We’re linking daily to selected audio / video files from our YouTube channel. Today’s file is here (audio, 7:40).

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Interesting.

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Dear Mike Buchanan,

Welcome to the FSU’s weekly newsletter, our round-up of the free speech news of the week. As with all our work, this newsletter depends on the support of our members and donors, so if you’re not already a paying member please sign up today or encourage a friend to join and help turn the tide against cancel culture. You can share our newsletters on social media with the buttons at the bottom of this email (although not if you’re reading this on a desktop). If someone has shared this newsletter with you and you’d like to join the FSU, you can find our website here.

Latest episode of the FSU’s weekly podcast out now

The latest episode of our weekly podcast is now available. This week, much of Tom and Ben’s conversation is taken up with a review of the best free speech related books in 2023, including several authors who have starred on earlier podcast episodes, such as Matt Johnson and Sharron Davies. Other recommendations range from Justin Brierly’s The surprising rebirth of belief in God through to a new book by Greg Lukianoff (president of FIRE in the USA) and Rikki Schlott, The Cancelling of the American Mind: how cancel culture undermines trust, destroys institutions and threatens us all. The episode is essential listening if you would like some fresh Christmas present ideas!

Tom and Ben also discuss the latest and rather surprising victim of cancel culture – public holidays. The Canadian Human Rights Commission recently published a report arguing that statutory holidays in Canada are an example of “present day systemic religious discrimination”. In the UK, meanwhile, the Equality and Human Rights Commission is under investigation for suggesting that the definition of sex in the 2010 Equality Act should be clarified so it better protects sex-based women’s rights. As reported last week, tightening the wording to ‘biological sex’ would amount to “actively harming trans people”, according to trans rights activists.

Presidents of Harvard, MIT and Penn make fools of themselves in Congress

Much bruhaha across the Atlantic after three heads of Ivy League universities were hauled before Congress to explain why they hadn’t done more about pro-Palestinian, genocidal chants on their campuses. New York Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik asked all three if “calling for the genocide of Jews” went against the codes of conduct at Harvard, MIT and Penn and all three presidents said it depended on the context.

Liz Magill, the President of Penn, realised she’d made a poor fist of it and put out a statement the following day. “In that moment,” she said, referring to her answer to Stefanik, “I was focused on our university’s longstanding policies aligned with the US Constitution, which says that speech alone is not punishable. I was not focused on, but I should have been, the irrefutable fact that a call for genocide of Jewish people is a call for some of the most terrible violence human beings can perpetrate. It’s evil – plain and simple.”

Having decided that such calls would in fact constitute ‘harassment’ of Jewish students, Magill announced that Penn would no longer rely on the US Constitution as a guide when it comes to what limits to place on freedom of expression, but “initiate a serious and careful look at our policies” to make sure they do more to tackle “hate proliferating across our campus and our world”.

This, of course, was exactly the wrong response. As Steven Pinker observed on X, she should have said that the tolerance shown to pro-Palestinian protestors at Penn – provided they don’t breach the First Amendment – would henceforth be extended to other, equally controversial speech on campus:

The wrong way for the elite universities to dig themselves out their reputational hole: restrict speech even more.

Instead:

1. Clear & coherent free speech policy.
2. Institutional neutrality: Universities are forums, not protagonists.
3. Force prohibited: No more heckler’s vetoes, building takeovers, classroom invasions, intimidations, blockades, assaults.
4. Disempower DEI bureaucrats, responsible to no one, who have turned campuses into laughingstocks.
5. Viewpoint diversity: Discourage political & intellectual monocultures (including hard-left/PoMo/‘intersectional’).

The reason the three Ivy League presidents got into such a pickle is because they haven’t displayed the same forbearance when it comes to other students with controversial views. As Brendan O’Neill pointed out in Spiked, these same university administrators have overseen the creation of ‘safe spaces’, introduced policies prohibiting ‘microaggressions’ and done nothing to stop noisy protestors vetoing conservative speakers on campus. “Jews clearly are not covered by the new moral order on campus,” Brendan concluded.

I was a guest on Brendan’s podcast this week in which we discussed this and other matters. You can listen to that here.

FSU Comedy Benefit on 20th December

There are just under two weeks to go until our spectacular, annual Comedy Benefit on Wednesday 20th December. Our MC for the evening is FSU favourite Dominic Frisby and he will be joined on stage by a fantastic line-up: Francis Foster, Daniel O’Reilly, Tania Edwards and Alistair Williams. (Alistair has just won the British Comedian of the Year Award.)

