”

But the same applies to women. If Bristow were really a woman he would understand that.

She described worsening mental health symptoms and “feelings of helplessness” since her suspension: “Things have been getting better lately, but it’s still a massive hit to my sense of well-being.”

See: women, passim.

“Being the first openly trans woman to be selected as a candidate by a political party for Bristol City elections had great importance not only to me, but also to the trans community,” Bristow explained in her court claim.

But also to the women’s community, who are seeing our few gains disappearing into the pockets of men who claim to be women.

A member of the LGBTIQA+ Greens, who spoke to openDemocracy on condition of anonymity, said the regional council “have huge questions to answer about their decision-making and whether or not they’re unfairly targeting inclusive people”.

Wut? What does “targeting inclusive people” mean?

In December 2020, Bristow was elected co-chair of Green Party Women (a party subgroup that represents the priorities of women party members), prompting what the LGBTIQ news website PinkNews described as a “transphobic backlash“ including from “a very small number of people” in the party. In an official statement at the time, the Green Party said its support for trans rights was “unequivocal”.

Yes those oh so unreasonable people who think chairs of Green Party Women should be women. Why is it that these stupid bitches don’t want men taking everything women have? Are they demon-possessed, or what?

A Green Party spokesperson told openDemocracy that they “do not comment on individual disciplinary matters”, but added: “The Green Party recognises that trans men are men, trans women are women, and that non-binary identities exist and are valid.”

That’s sad, because trans women are men, trans men are women, and “non-binary identities” mean nothing at all.

Joan Smith has a must-read piece at the Guardian about the often overlooked connection between violence against women and terrorist violence.

Five years ago, I began to notice that the perpetrators of some of the worst terrorist attacks had something in common. A high proportion shared a history of assaulting wives, girlfriends and other female relatives, sometimes involving a whole series of victims, long before they attacked total strangers.

It’s so obvious once she points it out, isn’t it. Of course they do. What do we so often see in angry men? That they love to turn their anger in the direction of women. But it needs to be spelled out explicitly so that law enforcement gets it and acts accordingly. Joan (who is a fucking superhero by the way) has made that happen.

She cites some examples from 2016 and 2017 (do read the whole piece).

There were striking similarities between the histories of Darren Osborne, the rightwing extremist who drove a van into worshippers leaving a mosque in north London, and Khalid Masood, the Islamist who staged an attack on Westminster Bridge. Both men had criminal records for violent offences – and both had abused women.

Officially they were enemies – a right-winger who attacked random Muslims and an Islamist who attacked random walkers on a bridge – but they were bros underneath.

I thought these cases challenged conventional wisdom about terrorism, which holds that it is all about ideology. Many fatal terrorist attacks actually appeared to be an escalation of violence that had been going on, sometimes for years, against members of the perpetrator’s family. I was convinced that the police and MI5 needed to change the way they assessed the risk posed by suspects, treating a history of domestic violence as a very significant red flag.

When I raised this with the authorities, however, I encountered scepticism and disbelief. So I decided to write a book, using published sources to piece together a woeful catalogue of men who had humiliated, beaten and sexually assaulted women long before they became notorious as terrorists. It was published in 2019 and this time senior figures at counter-terrorism policing and the Home Office listened.

See what I mean? Super hero.

The Home Office commissioned research on “adults and children who had caused concern to teachers, social workers and family members because of a possible vulnerability to radicalisation (V2R).” The results are not yet published but Joan has seen them and calls them stunning.

Almost 40% of adult referrals had a history of domestic abuse either as perpetrators, witnesses or victims – or a combination of all three. This is likely to be an underestimate, given that domestic violence is one of the most under-reported crimes, but it provides some idea of prevalence for the first time. The comparable figure for children is 30%, another likely underestimate because under-16s were not routinely questioned about domestic abuse in the home.

Again – one feels “of course” but Joan actually got officialdom to do the research.

As I expected, the link is visible across ideologies, from Islamists and rightwing extremists to the fifth of the sample where no known ideology was identified. This confirms my theory that terrorism is at least as much about male violence as ideology, suggesting that angry young men are attracted to extremist ideas that appear to “justify” their grievances.

So now that they know misogynist violence can be a warning sign for real violence [sarcasm alert] maybe law enforcement could start to take it seriously. Maybe.

The Project Starlight report rightly includes a raft of recommendations, calling for much wider awareness of the link between violent extremism and a history of domestic violence. “All counter-terrorism case officers should consider checking for potential links to a domestic abuse-related incident,” it says.

