Islam is playing an increasingly important role in schools. A recent case at a grammar school in Döbling shows how far consideration for Muslim pupils can go: A teacher refused to read aloud from the Bible because it was ‘not fair to Mohamed’.
As the newspaper Krone reports, in this case the Ministry of Education referred to the responsibility of the Directorate of Education, which in turn stated that there were ‘no guidelines for dealing with religious texts in German lessons’. This incident shows that teachers are often left alone when it comes to dealing with religious topics in everyday school life. It seems as if the focus is increasingly on avoiding conflicts with pupils or parents.
Thomas Krebs, a member of the teachers’ union, is now calling for harsh punishments for radical pupils and their parents. He emphasises that no improvement is possible without the support of parents. Krebs proposes that violent and radicalised pupils and their parents should be obliged to attend instruction meetings with the police. If this obligation is not fulfilled, he calls for fines of up to 5,000 euros.
Dick Schoof Photo: @DickSchoof on X, 16 April 2024
Good news from the Netherlands, my country of birth: a new government is in the works. It will build a bridge between the political centre and the nationalist and anti-Islamist politician Geert Wilders, who won the November elections. This deal concludes a gruelling government formation process.
The doomsday scenario of escalating polarisation between the centre and populist nationalism now seems averted. This is crucial for the health of Dutch democracy.
That said, the deal introduces a peculiar element: Wilders, who won the election, will not become prime minister; Dick Schoof will instead.
Mr. Schoof, an unelected professional bureaucrat, former spy chief, and deep state power player unknown to the broader public, hails from the national intelligence and security apparatus. He is stepping out of the shadows thanks to nomination by Wilders and three centre parties (namely New Social Contract, the Liberals, and the Farmer’s Party).
Surprisingly, Dutch citizens have been assigned their prime minister without any public deliberation on his selection and without him even committing to a policy programme, let alone accounting for it in any meaningful way. This course of events treats democracy poorly, and is even slightly authoritarian. Still, it could serve the national interest if it produces a serious government that will finally counter uncontrolled mass migration from the Islamic world and Africa.
But first, how did we get here? After Wilders won the election convincingly in November, the formation of a new government was not proceeding smoothly. Under more normal circumstances, a victory of this magnitude—Wilders won 37 of 150 seats; the second, third and fourth parties in the country’s splintered electoral landscape captured 25, 24 and 20 seats—would have resulted in Wilders leading a coalition government as the country’s prime minister. But Wilders is not a normal system politician. He is the crude populist indictment of the system, far too controversial for the prime ministership in the decent, consensus-oriented, and—yes, conformist—Netherlands.
Aside from being too controversial to be PM, Wilders is also too populist to have a solid party cadre at the ready. Although his Freedom Party has been in parliament since 2006, it has remained weak in human resources and organisational capacity. The party, for years no more than a glorified campaign vehicle, has no members (Wilders is the only member), no policy research institute, and few if any ties to civil society and to Dutch conservative intellectuals.
Wilders couldn’t appoint good ministers and undersecretaries drawn from his party’s ranks. But if he wasn’t going to nominate the senior members of government, who was? His surprising election win brought responsibility; at one point during the negotiations, Wilders even had a third of Dutch citizens behind him in the polls. In short, Wilders had to lead but couldn’t.
While the centre parties could theoretically sideline Wilders by instead forming a coalition with Frans Timmermans—who leads the alliance of Greens and Labour—they could not responsibly do so.
This would have permanently alienated a large portion of the electorate. Wilders not becoming prime minister—despite winning the elections—is hard enough for Wilders voters to swallow; him having no input in the government formation would have pushed things too far.
Besides, the Dutch electorate demanded substantial change by supporting Wilders en masse. The Dutch again want to be recognised as a nation under a national government that serves the nation’s interests, most pressingly, by acting against uncontrolled mass migration from troubled regions outside Europe.
For too long, Dutch political life and many leading institutions have been entirely dominated by an ideology of universalist humanism; a globalism, principally indifferent toward preserving national character; an ‘Anywhere-ism,’ in David Goodhart’s terms.