Come and let your hair down with the FSU staff as we celebrate another successful year defending free speech. So, round up your friends and family and get your tickets here. You will also be able to purchase the perfect Christmas gifts – our brand-new tote bags, featuring inspiring free speech quotes, as well as gift memberships for the FSU (which you can purchase now here).

Conservative MP Bob Stewart appealing conviction for hate crime

Veteran Tory MP Colonel Bob Stewart was convicted of a hate crime last month after being deemed to have committed a “racially aggravated public-order offence” during an altercation with a heckler outside the Bahraini embassy (Express, Telegraph, Times). According to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) press release, “he used racist language towards the victim”, and demonstrated “racial hostility likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress to those present at the time”.

Anyone reading that description of Mr Stewart could be forgiven for conjuring images of a card-carrying member of the National Front, but raw footage of the incident reveals that the reality was rather different.

A video recorded by Sayed Ahmed Alwadaei from the UK-based Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy shows him confronting Mr Stewart last December while the MP was leaving an event organised by the Bahraini embassy at the Foreign Office’s Leicester House.

Mr Alwadaei, who is off camera, can be heard accusing Mr Stewart of “selling” himself to Bahrain. (Mr Stewart is an ex-Army Officer who was stationed in Bahrain in the 1960s.) Visibly annoyed, Mr Stewart responds: “Get stuffed. Bahrain’s a great place. End of.” A fractious exchange ensues, and at one point Mr Stewart can be heard telling Mr Alwadaei to “Go back to Bahrain”.

All part of the rough and tumble of democratic politics, you might think. And yet the Metropolitan Police saw things differently – so much so, in fact, that when a complaint was lodged by the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy regarding Mr Stewart’s off-the-cuff remark about Mr Alwadaei “going back to Bahrain”, they launched an investigation.

The denouement came last month when Westminster Magistrates’ Court found the MP guilty of racially abusing a member of the public. Asked during the trial how Mr Stewart’s comments made him feel, Mr Alwadaei replied: “I feel that I was dehumanised, that I was someone who is not wanted in the UK. I did not feel safe after that incident.”

Following the one-day trial, Mr Stewart was convicted of a racially aggravated public order offence and fined £600, forcing him to resign the Conservative whip in the House of Commons. Now, Mr Stewart is appealing that verdict with the case due to be heard in the Crown Court next Friday. He has already run up huge costs, so we’re asking our members to support the crowdfunder that a fellow MP has set up to help him with his expenses. You can find the crowdfunder here.

The veteran MP served in the Army for nearly 30 years, including stints in Northern Ireland and Bosnia, and has pledged to donate to the Royal British Legion any amount above the level needed to meet his costs.

Forthcoming FSU events in Belfast and Manchester – tickets now available

We will be kicking off the New Year with our first visit to Belfast, and for this inaugural event we have invited an incredible panel of speakers – Toby Young, Andrew Doyle, Stella O’Malley, David Quinn, Ella Whelan and Jeffrey Dudgeon – to discuss ‘The State of Free Speech in Northern Ireland’. Please mark the evening of Friday 26th January in your new diaries and calendars and start making plans to get to the beautiful Titanic Hotel in Belfast for an evening of debate and socialising. Tickets are selling very fast, so do book here now to avoid disappointment.

From Belfast we’ll be hotfooting it to Manchester: on Saturday 3rd February, we’ll be at The Anthony Burgess Foundation for a night of discussion with a spot of live music thrown in too. Toby Young will be speaking to Sean Corby and Denise Fahmy, two courageous FSU members who we have helped through legal battles to defend the importance of viewpoint diversity in the workplace. Sean is a professional musician, and as well as explaining why it mattered so much to him to take a principled stand, he will be playing from his extensive jazz repertoire. Tickets are on sale here.

Conversion therapy ban still looms large

Sorry to bang on about this, but we need you to keep writing to your MPs urging them to oppose a bill banning conversion therapy. On Wednesday, a Westminster Hall debate took place in which a succession of Labour MPs urged the government to bring forward such a bill – and there’s still a risk that the government will publish one in due course. Kemi Badenoch, the Minister for Women and Equalities, said as much in a House of Commons debate on Wednesday. In addition, a private members bill in the Lords banning conversion therapy is due to have its second reading next month and another private members bill, this one proposed by the Brighton MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle, is also due to be debated next month.

