After the closure of the Tavistock’s Gender Identity Service, many people have been left wondering how such institutional medical abuse of children could possibly have happened, and be allowed to happen for so long. How could some of the extremes of gender ideology and critical race theory be adopted by professionals who are supposed to be able to discern sanity from madness? ‘How Psychology Went Mad’ — the 12th episode in the New Culture Forum’s acclaimed #NCFHeresies documentary series — looks at the impact of ideology on psychotherapy, psychology, and psychiatry. It charts the development of the ‘talking cure’ and how this has become corrupted by far-left dogma and identity politics. In an era of increased censorship, political correctness, and infringements of freedom of speech, how can a profession based on being able to talk freely survive? In this documentary, Amy Gallagher, describes her own experience of authoritarian ideology interfering with her own psychotherapy training and interviews those who have also spoken up about similar concerns.
Month: February 2024
Embalmers finding thick, rubbery clots in veins and arteries
By John M. Contino
Strange; fibrous; often long, thick white clots are being extracted from the vascular systems of corpses by embalmers. For an example of what these clots look like, here is a one-minute video of such a clot being extracted by embalmer Richard Hirschmann of Alabama from the jugular vein of a deceased person. Mr. Hirschmann says he has about 250 such pictures on his phone.
British doctor John Campbell recently interviewed retired U.S. Air Force major, engineer, and data analyst Thomas Haviland about an “Embalmer Blood Clot Survey” that Mr. Haviland sent out to 50 National, Regional, and State Funeral Director Associations, each with hundreds of members in the U.S., Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. Mr. Haviland also sent the surveys directly to over 1,700 funeral homes. The surveys asked if, when, and how often the respondents may have encountered these strange, predominantly white clots during their work as embalmers. The astonishing video of that interview is about 48 minutes long and contains images of large, rubbery clots, as well as several graphs of various statistics compiled from the survey responses.
Here are some of the salient points from the interview:
· These white clots were never observed until they first began to appear in 2020. They were likely caused by the COVID virus. The occurrence of the clots exploded in 2021, after millions of people had been vaccinated. By 2022, an average of 30% of embalmed corpses were found to have these clots (the preponderance of typical “grape jelly” clots and “coffee ground” clots — small, dark clots resembling coffee grounds — also increased.) By 2023, the average percentage of white clots had dropped to 20%.
- Correlation is not causation, but there is an awful lot of correlation. Anecdotally, some embalmers report that all the individuals in whom the clots were found had been vaccinated (some 80% of U.S. adults received at least two shots). We were told that the vaccines would remain in the deltoid and produce enough spike proteins to provoke an immune response, but we now know that the spike proteins permeated the entire body — the vascular system and organs, including ovaries, the placenta, and mothers’ breast milk. (There was a 25% increase in infant deaths in 2023.)
- Mr. Haviland believes that many instances of these clots are never observed. Bodies may be cremated, or hospitals may take care of the remains for the families. Autopsies alone often do not reveal the clots, as medical examiners don’t drain blood, but mostly examine slices of organs. The responses to the surveys were underwhelming (except in Pennsylvania, where 125 responses came back within five days). Mr. Haviland believes that many Funeral Director Associations and funeral directors, having previously encouraged or forced their embalmers to take the shots, suppressed the surveys or disallowed their employees from answering them. It’s a matter of not finding what you’re not looking for.
- Actuarial tables identify a 10% increase in mortality over the last three years. To an individual who may know of 10 people who died last year, the difference between 10 and 11 deaths is not significant, but in the aggregate, it amounts to over 300,000 U.S. excess deaths per year. Globally, the numbers are horrendous. Cancers, myocarditis, opioid overdoses, old age, and other factors often combine to hasten death, but Dr. Cambell and Mr. Haviland are convinced that these large clots were the direct cause of death on the corpses in which they were found.
Both men are calling for a moratorium on the use of mRNA vaccines. That recommendation is eminently reasonable but entirely unlikely. Mr. Haviland says that Big Pharma has around 40 new mRNA vaccines in the works. Apparently, all manner of vaccines destined to be administered from cradle to grave are being transformed into mRNA shots. Mr. Haviland has sent all his findings to the CDC, the FDA, and the NIH but has yet to hear a peep back from any of them.
It’s not enough to resign oneself to “what’s done is done” — not when Big Pharma and the public and private medical establishments are hell-bent on making mRNA vaccines ubiquitous. We must resist.