Yet, perhaps the nation, the ‘Somewhere,’ the politics of place and particularism, is now indeed making a small comeback, restoring some of the balance and healing Dutch democracy. Or at least the four negotiating parties have overcome their colossal dilemma. Despite continuous moralising from the left-wing media (including targeted sabotage by the influential newspaper NRC, undermining the earlier prime ministerial candidate and popular former minister Ronald Plasterk, by falsely associating him with fraud), the four parties have agreed a deal: their respective party leaders will stay in parliament and not join the executive government, while at least half of the ministers, including the prime minister, will be drawn from outside of any of the four parties. The mandate for Schoof’s new government is right-wing, especially regarding migration.
Which brings me to Schoof. The Dutch public knows nothing about Dick Schoof, who spent four decades as a bureaucrat working behind the scenes. He was chief director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism (NCTV), and director-general of the General Intelligence and Security Service (AIVD). Spectacularly, Schoof managed to say nothing policy-related at his first press conference in his new role as prime minister. Asked about his plans as PM, he said evasively: “My plans are what the parliamentary leaders [of the four parties] have agreed upon,” without providing anything in the way of an interpretation of that agreement.
The Dutch press trotted out the premature judgement that Schoof would be an empty vessel, a colourless technocrat, serving the four political bosses who gave him his assignment. But that is naive. That Schoof does not immediately tell journalists what he will do does not indicate that he wills nothing—that he has no ideology or goals or will initiate little as prime minister. No, in his evasiveness, there is power. True power often moves in silence and never answers on command. Power, as power, is not chatty with journalists.
The little we know about Schoof is that he is capable, disciplined, and ambitious, even power-hungry. He tried to become the director-general of the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Defense at the same time; he drew mandates to himself that actually fell under another ministry; and he was the architect of the combined “super-ministry” of the Interior with Justice and Security, which concentrated power and within which he oversaw the formation of a new National Police. In his spare time, Schoof, aged 67, is a long-distance runner, running 90 kilometres weekly with monstrous willpower.
Again and again, he has pushed the limits of the law in securing the country. He had citizens illegally tracked online with fake accounts and an unauthorised agency infiltrating mosques. As chief of the Dutch secret service (AIVD), he was criticised for aggressively targeting the Cornelius Haga Lyceum—an Islamic high school where numerous teachers were propagating anti-Dutch Islamism. In his last position at the Ministry of Justice, he worked on a detention regime for troublesome asylum seekers, which the courts shot down.
Understandably, many, even in right-wing circles, are uneasy about the new prime minister’s assertive, daring, and at times creative approach to law and order. Indeed, it is far from sweet. However, if there is anyone who can translate the right-wing turn among the Dutch electorate into policy successes, it is this tough guy. The Netherlands has found its Dirty Harry.
A convicted killer who is serving over 30 years in prison for the senseless murder of his grandmother’s neighbor has been transferred to the female prison wing after claiming to identify as transgender. Miquel Toni Riera Prats first claimed that he felt like a “female lesbian” last year.
The brutal murder took place in Es Fortí, a neighborhood in Palma, while Riera Prats was traveling to visit his grandmother around Christmas of 2015. A few days after arriving, he went out to a bar with his girlfriend, where he proceeded to get extremely intoxicated on both alcohol and cocaine. At one point, his girlfriend returned back to her home, but Riera Prats went to another bar to consume even more alcohol and drugs.
When he returned to his grandmother’s residential block, he knocked on a neighbor’s door. The woman, Esperanza Ferrutxe, was a 45-year-old bank employee whom he had known since he was a child. Ferrutxe, who was in her pajamas, told Riera Prats that he reeked of alcohol and encouraged him to go back to his grandmother’s apartment. But rather than taking her advice, Riera Prats became violent, shoving the woman and punching her in the face.
When he saw his punch had drawn blood and apparently caused the woman to momentarily stop breathing, Riera Prats dragged the woman further into her house. Despite his later claims that he had “no intention” of killing Ferrutxe, Riera Prats proceeded to strangle her before setting her flat on fire in an effort to destroy evidence of the crime.
A neighbor saw the smoke and called the police. Ferrutxe’s charred corpse was found under a box spring in her bedroom.
