What was their first clue?

To Donald Trump, Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán is “fantastic,” Chinese leader Xi Jinping is “brilliant,” North Korea’s Kim Jong Un is “an OK guy,” and, most alarmingly, he allegedly said Adolf Hitler “did some good things,” a worldview that would reverse decades-old US foreign policy in a second term should he win November’s presidential election, multiple former senior advisers told CNN.

“He thought Putin was an OK guy and Kim was an OK guy — that we had pushed North Korea into a corner,” retired Gen. John Kelly, who served as Trump’s chief of staff, told me. “To him, it was like we were goading these guys. ‘If we didn’t have NATO, then Putin wouldn’t be doing these things.’”

No, he’d be doing much worse things.

The former president’s admiration for autocrats has been reported on before, but in comments by Trump recounted to me [Jim Sciutto] for my new book, “The Return of Great Powers,” out Tuesday, Kelly and others who served under Trump give new insight into why they warn that a man who consistently praises autocratic leaders opposed to US interests is ill-suited to lead the country in the Great Power clashes that could be coming, telling me they believe that the root of his admiration for these figures is that he envies their power.

“He views himself as a big guy,” John Bolton, who served as national security adviser under Trump, told me. “He likes dealing with other big guys, and big guys like Erdogan in Turkey get to put people in jail and you don’t have to ask anybody’s permission. He kind of likes that.”

In other words he’s that terrible combination: power-hungry and profoundly stupid.

“Trump believed in the power of his personal charisma and diplomacy,” recalled Matthew Pottinger, his deputy national security adviser, who was deeply involved in Trump’s meetings with North Korean leader Kim and Chinese President Xi. “He had almost unlimited faith in it. That was as true with Kim as it was with Xi — but also with allies too.”

What personal charisma would that be?

Trump and Orban agree to murder Ukraine.

Donald Trump “will not give a penny” to Ukraine if he is re-elected US president, the far-right Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, said after a controversial meeting with Trump in Florida.

“He will not give a penny in the Ukraine-Russia war,” Orbán told state media in Hungary on Sunday. “Therefore, the war will end, because it is obvious that Ukraine can not stand on its own feet.” According to Orbán, Trump has a “detailed plan” to end the Ukraine war, which began two years ago when Russia invaded.

Oh please. Trump has no detailed anything. It doesn’t take a detailed plan, all it takes is a Toddler No, and that’s all Trump has. And the plan is not to “end the war,” the plan is to allow Putin to devour Ukraine the way Trump devours a hamburger.

The US and its allies have supported Ukraine but further US aid is held up in Congress, having passed the Senate with bipartisan support only to be blocked in the House, which is controlled by far-right Trump allies.

They’re not even far right. They’re not even political. They’re just destroyers. Trash everything & give us money: that’s their “politics.”

Calling Trump “a man of peace”, Orbán said: “If the Americans don’t give money and weapons, along with the Europeans, the war is over. And if the Americans don’t give money, the Europeans alone can’t finance this war. And then the war is over.”

Peace shmeace. It’s not about “the war is over”; it’s about Putin wins and Ukraine is obliterated.

Despite facing 91 criminal charges and having suffered multimillion-dollar reverses in civil suits concerning his business affairs and a rape allegation a judge deemed “substantially true”, Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee.

And the US is a bitter degrading blight on the global landscape.

Trump said: “There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orbán. He’s fantastic, he’s a non-controversial figure because he says, ‘This is the way it’s going to be,’ and that’s the end of it. Right? He’s the boss. No, he’s a great leader.”

The profound understanding of democracy from the next “boss” of the US.

Wait, you mean Hamas aren’t the good guys? Are you sure? Did you check with them?

Arresting the victim part 3:

During the protest some activists were heard chanting “Zionist scum, off our streets” and several placards showed support for the Houthi militias in Yemen targeting ships going through the Red Sea.

One pro-Palestine activist on the march could be seen wearing a protective helmet and carrying a riot shield. The man, whose helmet was similar to those used by reporters in combat zones, paraded holding the riot shield with the slogan: “Resistance is justified when your land is occupied.”

One young woman held a placard that read: “One holocaust does not justify another,” in defiance of criticism that such comparisons are anti-Semitic, and another placard showed a bull depicting Gaza goring a person with a Star of David on their body saying: “Slaying of the beast.”

