It turns out that retaliating against witnesses is a crime.

The lawyer who represented Richard Nixon after he left the White House, William Jeffress, says Trump retaliatory action against Don McGahn could land him in prison for ten years. https://t.co/5E2V15mojp pic.twitter.com/1QpKKb77mX

— PoliticusUSA (@politicususa) April 25, 2019

Trump fired McGahn’s firm. If it can be established that he did it to retaliate, that could be ten years in the slammer.

More childish “No no no I won’t and you can’t make me!!” from the Trump House.

The White House will refuse to allow senior adviser Stephen Miller to testify before the House Oversight Committee, according to a letter obtained by The Washington Post.

Oversight panel Chairman Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) received a letter from the White House counsel Wednesday denying his request that Miller come before the committee to testify on the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

…

Few expected Miller to comply, given precedent that White House staff traditionally do not testify.

But Miller, Democrats worry, has had more power than a traditional White House staffer, particularly over immigration.

Miller was behind a controversial proposal to bus undocumented migrants to the jurisdictions of political foes of the president, Department of Homeland Security officials told The Post. He also pushed the policy that led to migrant children being separated from their parents after they crossed the southern border illegally, even if they were seeking asylum.

And Miller was reportedly the driving force behind the shake-up of the Department of Homeland Security at its highest levels, making room for the White House to install officials who will do Trump’s bidding despite concerns about legality.

But hey, he’s staff, not a Senate-confirmed official, so they can’t make him talk.

Trump admits he told McGahn to fire Mueller.

As has been incorrectly reported by the Fake News Media, I never told then White House Counsel Don McGahn to fire Robert Mueller, even though I had the legal right to do so. If I wanted to fire Mueller, I didn’t need McGahn to do it, I could have done it myself. Nevertheless,….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 25, 2019

It’s not clear if he meant to admit it, but admit it he did. He says the Fake New incorrectly reported that never told McGahn to fire Muller, so he’s saying he did tell McGahn to fire Mueller.

Not that we ever doubted it.

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on In Congress where it’s very partisan — obviously very partisan.

On a broader note: I’m getting really really tired of this constant use of “partisan” as a dismissive sneer. Not by people here, I mean in the discourse generally. Centrist political pundits are the worst for this.

In practically every other country on earth, it’s understood, accepted, and even appreciated that (1) voters have differing ideologies and policy preferences; and (2) political parties are a logical, sensible, and inevitable way to organize along ideological and policy lines and get things done. Of course, it’s generally acknowledged that there are times to set aside partisanship and come together in a crisis, or to call out corruption and wrongdoing within your own party, but the general idea of political parties isn’t treated as some filthy shameful practice.

Only in America (as far as I can tell), is that the case, thanks to the Founding Fathers having a bug up their asses about political parties, and relatedly hoping that America would somehow be “spared” that vulgar practice. As a result, American political institutions are designed to produce gridlock under fairly mild conditions. The only reason shit ever got done, aside from brief intervals of one-party dominance, is that for huge stretches of history, American parties were these weird coalitions of ideologically incoherent groups, where northern lefties and racist southern reactionaries would belong to the same party. And so you could peel off some liberal Republicans to support liberal policies, or some Southern Democrats to support conservative policies. And yet those were the supposed “good old days” — when parties really were more like the Red Team and the Blue Team rather than any principled differences in policy.

But of course we’re going to have to play this game again, where the eventual 2020 Dem nominee has to pay lip service to how he or she will magically find a way to get Republican Congresspeople to support his or her policies. Joe Biden is particularly going to make me nauseous with tales of the good old days when he would hang out and drink with GOP senators, because you can’t let a little thing like opposition to civil rights get in the way of enjoying the old boys’ club! And Chris Matthews will get all weepy at the thought of Reagan and Tip O’Neill coming together over a glass of whiskey, and oh, how Irish eyes were smiling, and can’t we go back to those halcyon days….

Self-pity reaches an apotheosis.

Rep. Steve King said Tuesday that his recent ostracism by House colleagues for defending white supremacy has made him identify with the tribulations a more famous leader experienced some 2,000 years ago: Jesus Christ.

Right? Remember Fred 11:13, where the disciples all tell Jesus he’s a racist and Jesus cries? It’s like that.

The exchange took place at a town hall event in Iowa during which an attendee stood up to tell the nine-term Republican that in her view, “Christianity is really being persecuted, and it’s starting right here in the United States.”