Miquel Toni Riera Prats
Riera Prats would later claim he had committed the crime simply because he “got nervous” when the woman yelled at him about being drunk, causing him to lash out. But he would later confess that he also wanted to steal money and jewelry from Ferrutxe, and became increasingly violent when she resisted.
The perpetrator pleaded guilty and the Court of Palma sentenced him to 36 years in prison for the crimes of murder, robbery with violence and arson, but the Supreme Court lowered the sentence to 30 and a half years in January of 2018. The Second Chamber also sentenced Riera Prats to give 50,000 Euros in compensation to each of Ferrutxe’s two brothers.
Riera Prats has been incarcerated for several years in the Zuera prison in Zaragoza, but he began identifying as a woman following the enactment of Spain’s controversial Trans Law last summer. The legislation significantly eased the requirements for a legal name and sex marker change, allowing anyone over the age of 16 to self-declare their gender and receive extensive protection from the Government on the basis of their identity.
Males who self-identify as women no longer need to take hormones, have surgery, or even change their appearance in order to receive the benefits of the law.
Miquel Toni Riera Prats fue condenado a 30 años y medio de cárcel por matar a golpes a su vecina, robarle e incendiar su casa en 2015.https://t.co/kqXH36Pu2O
Riera Prats reportedly began hormone treatment last summer, and the prison administration has now approved his transfer to the female wing.
This decision has generated controversy amongst prison officials, many of whom have said they consider Riera Prats’ alleged “sex change” to be a “fraud.” The prison administration appears to have denied Riera Prats’ request for a change of facility a few times, but finally conceeded in April, according to Última Hora.
The murderer, who has now grown his hair out, has decided to keep his male name, and has told prison officials that he identifies as a female lesbian.
Riera Prats is married to a woman, with whom he was in a relationship before going to prison. His wife, who lives in Palma, travels frequently to Zaragoza to visit him.
Miquel Toni Riera, asesinó a Esperanza Ferrutxe, de 45 años, el 23 de dicembre de 2015. La estranguló, cubrió su cuerpo con un somier e incendió su casa para borrar sus huellas. Hoy es otra de las 5.200 "personas" que según@_anaredondo_ se sienten mejor gracias a la #LeyTranspic.twitter.com/83Lm2XSFtW
— Feministes de Catalunya (@feministes_cat) May 31, 2024
Prior to the enactment of the Trans Law last year, Spanish women’s rights groups warned of the impending consequences of the legislation, including the ability of violent male inmates to be moved to women’s prisons.
On X, Feministes de Canalunya wrote: “Miquel Toni Riera murdered Esperanza Ferrutxe, 45, on December 23, 2015. He strangled her, covered her body with a box spring and set fire to her house to erase his tracks. Today he is another of the 5,200 ‘people’ that, according to @anaredondo, feel better thanks to the #TransLaw.”
A 52-year-old Zambian migrant was sentenced to 18 months of probation after sexually assaulting the 13-year-old daughter of his friend, which means he will not serve any prison time unless he violates his probation.
The sentencing, handed out in a Caen judicial court on May 28, 2024, was for a case dating back to Feb. 19, 2023, in Calvados.
On that day, after spending an evening with his friend, the Zambian migrant’s friend offered to take him home along with two other guests. The 13-year-old daughter of the driver also came along.
The 52-year-old Zambian man, who is seeking asylum in France, ended up sitting in the backseat with the daughter, where he began sexually assaulting the girl, according to French news outlet Ouest France.
The 13-year-old testified in court, saying: “He touched my leg, then my chest. He forced me to kiss him, he took my hand and put it on the fly of his pants.” She stated that the Zambian man also penetrated her anus with his fingers.
The defendant admits to sexually assaulting the girl but denies penetrating her, saying: “I ask myself the question every day: why did I do that? It was the first time in my life.”
The mother of the victim said in court that her daughter has since tried to commit suicide two times due to the incident.
“She was already fragile but what happened accentuated her condition,” said an expert psychiatrist during the trial.
The prosecutor said the defendant is a sexual predator, saying, “As the psychiatrist who examined him said, there is a sort of sexual fixation in the defendant’s life. The impulse towards the victim, which he does not explain and for which he expresses no regret, is particularly serious and worrying.”