So no wonder the Met is protecting the pro-Palestine marchers and pushing their critics to the ground.

This isn’t new, sadly. It goes back at least as far as the fatwa on Rushdie. It goes back at least to the days when the BBC constantly platformed the Muslim Council of Britain instead of its many critics.

In a video of the incident, Mr Ghorbani is heard shouting, “Shame on you” as officers held him down before saying: “I wrote down Hamas is a terrorist organisation… but they arrested me.”

Mr Ghorbani, an IT professional, said that he had been assaulted by pro-Palestine protesters as he stood holding his sign objecting to Hamas, which is a banned terror group.

Well it may be a banned terror group but it’s also The Authentic Voice of the People, while its critics are nonconforming troublesome rabble.

“They attacked me from behind and hit me in the head,” he said. “They pushed me and told me Hamas is a protector of Palestine. The police destroyed my sign and told me that I had harassed someone in the protest and that is why they arrested me.

“They arrested me because someone who supports Hamas attacked me and I defended myself. After 10 minutes my friends showed them a video of what I was doing and they released me. The person who attacked me was not arrested.”

Because that person is The Authentic Voice of the People.

Remember how the police arrested and then “de-arrested” a guy who was protesting Hamas on Saturday? It’s not working out well for them.

A former Cabinet minister has accused the Metropolitan Police of “emboldening” the mob after a counter-protester carrying a sign saying “Hamas is terrorist” at a pro-Palestine rally was arrested.

Niyak Ghorbani, 38,  was pulled to the ground and handcuffed by officers after an incident close to the march through central London on Saturday. He was arrested over an allegation of assault but was later de-arrested after officers reviewed footage of the incident.

The Met is now facing calls to take action against a protester who Mr Ghorbani, an Iranian who lives in Balham, says assaulted him.

The Met is also being told off for “two-tier policing” aka different rules for different protests. It’s much like the trans thing: pro-trans ideologists can do no wrong while critics of trans ideology can do no right. If there’s a brawl, it is necessarily the fault of the ideology-dissenter.

Robert Jenrick, the former immigration minister, launched an attack on the Met for their handling of the incident and said that officers were failing to tackle “the mob” and putting free speech at risk.

“This shameful incident is the logical endpoint of consistently prioritising ‘community relations’ over even-handedly enforcing the law: the mob is emboldened and free-speech is threatened,” he said. “It’s a chilling inversion of what law-enforcement is about. Two-tier policing must end.”

Police said officers intervened to prevent a “breach of the peace” and the arrest was not over the placard but the Campaign Against Antisemitism said that the response was “outrageous” and disproportionate.

Sssshhhhhh. The Islamist communinny, like the trans communinny, can do no wrong. Critics of the communinny can do no right. This is the rule.

“Scotland will do it! Tell Scotland! Scotland will hit her for us!”

Trans rights activists are attempting to have JK Rowling arrested by Scottish police over “misgendering” after a complaint was dismissed in England.

Northumbria Police last week confirmed that it did not believe the Harry Potter author had committed a criminal offence by publicly calling India Willoughby, a transgender TV personality, a male.

Willoughby had gone to police claiming Rowling had “definitely committed a crime” by referring to the former Celebrity Big Brother contestant as male.

Willoughby is definitely a man, and a nasty aggressive bullying man at that.

The 58-year-old former newsreader has vowed to appeal against “their decision not to prosecute” and is to request a review of the decision.

His spite is a thing of wonder.

Scotland has a different legal system than [from] England, with a controversial hate crime law, which was passed by MSPs exactly three years ago on Monday, due to come into force on April 1.

Brilliant choice of date.

In a letter to Holyrood’s criminal justice committee, the Edinburgh-based policy analysis group Murray Blackburn Mackenzie (MBM) raised concerns about implementation of the new law, which creates a new offence of “stirring up hatred” against protected groups, including trans people.

…

“Despite a clear promise made in the Parliament, over the three years since the Act was passed, the government has done nothing to engage with those concerned about the impact of the Bill on freedom of expression on questions of sex and gender identity,” MBM said. “MSPs emphasised the importance of police training, but what’s happening there is still unknown. The whole process has been a black box of top-down, closed policy-making, that does not inspire confidence.”

