Interesting (video, 10:28).
Our last general election manifesto is here.
Our YouTube channel is here, our Facebook channel here, our Twitter channel here.
If everyone who read this gave us £5.00 – or even better, £5.00 or more, monthly – we could change the world. £5.00 monthly would entitle you to Bronze party membership, details here. Benefits include a dedicated and signed book by Mike Buchanan. Click below to make a difference. Thanks.
A typically strong piece by Rod Liddle in the new edition of The Spectator:
A woman called Jenny Jones, now elevated to Baroness Moonbeam, or something, in the House of Lords has proposed a 6 p.m. curfew for all men everywhere. This would prevent men from killing women on the streets. Mrs Moonbeam is a member of the Green party and presumably agrees with their manifesto which insists that men who identify as women are women and there’s an end to it. In which case all I would need to do is don a wig and take to the streets — and upon being apprehended by a policeman simply explain that my name was Loretta and I’d just popped out to do a spot of murdering, I mean shopping, officer. Technically speaking, I wouldn’t even need to bother with the wig. That’s one flaw in the mad woman’s argument, then.
Another is that henceforth men might feel constrained to cram all their malfeasance into the daylight hours, thus quite overwhelming the emergency services. A third is that under Queen Moonshine’s proposals, after six o’clock men will be cosily ensconced at home with their wives or girlfriends. But here’s the thing: when women are attacked, it is overwhelmingly by members of their own family and usually their male spouses. Attacks by random strangers are comparatively rare (especially in the UK). So the proposal could well lead to a quite dramatic increase in the very problem the imbecilic woman is attempting to solve.
But Jenny Jones was not really attempting to solve any problem at all; it was, instead, a reflexive moment of spite and gender-based hatred from a woman who has a long and noble record of this kind of stuff. The horrible epidemic of stabbings and shootings we’ve seen in London these past five years is concentrated among youngish BAME men. If I were to suggest a 6 p.m. curfew for all young BAME people as a corrective measure I would rightly be condemned as both a bigot and an idiot. But Jones’s proposal found traction and was being considered by the First Minister of Wales. Luckily for men there is little point in going out after 6 p.m. in Wales anyway; I know from experience.
The body of Sarah Everard was found on 10 March in woodland near Ashford in Kent. It was a horrific murder. But we have heard very little about the poor woman for the past two weeks. Such is the overweening narcissism of the times that her killing was immediately co-opted into the political armoury to make a wider complaint about men and the nuclear family — despite the fact that the circumstances of Sarah’s death were extraordinarily unusual, statistically.
There are very few countries in the world where women are less likely to be attacked by a stranger than the UK. But the facts do not matter, so long as a dozen or so columnists can scream ‘#MeToo!’ for 800 words — and then go on to explain how a bloke once chatted them up in a bar, or spoke to them unbidden on a train. And how as a consequence we need to do something.
No. Not remotely comparable to a woman who was abducted and killed — and an insult to her family and friends who are trying to grieve for her. But you see, it’s all allowable, because this was a George Floyd moment. Or a Harvey Weinstein moment. Everything these days is. A singularity occurs and the pile-on begins: Me! Me! Me! This is what I have to experience every day! It’s all about me! Or, desperate to get in on the act, their husband columnists: ‘A man wolf-whistled my wife while she was out jogging in Queen’s Park.’
Meanwhile the whole thing is ratcheted up by the radical left, including the Socialist Workers party (which has a very interesting history of ignoring violence against women), and a shrill fugue consisting of concatenations — on the BBC, in the press, on social media — soon convinces the government that we need plain-clothed policemen in bars to stop men being a bit lairy to women while the Welsh decide whether to ban men entirely. And those who raise even a vague question about this stuff — Davina McCall, university professors, even a close friend of the murdered woman — are vilified and seen, in the eyes of the crusaders, as being almost as bad as the man who killed Sarah Everard. The enablers. Cancel them!