Egyptian man arrested in rape of woman, 20, in Milan, Italy
A young man was arrested on suspicion of raping a 20-year-old American student in a supermarket car park near a noted Milanese discotheque Friday night, police said Saturday.
The man, an Egyptian student who has not yet been named, was caught “virtually red-handed”, police said.
He had been stopped by the disco’s security officers after passers-by alerted them, they said.
Man arrested in rape of woman, 20, in Milan – TopNews – Ansa.it
Betraying Urban England, Betraying Rural England
Filthy streets lined with charity shops, pound shops, and vaping shops. Rubbish strewn across the walkways. Half-built or half-collapsed buildings covered in scaffolding. Fast-food joints on every corner, their logos printed on the litter that blows down the road. Very few English folk around, though a few of them lie homeless on the pavement. Many languages yelled aggressively from hidden allies. A vision of a third-world town. Raise your eyes a little above the shop fronts, however, and you will see glorious Restorationist Romanesque, sumptuous Regency facades, and medievalist romanticism expressed in high Victorian gothic. This is the town of Northampton, the capital of the ‘Rose of the Shires,’ as Northamptonshire is known. Northampton is like many once magnificent English towns in that it has been wholly left to deteriorate into a maze of rubble that is inhospitable to the indigenous population of these isles.
One need only look at Godwin’s Guildhall, an astonishing example of Ruskinian gothic in the centre of Northampton, to have some idea of the pride that historic county towns like this one formerly possessed. In the centre of Northampton is a remarkable example of Restorationist ecclesiastical architecture: All Saints’ Church dominates the main square (happily, Northamptonshire was always a hotbed of cavalier loyalism), for which King Charles II gave a thousand tons of timber for its completion—earning himself a rather fine statue atop the church’s narthex. But today, part of that church has been turned into a café, which is generally quite full while the nave remains largely unvisited. Northampton’s once splendid square, which is now surrounded by American fast-food establishments and kebab bars, is further spoiled by scattered rubbish and broken glass.
Northampton is just one example of a well-established and ever-growing problem in the UK: our towns are being left to rot. County towns are especially bad in this regard. From Bedford to Dumfries, these once noble, historic towns are falling apart. It was decided not to renovate our ancient towns and refurbish the old buildings into affordable housing and commercial establishments offered with a preference for small, local businesses. In turn, beautiful and once illustrious buildings are now left boarded up, ultimately to erode and one day be knocked down. Consequently, Brits have abandoned such areas, and newly arrived immigrants with which our small island has been flooded decade after decade, have colonised entire towns. This process has of course completely changed the nature and character of what ought to have been the social hearts of the shires.
The damage began after World War II, when elites driven by the mania of ‘progress’ sought to smash apart those towns that had been insufficiently damaged by the Luftwaffe, and rebuilt the townscapes with endless, colossal, concrete boxes coated in warped, bluish glass. Such monstrous labyrinths that they created are in fact the most edifying examples, given that many towns—especially England’s old seaside towns—were just abandoned altogether without any rebuilding taking place. Those eroding towns and their once beautiful Edwardian buildings have been given over mainly as social housing for new arrivals from North Africa and other places, paid for of course by the taxpayer. In every town across the UK, streets are now lined with vaping shops and Turkish barbers, which are widely believed to be fronts for money laundering operations.
Historically, the city or large town was really a creation of the merchant class, the bourgeoisie who derived the name of their social class from the borough of the city, that suburban sphere between the countryside and the city square where the market could be found. From the end of the Great Migration period in the 10th century to the mid-Renaissance period in the 16th century, the merchant class comprised a tiny subsect of any given society, functioning as the mediators of exchange for goods, nearly all of which were made in the countryside, by rural communities.
The city, then, was economically contiguous with the countryside, and it was also physically contiguous with the countryside. One moved in stages from the rural landscape into the city: from the fields into the borough, from the borough into the square. The city square would of course be dominated by the cathedral spire or tower, indicating the rustic origins of urban life, namely in the communities of farming monks and canons around which tenant farmers and free peasants gathered, and to whom traders then flocked to provide their services.