“Persecuted”=not being allowed to execute atheists and mouthy women and homoseckshuals.

In his response, King told her that after being formally rebuked by the House and stripped of his committee assignments, he had gleaned insight into what Jesus went through before the crucifixion, referring to his House colleagues as “accusers.”

“It’s been, for all that I’ve been through, it seems even strange for me to say it, but I’m at a certain peace, and it’s because of a lot of prayers for me,” he said. “And when I had to step down to the floor of the House of Representatives and look up at those 400-and-some accusers — you know, we’ve just passed through Easter and Christ’s Passion — and I have a better insight into what he went through for us, partly because of that experience.”

Was it about the fig tree? Did 400-some accusers yell at Jesus because of the fig tree?

The next day as they were leaving Bethany, Jesus was hungry. Seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to find out if it had any fruit. When he reached it, he found nothing but leaves, because it was not the season for figs. Then he said to the tree, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again”. And his disciples heard him say it.

…

In the morning, as they went along, they saw the fig tree withered from the roots. Peter remembered and said to Jesus, “Rabbi, look! The fig tree you cursed has withered!” “Have faith in God,” Jesus answered.

And his disciples said, “Shit, man, you could have just kicked a little dirt around and yelled, you didn’t have to ruin the whole tree. It’s not the tree’s fault that figs don’t ripen in November.” And Jesus was furious, and he wouldn’t talk to them for at least an hour.

“I’m grateful that we are the people we are and we not only — we have a strong Christian ethic here and a high percentage of people that are true believers, we have all of that going for us — but it’s also in our culture,” he said. “And we don’t think about it very often, how much the Christian faith echoes through who we are as a people.”

Which is white supremacists? They’re going with that?

King was roundly rebuked in January when he asked, in an interview with The New York Times, how terms like “white nationalist” and “white supremacist” became “offensive.” The House overwhelmingly passed a resolution condemning his comments, with King voting in favor of the measure as well.

The congressman has a history of using racist and denigrating rhetoric about minority groups and immigrants, and has amplified the voices of personalities on the right-wing fringe which much of that rhetoric can be traced to.

They’re going with that.

Josephine Livingstone at the New Republic apparently thinks that people are simply not allowed to discuss or write about what is meant by “trans” and how we know any of it is true and subjects of that nefarious kind.

Jesse Singal, who has gained notoriety on the left for his frequent tweeting and writing on trans issues, says he just wants to talk. When readers get angry with him, which happens often, he sees them as curtailing a productive conversation that he has prompted in the spirit of a free and vigorous exchange of ideas.

How dare he. No, what we’re supposed to do is find the Correct trans people on Twitter, find out what they say, memorize it, and point to it if the subject ever comes up. How do we know they have it right? Never you mind; we’re not permitted to ask questions of that type.

But if there were a neutral space online for this imagined debate about, say, trans children, its location would certainly not be Jesse Singal’s Twitter feed. There’s a reason that we have a saying about not dignifying an idea with a response.

But anyway we’re not supposed to have a debate. We’re just supposed to find out what the revealed truth is, and then shut up. If we wonder how anyone knows all this, we must keep it to ourselves.

Singal’s lamentations elicit a very particular weariness among trans readers. His logic is circular, and obsessive. In returning to the subject repeatedly, Singal seems intent on cracking some truth about the trans experience that is not accessible to him, as if provoked by that very inaccessibility. And this is the epistemological challenge that trans culture lays at cis culture’s doorstep: You must trust me to know my own identity. To extend full humanity to trans citizens means marking the limits of cis knowledge.

Ok, dropping the sarcasm now. That’s not an “epistemological challenge”; it’s a command to accept narcissistic bullshit without question. There is no such imperative. No, we are not required to trust anyone to know her or his “own identity” if her or his claims about said “identity” are implausible. We don’t have to extend people in general that kind of sweeping trust, because people can lie and people can be mistaken, yes even about their own identities. Of course they can; self-knowledge is subject to warping by self-interest, self-protection, self-love, to name just three obvious distorters. So no. That’s one reason the claims about trans identity are so contested and so contestable: they really entirely on subjective understanding of a magical self, and that’s not a strong basis for genuine knowledge.

That fact is clearly politically anathema to a lot of people right now, but that doesn’t make it any less true. The fact that the New Republic employs someone (Livingstone is a staff writer) who can’t see that is kind of embarrassing.