Due to the nature of the crime, the age of the victim, and the fact that she has suffered grave psychological harm due to the incident, the prosecutor was seeking two years of imprisonment, deportation, and judicial monitoring of the defendant.
Researchers at Oxford University evaluated over one million English children aged 5 to 11 and adolescents aged 12 to 15 for incidents of myocarditis and pericarditis in relation to the COVID-19 infection and the COVID-19 vaccine.
According to the preprint, myocarditis and pericarditis only occur after vaccination and not after COVID-19 infection.
“Whilst rare, all myocarditis and pericarditis events during the study period occurred in vaccinated individuals,” the authors wrote.
Antyimgracyjny, konserwatywny aktywista został zaatakowany nożem przez islamistę w biały dzień na środku ulicy w Niemieckim Mannheim. Ranny też został policjant.
This video comes from a livestream filmed yesterday by staff of the counter-jihad organisation Bürgerbewegung Pax Europa (BPE) at their stand in Mannheim. It depicts a knife attack perpetrated by a 25 year-old Afghan man known only as Sulaiman A. on the journalist, blogger and political activist Michael Stürzenberger. If you have the stomach, I recommend you watch the video several times; its rich detail make this one of the best documented acts of Islamic terrorism in Germany to date, and there is much to learn from it.
If violent internet videos are not your cup of tea, I’ll narrate it for you:
The footage opens with Sulaiman and Stürzenberger struggling in the background. Blue-jacketed BPE staff pull Sulaiman off his victim, but Sulaiman breaks free and charges, stabbing wildly and wounding Stürzenberger in the face and leg. This footage taken from another angle shows the police intervention more clearly; as is routine for BPE events, officers were already on scene, but for fifteen long seconds they do nothing. It is Stürzenberger’s colleagues themselves who must pull Sulaiman off his victim once again and fight for control of the knife. When the officers do intervene, it is to defend Sulaiman; they free the attacker from the BPE activists, at which point Sulaiman stabs one of the policemen in the neck and another officer finally shoots him. Thereafter, to complete the farce, a female officer restrains the BPE assistant who had been fighting Sulaiman.
The attack follows two sustained mass media freakouts about the grave dangers posed by ‘the extreme right’ in Germany. First the assault on Matthias Ecke in Dresden and then the viral ‘Ausländer raus’ Sylt video have provoked long and tiresome discussions about the dangers of right-wing violence and the brutalisation of political discourse by Alternative für Deutschland. Following Sulaiman’s far more gruesome knife assault, our politicians have nothing to offer but deafening silence.
From what we know, a few extremists clashed with each other – quite obviously the victim and the perpetrator. That could be at least part of the background here, that the victim was attacked because he was such a radical critic of Islam. His previous convictions and criminal history at least point to this. We still don’t know anything about the perpetrator …
Wendt defended the failed police intervention by characterising the attacker as a “knife-wielding hero like out of a Kung-Fu film,” and pleading that it was “unreasonable” to expect officers to get close to such an attacker because the “life-threatening” nature of the situation. Apparently it is too much to expect that television experts even watch publicly available footage of the events on which they comment.
These are just extremely marginalising and very extreme positions that [Stürzenberger] represents. And that is why he is not only labelled as a critic of Islam, but also by some as an Islam hater … Rhetorically, he is a very well-presented but he’s also an extremely irreconcilable right-wing populist.
The Münchner Merkur adopted the same tone yesterday, offering an extended piece detailing not Sulaiman’s assault but all of Stürzenberger’s political crimes:
Stürzenberger injured with a knife in Mannheim? Office for the Protection of the Constitution accuses him of Islamophobia
Stürzenberger was once press spokesman for the Munich CSU and later led the small right-wing party ‘Die Freiheit’ as federal chairman, which was dissolved in 2016. For years and until 2022, he – as well as the Bavarian BPE regional association – was listed by the Bavarian State Office for the Protection of the Constitution under the heading ‘Islamophobia relevant to the protection of the constitution’.
According to this report, there were indications that Stürzenberger was pursuing endeavours ‘aimed at abolishing religious freedom for Muslims’. A ‘fundamental rejection of the Islamic religion’ could be inferred from his statements. Stürzenberger generally equates Islam with terrorism.