Much of this wretchedness has been visited on us by the immediacy of social media, but it is also a consequence of affluent, liberal western societies in which the absurdities of identitarian politics hold sway. Men commit the overwhelming majority of violent crime. That is true of every country in the world. It is true of every society which has ever existed, for 40,000 years. There are solid evolutionary and biological reasons for this, some involving testosterone but also more complex stuff concerning competition between sperm.
What is undoubted is that these fundamental differences between men and women are utterly innate, hard-wired and not simply the product of social conditioning. We in the UK have gone further than almost any other society in addressing how one can harness the benefits (which are many) of gender differences — and minimise the obvious downsides. But quite how feminists can continue to insist simultaneously that women are ‘better’ than men, that men dominate women, and that men and women are born more or less identical is an utter mystery to me.
Meanwhile, remember Sarah Everard. The real victim in all of this. Such a terrible end to a wonderful life.
You can subscribe to The Spectator here.
Our last general election manifesto is here.
Our YouTube channel is here, our Facebook channel here, our Twitter channel here.
If everyone who read this gave us £5.00 – or even better, £5.00 or more, monthly – we could change the world. £5.00 monthly would entitle you to Bronze party membership, details here. Benefits include a dedicated and signed book by Mike Buchanan. Click below to make a difference. Thanks.
Enjoy (video, 4:07).
Our last general election manifesto is here.
Our YouTube channel is here, our Facebook channel here, our Twitter channel here.
If everyone who read this gave us £5.00 – or even better, £5.00 or more, monthly – we could change the world. £5.00 monthly would entitle you to Bronze party membership, details here. Benefits include a dedicated and signed book by Mike Buchanan. Click below to make a difference. Thanks.
Dear Mike Buchanan,
Welcome to the Free Speech Union’s weekly newsletter. This newsletter is a brief round-up of the free speech news of the week.
In an extensive analysis for Spiked, Frank Furedi explores the belief of many on “what passes for the left” that “the very real existence of a free-speech crisis is not only a fantasy, but a product of a right-wing, no doubt Tory conspiracy”. This “free-speech-crisis denialism” is underpinned by a wholesale rejection of free speech “as an inviolable moral good” and reaches its apotheosis with the view that free speech is opposed to life itself, which Furedi describes as “a form of moral blackmail”.
Noah Carl demolishes the same denialism in Quillette, albeit using more moderate language.
The government has accepted an amendment to the Domestic Abuse Bill that would require all the police forces in England and Wales to keep a record of those crimes that are motivated by hatred of the victim’s sex or gender – widely written up in the press as making misogyny a hate crime, although in reality it is a staging post on the road to that destination. The move is a concession to campaign groups seeking greater protection for women – a campaign given increased urgency by the killing of Sarah Everard. Spiked columnist Ella Whelan argues that women must refuse to live in fear, saying: “Making misogyny a hate crime writes into law that women cannot handle public life without the watchful eye of the state. This is not the politics of freedom; it is the politics of fear.”
Joanna Williams, founder of the think tank Cieo, questions the idea of relying on the perception of the victim to determine whether an assailant was motivated by hatred of your sex or gender, which is what the police will have to do, there being no objective test of whether a person was motivated by misogyny. It is important, she argues, to hear women’s “lived experiences of sexual harassment”, but the problem of using “entirely subjective responses to create apparently concrete data sets” should not be ignored. Williams says: “There is no formula for determining how many personal truths comprise a universal truth.”
The FSU tweeted on Thursday: “If last night’s amendment on ‘misogyny’ becomes law, it’ll be taken by police as instruction to record more ‘non-crime hate incidents’ against people’s names in police databases. Perception-based reporting has a chilling effect on free speech and should be scrapped, not expanded.”