Today, this connaturality and contiguity of the city with the countryside has almost entirely gone, across much if not all of Europe. The modern town is not a community of communities—boroughs, new towns, old towns, and market squares—but a monstrous metropolis populated by isolated individuals, often very recent arrivals, most of whom do not even know their next-door neighbours. Modern cities are grey islands separated by oceans of overly industrialised countryside. That countryside is itself largely visible only from the motorways that join up those urban islands, inhuman speedways which are a scourge both to wildlife and our own respiration. The modern city has little if any connection with the rural communities outside its concrete corridors, belonging as it does to an international economy driven by a chiefly digitalised global industry.
The slow divorce of city and countryside has in large part been the effect of Europe’s radical technological transformation. This transformation, which began to accelerate during the industrial revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries, sped up even more dramatically in the post-war decades of the 20th century. Imposed on us in these decades was the architecture that conveyed this divorce of landscape and townscape. What remained after World War II of the old cities of Europe that had grown up organically over the centuries was destroyed by progressivist ideologues. Urban populations residing in freshly bulldozed cities, from the 1960s to the ’80s, were forced by progressivist hubris to undergo the experiments of architectural modernism, Bauhaus, Brutalism, and then the postmodernism initiated by Le Corbusier (whose ambition to destroy the whole of Paris was thankfully never realised).
These architectural experiments were exported, either wholesale or in part, to every city in the world. Now, in England, when you drive from the rolling fields and dotted woodlands of what’s left of our ancient countryside into London, Manchester, Coventry or any other city, you feel as if you have been beamed up by some UFO of a hostile alien race and relocated to a dystopian world many galaxies away, where the extra-terrestrial beings must be utterly different from us, for no human could possibly be happy dwelling in such a place.
We are accustomed to thinking that it was ever thus, and that there has always been a gulf between urban and rural life. The rustic English farmhouse and the inner-city Georgian terrace, however, shared certain forms and principles of an architectural vernacular, and they emerged from a common culture and a national way of life. It is very difficult for the modern mind to grasp that the urban-rural dichotomy is one that belongs almost wholly to modernity.
Now, Britain’s ancient towns have become places impossible to inhabit, and this has led to a catastrophe for the British countryside. The rural landscape of these isles is famous throughout the world both for its variety and its beauty. But farmers, Britain’s most underappreciated community, are presently evermore pressured due to economic deprivation to sell off their land to developers. Currently, across much of the south in particular and of Britain in general, great stretches of our once treasured countryside are being built over with cheap housing from prefab materials. These housing estates are not designed to be places of settling, but property-ladder complexes, where people can buy their first properties with a view soon to moving on. Hence, they are not equipped with a main green for picnics and cricket, a post office, a pub, a hall, a church, or any of the other basic local institutions that make a British locality a place of settlement. Rather than focusing on the abandoned towns and renovating them, those towns are left to erode while the rural landscape is rapidly becoming marred by bad and thoughtless urban build-up.
King Charles, as Prince of Wales, decades ago sounded the alarm and called for a totally different approach to building to that which had infected the country in the post-war era. He waged a heroic campaign against the destructive barbarism of architectural elites and called for planners to use local materials and draw from a received tradition of building while using modern technology to work efficiently and safely.
Charles was roundly mocked then, as often he is now, and yet he has been entirely vindicated. Poundbury, in Dorset, which Charles supported and patronised from the beginning, was and is a huge success—whilst the ancient towns on which modernist architects were allowed to experiment are now wholly unloved. In his brilliant A Vision of Britain, which he published in 1989, Charles advanced ten very general architectural principles on which he thought future building in Britain should be based. But his call was derided and then neglected by the talentless progressives that dominated the architectural world.
Today, however, it is precisely Charles’s principles that developers try to apply, though few would admit that he was right all along. They’ve realised that it is those very principles that make their properties more desirable and hence more marketable. Developers are not very good at applying those principles, but at least they are now trying: across the country they are opting for neo-Georgian facades with local stone veneers and bay windows, and they’re moving away from the modernist boxes into which they tried to herd people decades ago. Unfortunately, rather than applying the principles to the renovation of old towns, developers are building all over the countryside, and thus irreversibly wrecking the landscape.
Had this country had a conservative government for the past 13 years, its government would have done everything in its power to conserve the historic towns as well as conserve its celebrated rural landscape. It would have practised conservative paternalism and protectionism to make the towns and cities affordable for new housing, prioritising the refurbishment of old buildings, and it would have adopted such protectionism to privilege the purchase of property by family businesses that produce or sell locally sourced goods.