I can’t see how that last point should be a problem, given that German journalists and politicians miss no opportunity to equate “right-wing populism” with political violence. In fact, for his thesis Stürzenberger has far better evidence.
There are reports that Stürzenberger writes for the widely-read website PI-News – the abbreviation stands for Politically Incorrect – and reaches many people via YouTube. In 2022 alone, his videos were viewed more than 723,000 times on that site.
He regularly appeared at rallies in German cities. He compares the Koran to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. He tried to block the construction of a mosque in Munich, among other places, and in this connection campaigned for a referendum in the Bavarian capital …
Stürzenberger is also to be blamed for his own stabbing because he stands at two degrees of separation from the evil fascist identitarian activist Martin Sellner:
According to t-online, Stürzenberger has appeared … with a former jihadist from a German Al-Qaeda network, who has established himself in the Islamophobic scene and is close to Martin Sellner. The Austrian has made a name for himself as an activist on the New Right and became known in Germany as a result of his role in the Potsdam meeting on remigration plans uncovered by a Correctiv team.
The Süddeutsche Zeitung once also described Stürzenberger as the face of Bagida, the Munich branch of Pegida, which was founded in 2014 …
T-online reports that Stürzenberger has been convicted four times, twice for incitement to hatred, once for insult and once for using unconstitutional symbols … He was acquitted following in further cases.
Because Stürzenberger is at fault, it is he who must be psychoanalysed, and not his attacker:
Stürzenberger’s obsessive rejection of Islam is said to originate primarily with the death of his former CSU party colleague Ralph Burkei. The former treasurer of the CSU district association in Munich sustained fatal injuries in the Mumbai attacks in November 2008 when he fell onto the canopy while fleeing from the Taj Mahal Hotel, making him one of more than 160 victims of the ten terrorists.
In 2013, taz spoke to another former party colleague of Stürzenberger. “He used to be a sports reporter, an ardent supporter of 1860 Munich, who was often at the football stadium to report from there,” Marian Offman, a longstanding Munich city councillor … told the paper.
They had been on first-name terms. But after his death Stürzenberger started sending anti-Islamic emails. “I tried to dissuade him,” Offman says…
Stürzenberger himself said … of Burkei’s gruesome death: “That was part of my experience with Islam.” Because he felt “ignored” within the CSU, he changed his party membership. And from then on, he was probably not only lost to the party. Afterwards Stürzenberger seems to have focussed solely on his rejection of Islam.
Meanwhile, German Muslim Twitter has filled with tweets and videos praising Sulaiman for the stabbing, to which our noble journalist class naturally maintain a pacific indifference.
You don’t have to agree with Stürzenberger and the counter-jihadists of the BPE to find all of this an utter abomination. For months we have been subjected to unending sermons about right-wing extremism – which, when it isn’t merely a trumped-up artefact of selective reporting, represents precisely a reaction to the grave social problems our idiotic ruling class have inflicted on us. Nobody in power can speak about these problems honestly. Yesterday, in discussing the attack, a journalist for NTV said that the BPE were an organisation opposed to “allegedly political Islam,” just a month after the pro-caliphate demonstrations of “Muslim Interaktiv” in Hamburg.
Our political discourse has become entirely detached from reality, incapable of acknowledging even the most obvious facts and obsessed with false threats of their own making. Stürzenberger is not the problem here. As a German he enjoys the right to speak forthrightly against Islam or any other religion in his native country without being stabbed by a crazy migrant from Afghanistan or harassed by the constitutional protectors. Maybe the people in charge should think about governing on behalf of their own people for once, rather than indulging in insane social engineering projects and population replacement programmes that in the end promise only to destroy them too.
The first paragraph of Meagan Jordan’s May 22 Rolling Stone profile of “abortion doula” Ash Williams is truly a masterpiece of clown-world propaganda:
In 2016, Ash Williams became pregnant for the first time. Williams wants to be a parent eventually — but he wasn’t ready for a child then. He didn’t know much about what an abortion entailed, and he needed a ride, so he called up a friend who drove him. When they got to the clinic, Williams, who is trans, remembers the people working there didn’t care enough to get his name right — using, instead, the name on his license. Never mind asking about pronouns. “Working with the actual provider was really f*****d up, too,” he says. “I just remember he didn’t say one word to me, and I felt sad about that.”