(There is also, to repeat, the simple fact that people can lie – yes, even about their “own identity.”)

One of the reasons that trans skeptics get so riled by this demand is that it implies that their empathy and their intellect have borders. It also denies the universality of human experience, and undermines the notion of a pure discourse where only reason prevails. Ironically, nothing makes those borders starker than the Singals of this world patrolling the edges of a culture war, demanding that their opponents meet them at the fence for a healthy conversation.

Can you figure out what that’s supposed to mean? Because I can’t.

Maybe we should just trust it.

Trump is justifying his defiance of Congress by saying it’s “partisan.”

In an interview with The Washington Post, Trump said that complying with congressional requests was unnecessary after the White House cooperated with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe of Russian interference and the president’s own conduct in office.

“There is no reason to go any further, and especially in Congress where it’s very partisan — obviously very partisan,” Trump said.

Trump’s comments came as the White House made it clear that it plans to broadly defy requests for information from Capitol Hill, moving the two branches of government closer to a constitutional collision.

…

In his interview with The Post, Trump maintained that the White House Counsel’s Office has not “made a final, final decision” about whether it will formally assert executive privilege and try to block congressional testimony. But he said he opposes cooperation with House Democrats, who he claimed are trying to score political points against him.

“I don’t want people testifying to a party, because that is what they’re doing if they do this,” Trump said.

It’s almost funny, to see Trump complaining about “partisanship” and testifying to a party. If it weren’t for partisanship and party-first, Trump would have been dead meat within days of taking office. For that matter he would never have been elected, because most of the Republicans would have campaigned hard against him. It’s only because they’re complete party hacks that they keep defending this execrable shell of a man no matter what he does.

Tennessee is going all out on the open, shameless voter-suppression thing.

After enormous black turnout in the 2018 midterms, Republicans are advancing a bill that would penalize voter registration drives.

Gotta suppress that black turnout so that we can elect more proudly racist white people who will support Trump in all his crimes.

The Tennessee Legislature will soon vote on a bill that is deliberately intended to suppress black turnout, even though Tennessee is among the five states with the lowest voter participation.

The bill in the senate would create some of the most aggressive regulations on large-scale voter registration in the nation — like civil penalties for groups that unintentionally file incomplete voter registration forms. It would impose criminal sanctions on organizers who don’t attend training sessions run by local officials and on groups that fail to mail in voter registration forms in a short 10-day window.

Until the Shelby ruling, federal law – the Voting Rights Act – would have blocked all that. The Shelby ruling kneecapped the VRA, and this shit is the result.

This is a clear attack on the successful efforts to mobilize black voters during the 2018 midterm elections. Close to 90,000 black voters were registered by the Tennessee Black Voter Project, led by the activist Tequila Johnson and the Equity Alliance, which partner with my organization, the Black Voters Matter Fund.

…

[B]lack-led, community-based organizations throughout Tennessee have been registering more voters, turning them out to vote and winning more elections for progressive issues and candidates. The fact that racial progress here has resulted in a white backlash is consistent with Tennessee history. Tennessee’s attack on black-led voter registration is also an escalation of similar strategies seen in Georgia. While he was secretary of state, Brian Kemp aggressively pursued criminal investigations against voter registration groups like the New Georgia Project, founded by Stacey Abrams.

The bill isn’t law yet. Fingers crossed it never will be.

Amnesty International reports Saudi Arabia executed 37 people today.

The execution of 37 people convicted on “terrorism” charges marks an alarming escalation in Saudi Arabia’s use of the death penalty, said Amnesty International today. Among those put to death was a young man who was convicted of a crime that took place while he was under the age of 18.

“Today’s mass execution is a chilling demonstration of the Saudi Arabian authorities callous disregard for human life. It is also yet another gruesome indication of how the death penalty is being used as a political tool to crush dissent from within the country’s Shi’a minority,” said Lynn Maalouf Middle East Research Director at Amnesty International.

The majority of those executed were Shi’a men who were convicted after sham trials that violated international fair trial standards which relied on confessions extracted through torture.

They include 11 men who were convicted of spying for Iran and sentenced to death after a grossly unfair trial. At least 14 others executed were convicted of violent offences related to their participation in anti-government demonstrations in Saudi Arabia’s Shi’a majority Eastern Province between 2011 and 2012. The 14 men were subjected to prolonged pre-trial detention and told the court that they were tortured or otherwise ill-treated during their interrogation in order to have ‘confessions’ extracted from them.