One of the many tragedies of living in modern Britain today is that of watching its ancient towns and cities corrode, whilst they are being colonised by a new nondescript, nebulous, global human being with no piety towards a particular place—at least, certainly not towards the town, county, and nation in which he dwells. And indeed, this is why our elites do not care about the problem I raise herein. The nobleman and the peasant always had more in common with each other than either did with the middle-class person, as the former were people of somewhere and the latter was a person of anywhere—to use David Goodhart’s now famous terminology. So too, today’s powerholders are people of anywhere and hence have far more in common with the people of nowhere who have colonised every town in Britain, than they do with the people of somewhere whom ordinary Brits used to be and largely still are. That is why the problem I raise is not treated as serious by today’s powerholders: they do not see it as a problem at all. And as we are condemned to watch our urban centres decay—a decomposition of once magnificent and often ancient townscapes and cityscapes that formerly punctuated the green horizon with medieval towers and Victorian spires—we should be furious at the fact that the desecration of our land needn’t ever have happened.
https://europeanconservative.com/articles/essay/betraying-urban-england-betraying-rural-england/
Sectarianism & Islamic Fundamentalism Threaten British Politics
NCF Director Peter Whittle joined Lee Anderson MP on GB News to discuss the Speaker of the House of Commons decision to break Parliamentary procedure out of fear of Islamic extremism.
‘Self described elite’ are ‘deliberately’ DISMANTLING Western democracy – Neil Oliver
Neil Oliver says the ‘self described elite’ have been carefully and deliberately dismantling Western democracies and holding on to power for too long.
CANADA: 6’2″ Trans-Identified Male Accused of Exposing Himself To Girls In Pool Changing Room Edited His Own Photos To Make Himself Look Like A Minor
A trans-identified male residing in Vernon, British Columbia, has been given sympathetic coverage by the press after two teenage girls reported that he had exposed his genitals in their presence while using the women’s change room of a local recreation center. Amanda Wilson, 67, whose given name has not been reported, was accused of stripping nude in the presence of two 14 year-old girls at the Vernon Aquatic Center on January 27.
The girls quickly told their relatives, and the uncle of one of the girls called the pool’s manager to complain.
“My niece had a 50-year-old man come into the change room, strip naked in front of her and her friend, she’s 14, and put on a woman’s bathing suit and go out,” the uncle, identified only as Kevin in order to protect the minors involved, said.
“He basically said that the kids have no rights and that the transgender person’s rights take precedence, this is something I think parents should know,” Kevin told local outlet Castanet in an article published on February 2.
“I was told by the pool manager that there was nothing he could do unless the person was ‘leering or making overt sexual gestures toward the girls’ but this guy was naked in front of teenage girls and that’s just not right,” he added.
Wilson, who stands at 6’2″ and weighs 300 pounds, has now been given a sympathetic platform in the media to share his side of the story. Writing to the Castanet in a letter published on February 15, the Canadian Armed Forces veteran has claimed that the girls could not have been exposed to male genitalia because, he says, he has “female sex organs” in place of his penis.
“I had surgery 13 years ago. It appears the two 14-year-old girls (who reported seeing me) never actually saw me completely naked,” Wilson wrote, accusing his critics of discrimination.
“The girls told their uncle I had male sex organs but I have female sex organs, at least on the outside. I am very masculine looking and as a result, I believe they assumed I had male sex organs. I do not. As well, I have some breast growth. I am legally female,” he added.
“Are we as a society going to start discriminating against people based on what they look like? If that is the case, what is next, banning people of different races?… Some believe I could use a separate changing room. That is true. But should we also force people of other races to use separate change rooms?”
“It makes me feel like a second-class woman,” Wilson said in a separate interview. “The fact that I’m trans overrides all the other good things that I’ve done.”
Reduxx has discovered a Facebook account belonging to Wilson, where he has posted disturbing images of what appears to be his own face edited to resemble that of a very young girl.
Last May, after Wilson updated his profile picture to an image of a young blonde girl, some of his friends took notice and told him the behavior was “creepy.”
“That’s creepy because you don’t look like this at all. You are much older,” said one of Wilson’s Facebook commenters. Another remarked, “It is kind of creepy for sure. No offense, my friend.”
Wilson took the criticism in stride, saying: “Isn’t it interesting what you can do with computer software?” and adding: “You should see what I can do with other people.”