It’s all there, isn’t it? In a single paragraph, we have all of the most insane and insidious progressive views on display. There’s the fiction of the “pregnant man.” There’s the “pregnant man” getting an abortion — that is, a gender-dysphoric female having her child killed by an abortionist. There’s the fact that the abortion clinic staff is faulted not for facilitating feticide but for paying insufficient attention to pronouns.
In this world, killing a baby is fine — but forgetting to call a woman “he” because she identifies as transgender is truly wicked.
But fortunately, Jordan introduces a hero in paragraph two: “After the procedure, Williams’ friend, who also happens to be trans, took over. Without asking what Williams needed, his friend purchased Maxi Pads for aftercare bleeding and cooked him a pot of collard greens with ham hocks to combat the low iron levels the pregnancy caused.” This experience inspired Williams to become an “abortion doula.”
What is an abortion doula? As Jordan notes, a “doula” is usually someone “hired to give support and guidance during labor,” but that’s not what Williams does. Williams “supports patients who choose not to remain pregnant.” Which is to say, Williams assists people who are having their babies violently removed by “accompanying them to procedures and aiding in aftercare, ensuring they have medication and holistic outlets.” One aspect of her job includes fundraising for abortions on social media, which she does rather well.
The Williams profile manages to pervert language on nearly every level. “Abortion and birth often get siloed, and we’ve been made to think that these things are a binary, but they’re really not,” Williams informs Rolling Stone. “For me, abortion is a type of birth.” Which is true, so far as that goes. It’s just the birth of a baby that has been deliberately killed — but in the wake of Roe’s overturn, says Williams, this service is in increasingly high demand.
“As long as there’s people calling me and telling me they need an abortion and they need help, I’m going to do whatever I can,” Williams said. According to Rolling Stone, she “also hosts abortion-doula trainings throughout the country and virtually via Zoom … he (sic) has run seminars on gender justice since receiving an invitation from the abortion clinic where he (sic) had his second abortion, in 2018, to do training for staff.”
Perversely, Williams’ hope for a better world is … people who want to abort their babies. “People are still calling me, asking where to get help to have an abortion, and that’s the source of my hope: abortion seekers,” she told the Rolling Stone reporter, who, as it turns out, had just had her own abortion. Here’s the way Jordan describes their conversation:
On the Friday Williams and I first speak, it’s been a week since I’ve undergone my own abortion. “Congratulations,” he says, genuinely. It throws me off, but in a good way. He’s the first person to celebrate my process, and it feels affirming. “There’s not just sadness and grief, but there’s also so much relief and celebration,” says Williams, who had an abortion shower years after his own procedures. “I believe every person deserves to have the kind of abortion that they want to have, the kind of pregnancy that they want to have.
It’s a potent, eye-watering ending to a profile that manages to showcase everything wrong with our culture in 2024. “Pregnant men.” “Abortion showers.” For that matter, “abortion doulas.” Celebrating someone for an abortion (“Congratulations — it’s dead!”) People “deserve” abortion. It reminds me of a line from Proverbs 8: “All those who hate Me love death.”
JK Rowling has taken aim at Labour and, more specifically, Alastair Campbell after he shared his disgruntled response to the Tories’ new Equality Act 2010 proposals.
As it stands, “sex” is one of the identifying traits protected under the act which makes it illegal for someone to discriminate against.
However, the term “sex” has become a disputed characteristic with some arguing that it can apply to people who have a gender recognition certificate, something that allows them to change their legal sex on their birth certificate.
The Tories’ plans for it to only apply to biological sex at birth is part of the party’s pledge to “tidy up the law so that we can create a better space for this conversation and make it less toxic”, according to Secretary of State for Business and Trade and President of the Board of Trade and Minister for Women and Equalities, Kemi Badenoch.
But Campbell isn’t persuaded, taking to X, formerly Twitter, on Monday to comment: “I’m sure the world of trade and business will take note that the actual Secretary of State for trade and business has decided that the biggest issue on her agenda on her first big election outing is the weaponisation of trans rights.