Also among those executed is Abdulkareem al-Hawaj – a young Shi’a man who was arrested at the age of 16 and convicted of offences related to his involvement in anti-government protests. Under international law, the use of the death penalty against people who were under the age of 18 at the time of the crime is strictly prohibited.

Saudi Arabia, like Trump, has nothing but contempt for international law.

The Trumpies Just Say No.

The White House plans to fight a subpoena issued by the House Judiciary Committee for former White House counsel Donald McGahn to testify, according to people familiar with the matter, setting up another showdown in the aftermath of the special counsel report.

The Trump administration also plans to oppose other requests from House committees for the testimony of current and former aides about actions in the White House described in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report, according to two people familiar with internal thinking.

Planning, or plotting. It can’t be called thinking.

McGahn was mentioned more than 150 times in Mueller’s report and provided damaging accounts to investigators about how the president pressured him to oust the special counsel and then pushed him to publicly deny the episode.

But Congress can’t investigate that, because PreZiDent Trump is ABOVE THE LAW.

Public testimony from McGahn could create a spectacle that would parallel the June 1973 testimony of President Richard Nixon’s former White House Counsel John Dean, whose live televised appearance before a Senate committee painted a vivid portrait for the country of the White House coverup of the Watergate burglary.

Wait a second. McGahn is a private citizen now. He doesn’t work for Trump any more. He can just testify voluntarily, can’t he?

Ah well, they answer that in the next paragraphs.

People close to McGahn, who were not authorized to speak publicly, said McGahn is “following the process” and working with the White House on his next steps, despite Trump’s public and private anger about his former White House counsel’s prominence in the Mueller report.

“He’s not eager to testify. He’s not reluctant. He got a subpoena. It compels him to testify. But there are some countervailing legal reasons that might prevent that,” said one person close to McGahn, who requested anonymity to describe private discussions. “He doesn’t want to be in contempt of Congress nor does he want to be in contempt of his ethical obligations and legal obligations as a former White House official.”

How about his moral obligations to the country and the world? Trump is a reckless criminal running amok. I think that outweighs putative “ethical obligations as a former White House official.”

Throwdown.

The House Oversight Committee moved Tuesday to hold a former White House personnel security director in contempt of Congress for failing to appear at a hearing investigating alleged lapses in White House security clearance procedures.

Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said he would consult with the House counsel and members of the panel about scheduling a vote on contempt for former White House personnel security director Carl Kline. At the instruction of the White House, Kline failed to show up for scheduled testimony on security clearances.

The move marks a dramatic escalation of tensions between Congress and the Trump White House, which is increasingly resisting requests for information from Capitol Hill.

“The White House and Mr. Kline now stand in open defiance of a duly authorized congressional subpoena with no assertion of any privilege of any kind by President Trump,” Cummings said in a statement. “Based on these actions, it appears that the President believes that the Constitution does not apply to his White House, that he may order officials at will to violate their legal obligations, and that he may obstruct attempts by Congress to conduct oversight.”

This is not a monarchy. Let’s hope it’s not a dictatorship.

Even in The Baffler…

Certainly not all academic philosophers are politely liberal defenders of tolerance. Recently, a small but vocal minority of philosophers have taken it upon themselves to defend a view that, it seems, they strongly feel is right—and to hell with anyone who sees things differently.

What? Some people have “taken it upon themselves to defend a view that, it seems, they strongly feel is right”? Well what else are they supposed to do? Is there some social rule against defending views we think are right? Should we be defending views we think are wrong, instead? Or should be be keeping quiet? Or should we be asking for permission first? (But from whom?) I suspect it’s not an accident that most of the people doing this “taking it upon themselves” to defend views are women while the author, Tom Whyman, is not. (The aptness of the surname is no fault of mine.)

Anyway, clearly he has carefully cued us to find these views reprehensible before we even know what they are.

Faced with an alleged PC consensus that proclaims the right of trans women to identify as women, and trans men to identify as men, these scholars have adopted a position they call “gender critical feminism.”