Responses to an earlier altered photo shared by Wilson in November 2022 were similarly critical.
“Why post a pic that doesn’t look like you at all?” asked one woman.
Wilson replied: “This is what I would have looked like if God had not made a mistake.” When the same commenter stated that “God didn’t make a mistake,” Wilson said, “How do you explain why so many people in this world are transgender. According to the church, there are only two genders. But my brain, my self, is female and my body was female. Something went wrong.”
For years, Wilson has repeatedly posted strong opposition to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, including one image which depicted him as Hitler.
“Hate is a strong word. There is only one person in Canada that I truly hate and that is Justin Trudeau,” Wilson posted in April of last year.
“There is an endangered species in Canada that is about to be exterminated,” Wilson wrote in July 2023. “They call it the Liberal Party.”
He has also, on several occasions, claimed to be a victim of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of his father.
“Spanking a child using your hand on their clothed rear is one thing, but when you use a leather belt or a piece of wood on their bare skin and leave welts, bruises, and cuts, that is another thing. Too many children are the victims of adults who seem to think that it is okay to brutalize a child,” wrote Wilson on January 1. Curiously, Wilson follows an independent maker of custom whips on Facebook which “ships worldwide.”
On the same day, Wilson stated he was “still suffering from the abuse” he received in his childhood.
“Madagascar law allows the castration of child rapists,” Wilson posted to Facebook on February 12, just three days before his letter to Castanet was published, wherein he claimed to have had his male genitalia removed.
Wilson has also shared reports of sexual crimes committed by minors while calling for children to be tried and punished as adults.
“You have to love the Youth Criminal Justice Act,” Wilson said in April 2023. “A twelve-year-old boy is charged with two counts of sexual assault but because he is a child, his name is not published. On top of that, the most he will get is three years in a comfortable facility. If someone is capable of committing a crime, they should be judged as an adult.”
The incident involving Wilson’s nudity in the women’s change room has not been widely reported, but did spark some criticism. After Castanet spoke with Kevin, community member Anne Gunion wrote a letter to the outlet criticizing legislation which allows for a self-declared gender identity to be prioritized over biological sex. Bill C-16, which was added to the Canadian Human Rights Act in June 2017, enshrined the concept of gender identity as a protected characteristic under the law.
“Bill C-16 has given access for predators to enter zones that were previously safe for women,” wrote Gunion, whose comments were released by Castanet on February 8. “Why are the feelings of someone who identifies as another gender more important than the emotional and physical safety of women? Why do transgender rights take precedence?”
“My heart goes out to women who have a past of sexual abuse and sharing a change room with a male causes emotional harm,” she continued. “Why are the feelings of someone who identifies as another gender more important than a child’s safety? That is not equality. Women have fought long and hard for equality, and allowing biological men into our safe spaces is a step backwards for women’s rights.”
Macron Berated by French Farmers: ‘You Gave Ukraine Colossal Sums, But Gave Us Crumbs!’
French President Emmanuel Macron on Saturday was surrounded by groups of farmers who chastised the neo-liberal leader for his green agenda and for prioritising Ukraine over his own people.
At the 60th Agricultural Show held in the Porte de Versailles exhibition centre in Paris on Saturday, agricultural unions and organisations clashed with security and breached the gates in order to air the grievances of farmers to Emmanuel Macron directly. After initially showing hesitancy, the French president acquiesced and held an impromptu debate with several farmers.
“You gave Ukraine colossal sums, but you gave us crumbs,” one farmer said to Macron according to broadcaster BFMTV.
According to the German-based think tank the Kiel Institute, Macron’s government has committed approximately $2 billion in French taxpayer money to Ukraine since 2022. However, the French taxpayer has paid substantially more through the European Union’s funding of the war, which is set to total over $150 billion after Brussels recently approved an additional $54 billion to Kyiv.
Farmers in France, and indeed throughout Europe, have been financially impacted by the war in Ukraine in more ways than having their tax dollars sent to Kyiv. Last year, the European Union decided to allow Ukrainian agricultural imports to flow into the bloc without any tariffs. The move has severely hurt the ability of local European farmers to compete, given that the lower regulatory burden and the lower cost of labour in the former Soviet state means that food can be produced at a much cheaper rate.