“Anyone might be tempted to think @KemiBadenoch has less interest in the general election than the internal ideological s**tshow likely to follow it.”
One person quick to hit back at Campbell’s claim was Rowling, who is no stranger to sparking national debate with her views on trans rights.
She slammed Campbell and Labour as a whole as she replied: “Badenoch is also Minister for Women and Equalities.
“Thanks once again for highlighting Labour’s complacency and indifference towards the rights of half the electorate.”
Badenoch is also Minister for Women and Equalities. Thanks once again for highlighting Labour’s complacency and indifference towards the rights of half the electorate. https://t.co/ioChg8ELgV
The proposals by the Tories ahead of July’s General Election have sparked questions as to why to implement it now and whether it will diminish the “confusion” the party claims it will.
Speaking to Isabel Webster and Eamonn Holmes on GB News on Monday, Badenoch stood by the plans as she told the People’s Channel viewers: “(The issue) has been toxified. There’s a lot of confusion about what the law actually says because terminology is changing.
“So what we’re doing is clarifying the terms of the act which says that the protected characteristic of sex in the Equality Act refers to biological sex.
“That will also help those parts of the Equality Act which creates exemptions for single-sex spaces.”
When Eamonn probed further by suggesting the plans were part of a “penis prominence” change, Badenoch replied: “If you wanna put it that way. It’s not quite how I would put it.
“It’s about your biological sex being what you were born as being protected in the act. Over the last couple of decades, people now talk about sex and gender. In law, those used to be the same thing but now when we talk about them, they’re different things.
“One is the biological sex the other is maybe what you choose to present as or how you identify.
“But the problem we’re solving is for many organisations like Rape Crisis Centres (and) prisons where people may identify as a woman even though they’re biologically male and they don’t know what to do.
“We’re clarifying what public authorities need to do, what private institutions’ rights are, a lot of them are worried about being sued even when they’re doing the right thing.
“So this is a tidying up of law so that we can create a better space for this conversation and make it less toxic, less heated, protect women and children and also most importantly protect those trans people who have had their issues used by many others who have nothing to do with them but are exploiting the law for other purposes.”
Labour’s shadow defence secretary John Healey has had his say on the proposals, telling BBC Radio 5 Live the change “isn’t needed” and that it was “an election distraction from the really core issues that matter to people “.
He said the Equality Act “already protects single-sex spaces for biological women” but did acknowledge there was a need for “clearer guidance”, something he promised Labour would produce.
In the omnipresent murky world of public-private ‘consultancy’ there exists a British firm called ‘Capita’ what is known as ‘consultancy.’ Large swathes of British and Irish institutions ‘outsource’ the jobs that they should be providing themselves, to companies like ‘Capita.’ The problems that this produces are on a vast scale and resembles a guava worm in a bottle of Mescal, getting plastered for free.
In 2000 the British army numbered 110,000. The last count, in 2023, we were down to 77,000. The Ministry of Defence now, through Capita, faces a wave of BAME recruitment targets. This means that recruitment is targeted towards women, gay, and ethnic minority groups. Call me old fashioned — but this is no way to run an army in the 21st century, with multiple arena threats from China, Russia. However, the biggest threat to the West, especially the UK and US, is domestic terror — the terror of liberalism.
Shakespeare wrote of the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, where the English, outnumbered by the French, hungry and decimated, defeated a French army. The English King Henry V fought in battle himself, in hand-to-hand fighting:
‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our English dead! In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man As modest stillness and humility; But when the blast of war blows in our ears, Then imitate the action of the tiger: Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood’.
War was unwelcome and protracted negotiations had been ongoing with the French for about a year. Unfortunately, Henry’s ‘reasonable’ offer — two million crowns for the captured John II, most of the territory of Northern France and the hand of Charles IV’s daughter plus a dowry of two million, was rejected by the surly French. In 2010 in the U.S., a belated ‘trial’ of Henry V took place through justices Ginsburg and Alito and Henry V was found guilty in his absence, ostensibly for the killing of French prisoners of war. The Nuremburg trials were nearly as futile. The Russians raped and murdered two million German citizens in their march to Berlin in 1945. Of course, this was ‘omitted’ at Nuremburg. Replying to a question by the judge as to why he was in court — Goering famously replied ‘Because we lost.’