“Policing tweets is so much easier than policing streets,” former police officer Harry Miller told Talk Radio this week. Miller’s legal challenge to the College of Policing’s practice of recording ‘non-crime hate incidents’ (NCHIs) at the Court of Appeal was heard last week, and he hopes for a judgement before Easter. He said: “If we win, the consequences are absolutely huge for the police and if we lose the consequences are huge to free speech.” FSU deputy director of research Emma Webb added that the monitoring and recording of NCHIs is “the mass surveillance of people’s opinions on controversial subjects by the police without this being mandated by Parliament”. You can read a report on NCHIs by Radomir Tylecote, the FSU’s research director, here.
The FSU is supporting Harry Miller’s appeal via its ‘Fighting Fund’ on GoFundMe. If he loses and the Court orders him to pay the College of Policing’s cost, he’ll be out of pocket big time. You can donate to the GoFundMe here. If Harry is successful, we’ll use the money to fight other free speech cases.
The National Catholic Register has published an article examining the difficulties faced by pro-life students on British university campuses. When president of Glasgow University’s Students for Life Grace Deignan first tried to set up a pro-life student group, she says, “We were told we couldn’t become a group on campus because the university didn’t take a stance on abortion. But after discovering there were already three pro-abortion societies active on campus, we knew we were being silenced.”
Julia Rynkiewicz, a midwifery student at the University of Nottingham, was suspended from her hospital placement when the University learned of her pro-life views. After a four-month investigation, her suspension was overturned, and she eventually got a financial settlement and an apology, but the ordeal set her back a year in her studies.
FSU General Secretary Toby Young is quoted in the article, saying: “The free-speech crisis at Britain’s universities is very real.” He pointed out that a survey commissioned in 2017 by the UCU, Britain’s largest academic trade union, found that free speech was less well protected in Britain’s universities than in every other EU member state bar one and since then “things have got worse by an order of magnitude”.
Raquel Rosario Sánchez, president of the University of Bristol’s feminist society has been removed from her post by the Students’ Union after a complaint was made by a trans student over the society’s refusal to admit trans women to women-only meetings about violence against women. The society, called Women Talk Back, has written an open letter to Education Secretary Gavin Williamson objecting to the decision. Ms Rosario Sánchez said: “Women have a right to single-sex spaces when we are talking about sensitive matters.”
An online conference called “Replatforming Deplatformed Women” held its first meeting this week at Cambridge University, featuring female speakers who have been disinvited from public engagements for alleged transphobia. The University was supportive, saying: “Rigorous debate is fundamental to the pursuit of academic excellence and the university will always be a place where freedom of speech is strongly encouraged.” (Tell that to Jordan Peterson, who was no-platformed by the University in 2019.)
Student Elizabeth Heverin was given a two-week ban by the Aberdeen University Students’ Association, preventing her from setting foot in the Association’s buildings, for saying “Rule Britannia” during a discussion about military recruitment on campus. The debate concerned the renewal of the students’ union’s commitment to a “demilitarised campus” because some students said “the presence of military personnel on campus would make them feel uncomfortable, due to links with colonialism and the British Empire”. Heverin, who disagreed with the policy, said: “It feels like I’ve been prosecuted for the crime of being patriotic”. Toby commented: “This is a misguided attempt to silence someone based on ignorant guesswork about their political values. Trying to silence people you suspect of harbouring unfashionable views through bans or by no-platforming them should have no place at a university.” The ban on military personnel on campus was eventually overturned.
Responding to the story in an interview with Nick Ferrari on Talk Radio, Calvin Robinson called it “bonkers” and urged people to “support free speech at all costs”.
The FSU has written to the President of the Students’ Association asking her to overturn the punishment, apologise to Elizabeth Heverin and assure other students that they won’t face the same fate if they utter the words “Rule Britannia”.
Writing in The Critic, Jack Stacey compares Winston Marshall from Mumford & Sons, now taking time away from the band to “examine my blind spots”, with Winston Smith, the central character of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. The banjo player’s recent apology for praising journalist Andy Ngo’s book on Antifa on Twitter amounts to a public declaration that he, like his Orwellian counterpart, finally loves “his Big Brothers and Sisters or, in genderqueer-friendly parlance, Siblings”.