On Wednesday the EU announced that it would extend duty-free access to its market for Ukraine for at least another year as a measure to help its economy stay afloat amid the war with Russia. Although Brussels said that it would put some safeguards in place to protect domestic agriculture, farmers’ groups said that the move would ultimately see further protests from farmers across the continent as it did not go far enough.
Ukraine was not the only issue raised by the farmers to Macron on Saturday. Multiple farmers spoke of the problems they are facing due to transitioning their operations to organic farming at the urging of the government in Paris and the EU.
“I went organic, it’s a stupid thing I did: I sell my cereals at the conventional price,” one farmer said per Le Figaro, adding: “I don’t pay myself not low income, my income is zero. You are putting a plaster on an open fracture.” Another farmer said: “People no longer have purchasing power, they cannot buy organic!”
They also reiterated grievances such as over-regulation, excess paperwork, and the EU’s green agenda as a whole, which many in France have tied to Macron’s government, given his party’s backing of climate policies in Brussels. In addition, the farmer’s groups called for the release of tractor protesters from police custody.
In a defiant tone, Macron responded to the farmers: “Please, let’s not say that nothing was done!”
Following weeks of tractor protests throughout France, including a “siege of Paris”, Macron’s second in command, Prime Minister Gabriel Attal announced some concessions to farmers, including ending planned tax hikes on agricultural diesel, additional financial support and a commitment to oppose the free trade deal with the South American ‘Mercosur’ bloc.
However, while tractor protests have mostly subsided for the moment, the anger among struggling farmers has not. Arnaud Rousseau, the head of the FNSEA agricultural union in France, has said that it is “very probable” farmers will once again take to their tractors to protest. Farmers throughout Europe will likely try to keep up the pressure on their governments and Brussels ahead of June’s European Parliament elections.
Texas teacher who cross-dressed at school put on leave after outrage
A chemistry teacher at a Texas high school has been placed on leave for cross-dressing at school, apparently as part of his stated desire to “be an out role model in a professional setting.”
Last week, Libs of TikTok publicized several photographs and a video clip of Hebron High School teacher Rachmad Tjachyadi wearing dresses, a costume of female villain Ursula from Disney’s The Little Mermaid, and wearing a tutu in a classroom.
This week, the Christian Post reports that following public circulation of the images, Lewisville Independent School District announced it was “aware of the video and the staff member has been placed on administrative leave while the district reviews the situation, which is standard procedure. It would be natural for our families to have questions about this situation, but because this is a personnel matter currently under review, there is no additional information the district can share.”
Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott weighed in, calling the incident an example of the need for school choice.
The Post compiled several items from the teacher’s social media history offering a window into his activism, including an active role in the school’s Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA), for which in 2022 he put out a call for “someone who can teach my GSA Baby Gays how to VOGUE properly!! The GSA kiddos want to present voguing during a cultural festival at our school in a few weeks.” (“Voguing” is defined as “to strike poses in campy imitation of fashion models especially as a kind of dance” and in recent years has been claimed as a form of “LGBT expression.”)
He was also part of the Forward Slash Project, a so-called “queer archive” for “knowledge disruption that opens pedagogical space for queerness as an ideality that can be used to re/imagine and re/think futurity.” He has a biography on the project’s website (which has since been made private) that states his intentions to “utilize dress-up days at his schools to show off his feminine side in the education settings,” with his “”goal as an educator” being “not only to educate the students in science but also to be an out role model in a professional setting.”
The indoctrination of children with left-wing indoctrination on sexuality and other left-wing agenda items has long been a major concern in American public schools, from libraries to athletic and restroom policy to drag events to classroom materials to even “transitioning” troubled children without parental input. The influential American Library Association, currently helmed by a self-described “Marxist lesbian,” opposes denying children access to age-inappropriate materials.
Drag in particular has emerged as one of LGBT activists’ favored tools for exposing and acclimating children to the concepts of gender fluidity and sexual experimentation, via “family-friendly” drag shows at schools and community events or Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH) events in which crossdressers read books to children, often at public libraries.
In recent years, these issues have helped fuel a parent backlash that has been credited with Republican gains in states like Florida and Virginia, whose current respective governors have taken leading roles in fighting back.
Spain Back Among EU’s Poor Countries
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has presided over the EU’s worst-managed economy in the last five years, letting per capita income fall so sharply that the country now qualifies for the “club of poor countries,” that is, EU member states that qualify for cohesion funds.
The numbers came from an in-depth study published at the end of January by the Juan de Mariana Institute.