No, that’s not accurate. Getting it wrong in the very first sentence; that’s not auspicious. The issue isn’t people’s right to “identify as” anything they like; the issue is forcing other people to treat the “identifying as” as dispositive. You can identify as the Pillsbury dough boy if you like, but that doesn’t mean you can force anyone else to believe in your identity.

They’ve become known to their detractors as “trans-exclusionary radical feminists” (TERFs). In short: they think that sex is a matter of biology, not a “social construction”; they also believe that the interests of cis and trans women can radically diverge—so much so, indeed, that they contend that giving trans women access to women’s spaces often, if not always, constitutes a physical threat. (Trans men, by contrast, are usually just “misguided” lesbians forced to transition by the woke mainstream.) For obvious reasons, people with gender critical views are often accused of being transphobic.

Note the complete failure to explain how and why giving trans women access to women’s spaces can not possibly ever constitute a physical threat, and even to admit that he’s not explaining – note the breezy, careless, confident skipping right past that point, without pausing to consider for instance how women can know who is a trans woman and who is faking in order to spy on or assault women. Note that and then marvel at the “for obvious reasons” that precedes the “transphobic” smear.

Meanwhile, a guest post on Daily Nous (the other big philosophy blog, alongside Leiter Reports) took umbrage at a piece written by trans woman philosopher Rachel McKinnon in which (during, as it happens, a symposium on Jason Stanley’s How Propaganda Works) she used the TERF acronym—a coinage that gender critical feminists often insist is a “slur.” This is largely because it has been employed—and forcefully so at times—by trans opponents of their views: people who, to be clear, comprise a marginalized group who might understandably feel threatened by the implications of gender critical arguments.

Unlike mere stupid commonplace women, who have no right at all to feel threatened by being called “TERFs” or bullied for saying anything about women’s rights.

One more Guardian piece on Carl “Sargon of Akkad” Benjamin, this one from a month ago:

Ukip is expected to choose a controversial YouTube activist, who has been accused of triggering rape threats against a Labour MP, as a candidate if Britain takes part in the European elections, it has emerged.

A party selection process this weekend is likely to confirm the candidacy of Carl Benjamin, a self-styled free speech activist who has been banned from Twitter and some other platforms because of his views, Ukip sources said.

Carl Benjamin is not a “free speech activist.” That’s just a screen. It’s not “free speech activism” to spew misogynist venom at women and xenophobic venom at pesky foreigners. It’s just spewing venom.

Benjamin, who calls himself Sargon of Akkad after the ruler of a Mesopotamian empire, first became known for his anti-feminist commentary, and has also expressed controversial opinions on immigration, race and other issues.

In 2016 he tweeted “I wouldn’t even rape you” to the Labour MP Jess Phillips, in a message featuring the tag #feminismiscancer. Phillips said she subsequently received 600 rape threats.

Benjamin, who is among a trio of social media-based activists who joined Ukip last year, has previously used racially charged language, accusing alt-right critics during one live web interview of “acting like a bunch of niggers”. He added: “You think white people act like this? White people are meant to be polite and respectful to one another.”

Not free speech activism. Just common or garden shit-talking, bullying, race-baiting, bullying. Not free speech activism and not classical liberalism, either.

Originally a comment by Acolyte of Sagan on A history of oppressing a marginalized group.

Which of the following would most likely have a genuine claim of being oppressed?

a) A male-bodied, female-identifying person being told that, no, you cannot take a role of rape counselor to women and girls at this rape crisis centre. Women and girls tend not to want to share the most intimate details of their abuse with any stranger, but more-so with a male-bodied stranger. They are also understandably likely have a fear of male-bodied people, but fear and trust do not tend to go hand-in-hand, and a counselor must have the trust of the person being counseled in order to be effective.

b) Women and girls being told that, yes, they must accept a male-bodied, female-identifying person as their rape counselor at this rape crisis centre. It doesn’t matter that they’re unwilling to share intimate details of their abuse with a male-bodied stranger, and may not trust a male-bodied counselor sufficiently to be able to recieve effective counseling, because that attitude is just bigotry and genital hang-ups; they are the problem, not the male-bodied person wanting to counsel them when they’re at their most vulnerable.

Same question.

a) A male-bodied, female-identifying person being told that, no, you do not qualify for a place at this refuge for women suffering domestic abuse. There is a strict no men policy in place here because the women we shelter are, in general, scared to be in close proximity to men and this refuge is a safe-space for abused women.

b) Women fleeing domestic abuse being told that they must share this shelter with male-bodied people despite being scared to be in close proximity to men, and if they don’t accept that condition they must go elsewhere.