That’s for damn sure.

Deutsche Welle on the opening of the Amsterdam Holocaust Museum:

Israeli President Isaac Herzog attended the opening of the National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam on Sunday. The museum tells the stories of some of the 102,000 Jews who were deported from the Netherlands and murdered in Nazi camps during the Holocaust in World War II. Three-quarters of Dutch Jews were among the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis.

Who were the Nazis? Members of a genocidal political movement in Germany. DW is to the Nazis as the Washington Post is to slavery. That’s a crude comparison, but my point is that nationality is not the same as political or moral orientation. Netanyahu isn’t Israel, Germany isn’t Nazism, the Washington Post isn’t Trump. The opening of a Holocaust museum is not endorsement of war on Palestinian civilians.

Among the exhibits are a prominent photo of a boy walking past bodies at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp after it was liberated, dress buttons excavated from the grounds of the Sobibor extermination camp, and walls covered with the texts of hundreds of laws discriminating against Jews enacted by the German occupiers of the Netherlands.

Enacted by the German occupiers but ordered by a much smaller set of people who had totalitarian control of the German state.

Dutch pro-Palestinian organization The Rights Forum called Herzog’s attendance “a slap in the face of the Palestinians who can only helplessly watch how Israel murders their loved ones and destroys their land.” More than 30,000 Palestinians have died in the war, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry.

Amnesty International put up detour signs around the museum to direct Herzog to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the nearby city of The Hague, where South Africa filed a case against Israel accusing it of genocide. Israel denies the allegations. A smaller pro-Israel group also gathered nearby with flags and photos of the hostages that were kidnapped by Hamas militants.

Police officers were present to deescalate tensions between the two demonstrations.

Good luck with that.

Well whaddya know:

Transgender golfer Hailey Davidson’s playing options just got significantly smaller.

Transgender i.e. male.

NXXT Golf announced on Friday that, effective immediately, competitors must be a biological female at birth to participate. A statement from the tour notes that it underscores the organization’s commitment to “maintaining the integrity of women’s professional golf and ensuring fair competition.” The news comes on International Women’s Day.

“As we navigate through the evolving landscape of sports, it is crucial to uphold the competitive integrity that is the cornerstone of women’s sports,” said NXXT Golf CEO Stuart McKinnon in a statement.

Yes, it is. Thank you for noticing.

“Our revised policy is a reflection of our unwavering commitment to celebrating and protecting the achievements and opportunities of female athletes. Protected categories are a fundamental aspect of sports at all levels, and it is essential for our Tour to uphold these categories for biological females, ensuring a level playing field.”

Davidson, a three-time winner on the tour, currently ranks second on the mini tour’s season standings. She has played nine times this season on the NXXT.

That is, he has played nine times this season, thus taking nine opportunities to play away from a woman.

Gender gender gender gender.

Did I mention gender?

Hannah Gadsby has a new gendersomething. Yay.

Nanette was already an awards-scooping live show before Netflix’s cameras started rolling, but its meteoric success made a proper international celebrity of the festival circuit staple. It also made Gadsby, who grew up in a small town in north-west Tasmania, an unexpected figurehead for LGBTQ+ representation in Hollywood.

Yet again – how does that work? How can anyone be a figurehead for all of those categories?

Gadsby spends much of their time based in Australia but has seen trans rights become a divisive political issue in the US and UK, one often divorced from the voices and experiences of trans and genderqueer people.

I think you’ll find that a hell of a lot of LGBTQ+ “activism” is very divorced from the voices and experiences of L and G and B people who don’t subscribe to trans doctrine. Sometimes people simply disagree on things and therefore are “divorced” from each other.

“It’s just part of the broader culture wars – trans people are being held up as this wedge issue. It’s happened before, we know it’s wrong. We always feel regret, culturally, after these moments – ‘Oh we were a bit harsh there weren’t we?’ But these moral panics exist in a time of great uncertainty, which it is, and certain groups of individuals cop it. And that’s what’s happening, and that makes it very dangerous. And Australia isn’t immune.”

Apparently Gadsby hasn’t noticed that the QT communinny is more than a bit harsh to people who reject trans ideology. What about that eh? Maybe the harshness isn’t all on one side?