Canadian editor of Quillette Jonathan Kay has written about the predicament of freelance journalist Jesse Singal, who has been the subject of “a malicious and wilfully dishonest propaganda campaign” accusing him of transphobia, sexual exploitation, “slut-shaming” and more, none of which have been backed by a scintilla of evidence. Kay observes that the main victims of cancel culture tend not to be conservatives but rather “heterodox liberals who simply offer a dissenting opinion”. Singal is “a liberal whose words are read by other liberals”, and it is his independent-minded deviations from woke orthodoxy, particularly on the subject of gender dysphoria in children, that make him the target of “those who view the issue of trans rights through the Manichean lens of blessed dogma and wicked heresy”. Their goal “is to excommunicate, silence, and demonetise one of the few journalists who’s actually researched the science that should guide our treatment of dysphoric children”.
Writers concerned about cancel culture could do worse than read “How to Survive Cancel Culture as a Writer” by Thomas Umstattd Jr. His advice includes: “don’t be a jerk”, “don’t apologize to trolls”, “pick your enemies”, “own your own platform”, and “stand your ground”.
The latest Charlie Hebdo cover, which features a cartoon of the Queen kneeling on Meghan Markle’s neck, has caused outrage and criticism for its obvious reference to the death of George Floyd (and its implication that the Queen is racist). But according to Spiked, the attacks on the magazine for making light of George Floyd’s killing are absurd: “Charlie does not discriminate when it comes to causing offence. Quite the opposite: it is an equal-opportunities blasphemer.”
FSU Director Douglas Murray made on appearance this week on the Telegraph’s podcast Planet Normal, discussing identity politics and the increasing divisions in society. He argues that progressive radicals are playing weird and dangerous games in the name of equality which will ultimately “provoke anger and angst and recognition of difference rather than an erasure of difference”.
In response to an increasing number of messages expressing concerns about cancel culture and critical race theory, American economist and podcaster Glenn Loury has set up an email address so people worried about the Maoist climate sweeping America can contact him: thework@glennshow.com. “Please do NOT use it if what you have is a general question, a suggestion for an interview, or a note of support,” he said. “Please DO use it to tell us about the ways the zeitgeist is manifesting itself at your place of employment; about the help you might need from us or other members of our community; about the ways you would want to see this initiative to evolve in; or about the contribution you would like to make yourself.”
Professor Andrew Tettenborn, a member of the FSU’s Legal Advisory Council, argues that the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, which passed its second reading this week, will not only give “police worryingly unlimited power to suppress public protests” but could also “criminalise almost any public speech online, in posters or for that matter in newspapers, if enough people are prepared to complain about it”. The implications of this are so horrific, he says, that any progress on free speech made by groups such as the FSU could be rolled back all at once by “this catch-all provision apt to catch any speech where a pressure group can whip up enough of its supporters to say they are seriously distressed by it”.
Andrew Doyle, the pro-free speech campaigner and comic genius behind the Twitter character Titania McGrath, has been hired by GB News to be the channel’s wokeness correspondent, monitoring the excesses of woke culture. As a member of the FSU’s Advisory Council, Andrew is the second FSU figure to be snapped up by the new channel, the first being founding director Inaya Folarin Iman. Should it change its name to FSU News? The new channel – which is shaping up to be a refreshing alternative to the BBC News Channel and Sky News – is due to launch later this year.
We’ve received several requests to make it possible to share these newsletters on social media, so we’ve added the option to post them on various social media platforms, including Twitter and Facebook. Just click on the buttons below.
If someone has shared this newsletter with you and you’d like to join the FSU, you can find our website here.
Kind regards,
Andrew Mahon
Our last general election manifesto is here.
Our YouTube channel is here, our Facebook channel here, our Twitter channel here.