Karellen, your initial post equated trans people with women and with people of colour, but there is no equivalence between trans people and the latter two groups. Both women and people of colour are biologically and physically women and/or people of colour. Their status as women or people of colour are undeniable, well-defined and provable facts. A persons’ sex or colour is clearly identifiable at birth and is neither reliant on nor changeable by an individual’s sense of self. Transgender is solely a personal, psychological phenomenon, its existence being totally reliant on the individual’s sense of self and liable to change as the individual’s sense of self changes over time.

To conflate transgender people with women and with people of colour is a disingenuous tactic in the same vein as the conflation of transgender and intersex by the use of ‘assigned at birth’. It is only a superficially convincing argument, one that falls apart as soon as one gives it more than superficial thought.

Just as with religion, there’s a very good reason why trans activists do not welcome discussion and debate over their claims, demanding straightforward compliance instead, and that reason is that the claims tend not to stand up to scrutiny.

Last June the Guardian reported that Ukip had welcomed a trio of Twitter trolls, Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad) being one.

Ukip has allowed a trio of social media activists linked to the “alt-right” to join the party.

The arrival of Paul Joseph Watson, Mark Meechan – better known to YouTube viewers as Count Dankula – and Carl Benjamin, who posts videos as Sargon of Akkad, will alarm some senior Ukip members already concerned at the struggling party’s direction under Gerard Batten.

…

All three are vocal on social media, with large followings and often controversial views. Watson, who has 875,000 Twitter followers, is a senior editor at Infowars, the US-based website that deals partly in conspiracy theories, such as arguing that the Sandy Hook primary school shooting was a hoax.

Watson describes himself as a “classical liberal”, but mainly offers posts condemning immigration and Islam, and seeking to bait leftwingers.

“Classical liberal” in the sense of xenophobic and bullying; ok.

A spokesman for the group Hope Not Hate, which monitors far-right groups among others said: “There are attempts afoot to forge an alliance between extreme figures who have made their names online, those involved in electoral politics, and those out on the streets, around an anti-Muslim and pro- ‘free speech’ agenda.

“In following the path he’s chosen, Batten is leading Ukip down a dangerous route, and the acceptance of figures such as Watson is further evidence of this.”

Oh don’t worry, they’re classical liberals.

Twitter troll hits the big time – Carl Benjamin aka Sargon of Akkad is a Ukipper.

A leading Ukip candidate for the European elections argued that feminism was responsible for a rise in the number of men carrying out mass murders, because the killers felt disenfranchised and “out of options”, it has emerged.

Carl Benjamin, a social media activist who previously tweeted “I wouldn’t even rape you” to the Labour MP Jess Phillips, argued in a now-deleted YouTube video that feminism had caused male mental health to deteriorate, prompting more mass killings.

“This is what feminism has wrought – a generation of men who do not know what to do, who are being demonised for what they are,” said Benjamin, who uses the name Sargon of Akkad on social media.

“Before your stupid social justice feminist bullshit, it didn’t happen on this scale. It’s crazy – this is a disease of the modern age,” Benjamin said in the 2014 video, recorded after the murder of six people in California that year by a 22-year-old man who said the killings were a response to women rejecting him sexually.

“You are responsible for perpetuating it, by disenfranchising these poor fucking guys who don’t have any options left,” Benjamin said.

Benjamin is second on Ukip’s regional list for MEP candidates in the south-west of England should next month’s European parliament elections take place in the UK.

He was among two candidates paraded by Ukip’s leader, Gerard Batten, at a fractious press conference last Thursday, at which Benjamin responded angrily to journalists’ questions about the tweet to Phillips, saying he was being accused of “crimes against political correctness”. Phillips has said she received 600 rape threats after Benjamin’s tweet.

Oh yes, it’s just crazy PoLitical CorRectness to think men shouldn’t use social media to bully women.

“The question you and all of your stupid fucking feminist cultists need to be asking is, why are these men becoming misogynists in the first place? What is this feminist-run society doing to them that is causing them to go insane?” he says.

He adds: “When someone takes the option of absolute, insanely last resort, you have to wonder what kind of system is producing them. And I tell you what, Laci, it is a fucking feminist system that’s doing this.”

The Guardian has asked Ukip to comment.