Between the years 2019 and 2023, the period in which Pedro Sánchez has served as the country’s prime minister, per capita income in terms of purchasing power has fallen by 5.5%,
That ranks Spain as the EU country with the second-sharpest decline in the time period and contrasts with an increase in per capita income in 18 of the 27 member states, including its neighbor Portugal, where per capita income has increased by 1.3% in recent years. Interestingly, Germany came out even worse than Spain in per capita income loss, while France did only slightly better. The institute based its study on data from Eurostat. According to El Debate’s report on the study, the average salary in Spain in the last two years has effectively lost 615 euros in purchasing power.
The numbers show that Spain is falling further and further behind the EU’s average per capita income.
“During Sánchez’s mandate, this ratio has gone from reaching 91% of the European Union average to 86%,” the study states. “It puts us back in the club of the poor countries of the Union, which have the right to request access to the cohesion funds offered by the community institutions, something that had not happened even in the worst moments of the previous financial crisis.”
The study also notes that it puts the government in an uncomfortable situation. If it asks for the cohesion funds, it will be admitting the real problems with the Spanish economy. But if it does not ask for the funds it will be “leaving money on the table to which all Spaniards are entitled according to the criteria set by Brussels.”
The study also found the Spaniards face an increasing tax burden, a situation that again contrasts with most of the EU member states. Fiscal pressure from the government on citizens rose by 2.9 points between the end of 2018 and 2022, going from 35.4% to 38.3% of GDP. This is the second-highest such increase among member states in the period analyzed. Spain is one of the outlier countries where, in an economic crunch caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, inflation, and the war in Ukraine, it insists on collecting more from citizens who are already suffering from higher costs of living and economic stagnation. The institute also observes that while the government insists on blaming the loss of purchasing power solely on forces outside its own policies, the reality is that the government itself is part of the problem.
“The government of Pedro Sánchez has insisted on linking this trend with external factors such as the COVID-19 crisis, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the rise in international energy prices, etc. However, half of European countries have reduced the fiscal pressure compared to 2018 to leave more resources for families and companies and thereby contribute to generating more growth and more employment in an international context considered adverse,” the study states.
It further observes, “the statement made by the Government that tax collection has increased because of economic growth and job creation is also unfounded since in the last 5 years tax collection has increased 7.5 times more than the Spanish economy has grown and 3 times more than employment,” the Institute indicates.
On average in the EU, fiscal pressure on citizens has either remained the same or decreased, In Nordic economies, for example, the Danish government lowered tax pressure by 2.7 points and the Swedish government by 2.1 points. In Finland, the increase was a mere 0.6 points, far below that of Spain.
The study also looked at the ranking of Spain according to the Economic Management Indicator (EMI), which evaluates how the twenty-seven EU countries have managed their economies in this period of time using a combination of factors from employment to per capita income, fiscal pressure, GDP growth, and public debt.
GDP growth between 2019 and 2023 timidly increased by 2.3 points, placing Spain at number 22 among EU countries and more than 50% behind the European average, which was 5.6%. Spain’s neighbor Portugal grew 7.8% in that same time frame.
The study also found that the government has been fudging employment statistics by including people on so-called “fijo discontinuo” contracts. These contracts are permanent, but employees only work for the company for part of the year. The rest of the time, they either do not work or work elsewhere. Under the government figures, those not working during the ‘downtime’ moments of their contract do not count in unemployment numbers. This contrasts with seasonal workers, who do count as unemployed between stints of work. Under the new calculation, the government boasted that the unemployment rate had fallen 16.7%.
“However, 90% of the reduction is explained by the statistical make-up of fijos discontinuos. If we measure effective unemployment and consider the situation of those 700,000 workers [on fijo discontinuo contracts] who are not employed but have been deleted from the official figure, we find that the drop in unemployment between 2019 and 2023 has been just 1.4%,” the study points out.
According to the institute then, Spain ranks 18th among EU states in terms of unemployment.
At the same time, public debt has sharply increased.
“Its weight on GDP has risen moderately in the EU-27, with an increase of 3.3 points between 2019 and 2023. On the other hand, in Spain a rise of 10.8 points has been observed, which triples the community average,” the study states.
For every euro of GDP improvement during Sánchez’s mandate, the government has also created 2 euros of public debt.
https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/spain-back-among-eus-poor-countries/