University of Victoria celebrates Women’s Day by celebrating men, because of course it does.

Psst – Jamey – trans is colonialism. You’re the colonizer, chum.

The Washington state department of health promoted this article on Facebook and did so without any “pregnant people” genuflection so I got my hopes up, but of course that was a mistake.

Abortion

Abortion is legal and protected in Washington state. Abortions have been legal in Washington since 1970, and that has not changed even after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.

A lawsuit in Texas seeks to remove U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval of mifepristone, a safe and effective drug that’s been used in medication abortions by millions of Americans for over 20 years. As of April 21, 2023, the Supreme Court maintained full access to the drug nationally.

Third sentence in and it’s all over. It’s not women who need abortion rights, it’s “Americans.”

How WA Protects Abortion Rights

In Washington:

• Abortions are legal up to the point of fetal viability (as determined by a provider) or to protect the life or health of the pregnant individual.

Were you thinking “or to protect the life or health of the pregnant woman”? Shame on you.

People of any age have the right to independently consent for their own abortion care – parental involvement is not required.

A boy age 12 can absolutely consent for his own abortion care.

Be less inclooosive, Washington state.

Hey gang, let’s go protest the opening of a Holocaust museum. Maybe dress up as Anne Frank to really underline the point.

Oh dear, Willz is feeling let down by the police, who are after all there to do the bidding of angry men.

Sarah Ditum takes a chainsaw to Judith Butler’s new book:

Who’s Afraid of Gender? is an elaboration on her big idea, as laid out in the 1990 book Gender Trouble, that gender is “performative” — that is, whether you’re a man or a woman is determined by whether you act in a manly or womanly way, not by your physical body. This is the intellectual ballast in the now-common claim that “trans women are women, trans men are men”. (Butler identifies as nonbinary, but generously tolerates being called “she”.)

The insight that men and women’s behaviour is at least partly socially constructed wasn’t new, but Butler pushed it further. Not only gendered behaviour but sex itself was socially constructed. Female, she wrote in Gender Trouble, “no longer appears to be a stable notion”. The proper job of feminism, therefore, was to ask “what political possibilities are the consequence of a radical critique of the categories of identity”.

Welp, now we’ve found out, and it turns out they suck. The political possibilities are men grabbing everything that belongs to women and bullying women who object and destroying feminism. Happy now?

All critics of gender ideology, according to Butler, desire “the restoration of a patriarchal dream-order where a father is a father; a sexed identity never changes; women, conceived as ‘born female at birth’, resume their natural and ‘moral’ positions within the household; and white people hold uncontested racial supremacy”.

You what now? How did that last clause get in there? Same way all the rest of it gets in there: sheer arbitrary will.

In all the verbosity you could almost miss how insulting Butler is to female victims of male violence. But it’s there. After a section on JK Rowling, Butler writes: “Living in the repetitive temporality of trauma does not always give us an adequate account of social reality.” In other words, women who have been abused (which includes Rowling) cannot be trusted. No wonder Butler doesn’t want to identify as a woman: she doesn’t seem to like them very much.

It’s mutual, babes.

“India” Willoughby is trying to make a career for himself out of harassing JK Rowling. He’s hugely productive in the sense of churning out content, but he’s not very strategic or effective or even interesting.

JKR is underwhelmed.

I hope the draft Willz lives in is icy and howling.

And so on. He’s harassing her and now he’s trying to get the police to punish her for being the target of his nonstop harassment. I hope he goes splat sooner rather than later.

How to target advertising on Twitter:

Chapter 2:

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Major doubts.

I’m starting to think that Willyboy is really stupid enough to think that because something exists as a matter of law it is, ipso facto, illegal to deny it. [Francis Boyle]

I’m not so sure; I don’t think he would have seen this coming, and not because of stupidity or for having been blinded by his narcissism. Given how much the police had become the enforcers of trans ideology, Willoughby would have been justified in expecting the police to continue harassing and arresting those who resist and speak out against trans demands, or more accurately, those who defend women’s rights, particularly women themselves. We’ve certainly seen plenty of stories of police abuse in the name of trans “rights” from policing tweets and ribbons, limericks and stickers that said nothing different than what Rowling did.