But this may not be straightforward when so few incidents lead to convictions. A recent report revealed that three-quarters of domestic abuse cases reported to the police in England were closed without the perpetrator being charged. Some organisations have come up with welcome innovations – Croydon in south London, for instance, has a specialist social worker sitting on Channel panels, leading to the disclosure of previously unsuspected domestic abuse in the history of V2R referrals.

But the Cinderella status of crimes against women can no longer be tolerated. The connection between private and public violence is now crystal clear – and the cost of continuing to ignore it is way too high.

Joan Smith is the author of Home Grown: How Domestic Violence Turns Men Into Terrorists and co-chair of the mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls board

Share the piece with everyone you know.

A new scam, not radically different from the old scams.

On August 4, two emails regarding “OFFICIAL TRUMP CARDS” were sent by Save America, a joint fundraising committee of Save America and the Make America Great Again PAC.

Each showed four designs and spoke of Trump’s desire for recipients to decide which one should be chosen.

But what are Trump cards? What do they get you?

I think the answer is that they’re just pieces of cardboard with some words on them. They don’t get you anything.

One included a direct message from former President Trump, in which he said: “We are launching our OFFICIAL TRUMP CARDS soon, and my team asked me to select the design. I’ve always said the only voice that matters is YOURS, which is why I want YOU to be the one to pick our brand new card.

“The card you select will be carried by Patriots all around the Country. They will be a sign of your dedicated support to our movement to SAVE AMERICA, and I’m putting my full trust in you.

“I’ll look for your response first thing tomorrow, Friend. Will I see it?”

This card will be carried by Patriots for what purpose? They will be a sign to whom?

According to another mailing they’re special.

“We’re about to launch our Official Trump Cards, which will be reserved for President Trump’s STRONGEST supporters, and we have some very exciting news to share with you,” a message from Save America read.

STRONGEST meaning gave the most $$$ to Trump? Packs the biggest guns? Breaks the most laws?

“We recently met with the President in his Florida office and showed him four designs. Originally we were planning on releasing just one design, but when President Trump saw the cards on his desk, he said, ‘These are BEAUTIFUL. We should let the American People decide – they ALWAYS know best!'”

Within each email people could click on the designs to select which they preferred. Doing so then took them to a donation page where the selected card was shown and “RESPONSE RECORDED!” written.

Can you imagine the thrill??!

After clicking the selection, there was then a form calling for donations to the Save America Joint Fundraising Committee.

The emails did not detail other specific uses for the cards. It was also not specified how they could be obtained or would be allocated. Newsweek has contacted the office of the former president for comment on the cards and their potential usage.

Isn’t that just so radical left, wanting to know what the cards are for and how people can get them and petty shit like that? Make America Great Again!

Each of the proposed cards [was] deep red and gold in color. They all had Trump’s signature on, as well as a space for name and an ID number.

Two featured eagle designs, another had a plain background and the other had a U.S. flag in the background. Each said “Official Trump Card” and was emblazoned with the Save America logo.

One of the card designs had a typo which read “offical” rather than official.

Cool. Nice mashup of offal and fecal.

They don’t scream “Nazi” at all. No no.

Woe that too late repents.

Governor Asa Hutchinson on Tuesday expressed regret for signing Act 1002 into Arkansas law. The new law bans the state and local officials from enacting any mask mandates.

Any other laws like that on the books in Arkansas? Bans on calling the fire department when the house goes up in flames? Bans on vaccinating children? Bans on teaching toddlers not to run across the street? Bans on ducking when someone throws a brick?

During a press conference, Hutchinson answered questions about why he signed the proposal into law. He said that when he initially approved it a few months ago, both COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations were at a “low point” in Arkansas and were declining.

That’s a stupid reason.

He is concerned that since students ages 12 and under are not approved to receive the COVID-19 vaccinations they could be put at risk of contracting the virus when school returns in the fall.

Oh never mind that, it’s much more important to play these idiotic murderous games with the population’s health.

How romantic.

He asked WHAT????

Are you a member of the nation in question, asks Morgane Oger, a man who pretends to be a woman. Yo, “Morgane,” are YOU a member of the nation of women? No, you’re not, so you should stop trying to bully us into saying you are.

Guess what: like all groups facing oppression, we – women – loathe performative allyship, to say nothing of actually pretending to be one of us.