If everyone who read this gave us £5.00 – or even better, £5.00 or more, monthly – we could change the world. £5.00 monthly would entitle you to Bronze party membership, details here. Benefits include a dedicated and signed book by Mike Buchanan. Click below to make a difference. Thanks.
A tip of the hat to Elizabeth Hobson for this (video, 3:02). I’ve been in a couple of discussions with this idiotic Belgian feminist, and I applaud Elizabeth for keeping cool in the face of the woman’s idiocy.
Our last general election manifesto is here.
Our YouTube channel is here, our Facebook channel here, our Twitter channel here.
If everyone who read this gave us £5.00 – or even better, £5.00 or more, monthly – we could change the world. £5.00 monthly would entitle you to Bronze party membership, details here. Benefits include a dedicated and signed book by Mike Buchanan. Click below to make a difference. Thanks.
Our thanks to Martin for this.
Our last general election manifesto is here.
Our YouTube channel is here, our Facebook channel here, our Twitter channel here.
If everyone who read this gave us £5.00 – or even better, £5.00 or more, monthly – we could change the world. £5.00 monthly would entitle you to Bronze party membership, details here. Benefits include a dedicated and signed book by Mike Buchanan. Click below to make a difference. Thanks.
A piece just published by Breitbart. The start:
The UK’s policing minister has suggested that schools should teach boys how to treat women in public, as feminists and far-leftists continue to hijack the tragic death of Sarah Everard to advance an anti-male agenda.
Our last general election manifesto is here.
Our YouTube channel is here, our Facebook channel here, our Twitter channel here.
If everyone who read this gave us £5.00 – or even better, £5.00 or more, monthly – we could change the world. £5.00 monthly would entitle you to Bronze party membership, details here. Benefits include a dedicated and signed book by Mike Buchanan. Click below to make a difference. Thanks.
Our thanks to Nigel for this. He writes:
There really is no end of people you could put in a “group”. It is such a fool’s errand to attempt to prevent all hurt “feelings”. I simply don’t believe my upbringing was so extraordinary in the sixties and seventies. In a prosperous working-class area we were taught all the “Christian virtues”, but of course there were always a few who were rude, or bullies, or just plain nasty. As far as I can see my children too know about the “golden rule” and what decent behaviour is and isn’t. Like the bizarre idea that there needs to be some “new” education to ensure boys aren’t nasty to girls en masse, when “never hit girls” and “mind your language in front of girls” appears as much a part of male socialization now as it was in the 1960s.
There comes a point surely where we have to admit that trying to respond to every possibility someone will transgress manners by an ever growing manual of perfect behaviour, overseen by police, can’t substitute for teaching some very basic principles of decent behaviour to be applied to all people.
Our last general election manifesto is here.
Our YouTube channel is here, our Facebook channel here, our Twitter channel here.
If everyone who read this gave us £5.00 – or even better, £5.00 or more, monthly – we could change the world. £5.00 monthly would entitle you to Bronze party membership, details here. Benefits include a dedicated and signed book by Mike Buchanan. Click below to make a difference. Thanks.
Our last general election manifesto is here.
Our YouTube channel is here, our Facebook channel here, our Twitter channel here.
If everyone who read this gave us £5.00 – or even better, £5.00 or more, monthly – we could change the world. £5.00 monthly would entitle you to Bronze party membership, details here. Benefits include a dedicated and signed book by Mike Buchanan. Click below to make a difference. Thanks.
Enjoy (video, 33:52).
Our last general election manifesto is here.
Our YouTube channel is here, our Facebook channel here, our Twitter channel here.
If everyone who read this gave us £5.00 – or even better, £5.00 or more, monthly – we could change the world. £5.00 monthly would entitle you to Bronze party membership, details here. Benefits include a dedicated and signed book by Mike Buchanan. Click below to make a difference. Thanks.
Justice for Men & Boys 