Perhaps the tide is turning, and Willoughby chose the moment after the high water mark of trans influence to lodge his complaint. Or maybe, as I speculated above, Rowling was just too strong to target. But since the police have made it clear (in this instance at least) that calling a man a man, and referring to him as “he” and “him” is not a crime, all police persecution of anyone else doing the same thing should stop. It’s not a court decision but it is a precedent. It also shows that, in the eyes of this police department, in this instance, whatever documentation Willoughby has declaring him to be female, it does not turn him into one; he remains a man. This shouldn’t be news, but it is. Given the police’s eagerness to pursue gender heretics who refused to bow to Stonewall Law, this is huge.

I wonder if the department in question thought through the fact that they were unilaterally opening up this big new can of worms that’s going to effect policing itself. Feminists and other critics of gender ideology in the UK can now point to this police decision to protect themselves against police targeting and harassment. Considering how widespread the surrender of police services to the demands of trans activism is (along with the police’s own apparent internally motivated enthusiasm for GC witch hunts), it will be interesting and informative to see how this de facto change in policy plays out across the country.

I’m guessing this standard will not be applied evenly or consistently; some departments seem to be more “trans zealous” than others. Will they follow Northumbria’s lead? While the police’s taking up the position of trans “enforcers” seems to have been centrally devised and organized, the beginning of its abandonment of this Holy mission, as it has happened, surprisingly, in the Willoughby/Rowling case, might be a good deal more ad hoc and piecemeal, until government guidance steps in decisively. Will trans activists recognize the police response to this incident for the potential sea change it very well might be, if it were to be applied across the board? A woman has said “No,” and has gone unpunished; the police have declared that she did not break the law. Calling a man a man is now no longer a hate crime, not even a “non-crime hate incident.” How will they let this stand?

Now if the police took the next step and actually started citing trans activists for launching frivolous complaints of “misgendering” that waste police time and resources, that would be great. Mustn’t be greedy though; we should be happy with one miracle at a time.

News from Nigeria:

Nigerian security forces are searching for more than 200 children abducted from their school by gunmen on motorcycles Thursday, in the latest mass kidnapping to hit Nigeria.

Officials and witnesses have given varying figures of the number of students taken from the school in Kuriga, a town in northwestern Nigeria, with between 200 and 300 children reported to be missing, some of them as young as 8 years old.

It was the second such abduction in Nigeria in a week, after around another 200 people — mainly women and children — were kidnapped by militants in Borno state in the country’s northeast.

“Militants”? Funny kind of militancy.

If the higher total this week is confirmed, it could surpass the mass abduction in 2014 when Boko Haram militants kidnapped 276 schoolgirls from their dormitory in the village of Chibok.

The West African nation has been struggling to contain the kidnapping epidemic for a number of years now. More than 3,600 people were abducted between July 2022 and June 2023, according to Nigeria based SBM Intelligence group. But the actual number could be far higher, as many people do not report kidnappings for fear of reprisals.

Read the rest at your peril – it gets worse and worse.

One has to wonder…why are the met arresting the guy protesting terrorism? Are we all pro-terrorism now? I seem to have overlooked that ruling.

His sign says “Hamas are terrorists.”

They batter him down to the ground in aid of arresting him for…saying Hamas are terrorists.

Bang crash thud, another massive limb falls off the tree.

A police force allowed a group which claimed gender-critical views are hate speech to carry out a training day for members of the local community. Staffordshire Police was criticised for permitting the organisation to carry out an “inappropriate and inaccurate” course in February. The session was delivered by the group Uniting Staffordshire Against Hate (USAH) at the force’s headquarters to members of the public.

The “against hate” bit is a joke, because what they’re doing is inciting hatred of women who know that men are not women. By the way it’s not “hate” to know which people are men.

Gender-critical group WeAreFairCop attended the event, and accused the trainers of having a lack of knowledge regarding hate crime legislation. Harry Miller, from WeAreFairCop, attended the training day on Feb 28 and claimed USAH had a political motivation.

…

A spokesperson for Staffordshire Police said: “This event was delivered and facilitated by Uniting Staffordshire Against Hate, and was solely for members of our local community. The session aimed to stimulate conversation and enable sharing of a wide range of views, with the intention of encouraging tolerance and increasing understanding of the impact of hate crime.”

By saying that women who know which people are men are engaging in hate speech.