Now we have liberalism in all its grubby silliness. The precis here is not to favour any nation or cause, or to rewrite history, but to highlight the special liberal ‘metaphysic’ of war: the abandonment of moral ideology by liberals; the relativity of liberal notions of justice. We cannot face abhorrent threats, from wherever, with the liberal mannequins of war, with ‘sexualised’ youth or transgender quotas. It is what defeated the U.S. in Vietnam. It is the poison which is nullifying UK preparedness for war, as they talk of conscription. Will we have to rename the British regiments — no more the ‘Irish Guards’, ‘The Gurkhas’, ‘1st Royal Regiment of Foot’, ‘The Queen’s Own Light Dragoons’. Now we shall have the ‘2nd Transgender Infantry’, ‘The Black Lives Matter Infantry’ and the ‘Queer Fusiliers.’ The corruption of the liberal worm, that cancerous germ which James Burnham noted in the 1950s in his seminal The Suicide of the West, has come home to roost.
For there is a queer confusion in liberal thinking. Tolstoy opines in War and Peace that:
“To us, it is incomprehensible that millions of Christian men killed and tortured each other because Napoleon was ambitious or Alexander was firm, or because England’s policy was astute or the Duke of Oldenburg was wronged. We cannot grasp what connection such circumstances have the with the actual fact of slaughter and violence: why because the Duke was wronged, thousands of men from the other side of Europe killed and ruined the people of Smolensk and Moscow and were killed by them.”
Beneath these same stars of Christianity, a commonality exists. Now this community and spirit is destroyed by liberalism. It is dissected by reason, split into parts, examined. It is called liberal reason. The final straw of liberalism is its nineteenth century joining to capital. It is the abandonment of everything to the market. It is the ‘ptolemisation’ of liberalism, its death throes. Black Lives Matter, Greens, Armies, Families, Corporates become another market for capital. War is a gargantuan business; the European firms fishing in the Zelensky River of Keynesian funds. The BlackRocks and Halliburtons, the happy ‘merry go round’ of death. Homo Liberalis, unlike other species, cannot rest easy, there must be constant ‘progress’ and progress is defined by scientism, technology, and war.
The end game of liberalism, its corruption, its denouement, is this neglect of any political theology, any underlying metaphysic or principle. We need a Copernican revolution. Nietzsche had proclaimed that ‘God is Dead,’ but what replaced him? Augusto del Noce, the Italian philosopher of the postwar period, saw this secular wasteland as the logical outcome of reason and technology. This nothingness, this apathy eats away at the soul of homo liberalis. Now, with wolves at the chicken run, they will ask the white working class to take up arms against the ‘enemy.’ From Kensington in Philadelphia to the slums of Glasgow, the heroin-infested cesspits of Naples or the ethnic, broken sink estates of Sweden — the white working class can’t hear the trumpet calls. They have been told for a generation they are at the bottom of the ladder. Worthless scum compared to the transgenders and the ethnic groups at the forefront of cultural Marxism. No more rallying calls from Henry V, no poppies blowing in the red-blood skies of the Somme. No flags at Iwo Jima. It is the nadir of the West, of liberalism. Nothing matters but the dollar and the loyal boys of Agincourt won’t be coming to their rescue this time.
Brian Patrick Bolger LSE, University of Liverpool. He has taught political philosophy and applied linguistics in Universities across Europe. His articles have appeared in the US, the UK, Italy, Canada and Germany in magazines such as ‘The American Spectator‘, ‘Asian Affairs‘, ‘Deliberatio’, ‘L’Indro Quotidiano Indipendente di Geopolitica‘, ’The National Interest’, ‘GeoPolitical Monitor’, ‘Merion West’, ‘Voegelin View’, ‘The Montreal Review‘, ’The European Conservative’, ‘Visegrad Insight’, The Hungarian Review‘ ,’The Salisbury Review’, ‘The Village’, ‘New English Review’, ‘The Burkean’, ‘ ‘The Daily Globe’, ‘American Thinker’, ‘The Internationalist’, ‘Philosophy News’. His new book- Nowhere Fast: Democracy and Identity in the Twenty First Century is published now by Ethics International Press.