In case you need reminding, ‘conversion therapy’ as commonly understood is already illegal in this country. So what is it the LGBTQ+ lobby wants to ban? The answer is, they want to criminalise any conversations between health professionals and gender-confused adolescents and between parents and their children that are intended to steer people away from having irreversible medical procedures. If you need reminding why the FSU is opposing a gender conversion therapy ban, visit our home page.

Please use our campaigning tool to contact your MP and tell them not to vote for any such bill and urge the Prime Minister not to publish one. It only takes a couple of minutes to fill out. You can find it here.

Kind regards,

Toby Young

General Secretary

I was pleased to be informed of an interesting and often amusing website recently, Mons Badonicus. The section which may be of particular interest to followers of this website is The Fairer Sex – Short Stories on Male Privilege. I’ve added the site to our list of recommended websites. I asked Peter, the writer of the material on the website, for some background. He provided this:

I am now retired, living in the UK, after a thirty-year career in industry. During this career, I published a couple of texts in my technical field, which, rather than mathematical affairs, are actually quite wordy. These projects reminded me of how much I had enjoyed writing as a child. I began producing social commentaries, humorous mostly, which I circulated amongst friends. On retirement I started a website, MonsBadonicus.co.uk, on which I showcase my writing. I write about the things that interest or intrigue me. There is a mixture of social commentary, science, art criticism, pensées, politics – and short stories to which I shall return. The name MonsBadonicus has no deep significance: when planning the website, I simply happened to be reading a book about Anglo-Saxon England. I saw, however, in the Battle of Mount Badon (AD c.500), a vague parallel in the present culture wars, and the way the British appear to be losing confidence in themselves as a nation. The same comment might also be made about the Anglosphere, and the West generally. I invested little effort in finding a conventional publisher: my political incorrectness is hardly likely to pass muster with today’s ‘sensitivity readers’ (read: censors). There are certain ideas and concepts (wokeism, identity politics, diversity, inclusion, equity, and . . . erm, feminism) that, being sacrosanct, are now shielded from criticism. I was a member of a well-known author’s association (I won’t name them) for twenty-five years. I left them because they’ve lost their way; they no longer believe that writers should be free to question and to criticise. Instead, writers must conform. Anyone old enough to have known the Soviet Bloc, will recognise this sort of society. My present project is ‘The Fairer Sex – Short Stories on Male Privilege’. (These titles are of course ironic, the subtitle also sarcastic). It was in about 2005 that, at work, I discovered two sheets of paper pinned to a noticeboard: ‘Discrimination against Men’. This was the very first time I saw ‘discrimination’ used with ‘men’. I had, in fact, already noticed some of these problems myself, and wondered why the mainstream media invariably ignores, dismisses, denies or excuses them. (I have not been personally affected, except in one case: in the male-dominated world of engineering, women engineers are preferentially hired and preferentially promoted – irrespective of competence. I have wondered whether there is a particularly advantageous ‘female’ way of designing an exhaust-gas recirculation valve. When I last looked, the laws of fluid dynamics were gender neutral.) For a long time, I greeted this anti-male discrimination with a shrug; what stuck in the craw, though, was the torrent of lazy, uncritical or partisan reporting in which women, never men, are portrayed as the disadvantaged sex. I therefore resolved to write about the derogation of men’s rights, and the damage that feminism is inflicting on society. The question was how to tackle it. This subject is already well-served in nonfiction (I have assembled about fifty texts), but no one appeared to have tackled it in fiction. I believe that fiction when properly marshalled is a very useful tool – it can poke and jab in ways and in places that nonfiction cannot. There is a YouTube channel, Dr Shaym, that gave me the idea. In his videos, Dr Shaym runs through a list of topics, ‘Questions to ask Feminists’. I therefore decided on the formula of ‘one topic, one story’). Note particularly, that I always do my research: to prove that my portrayals are realistic rather than fanciful, I provide my real-life sources under ‘endnotes’. I invite my readers to seek out this evidence for themselves. I have used my own list, rather than Dr Shaym’s; but currently I have fifty stories planned. At the time of writing (December 2023) I have posted twenty-three of them. Some are as follows. No. 7: Kangaroo courts in college campuses, and the consequent denial of due process to male students (‘Potted Plants’). No. 9: The sneakiness of the male feminist (‘The Cuttlefish Stratagem’). No. 18: The widespread lie that men perpetrate most domestic violence; and which the state shamefully assists in perpetuating (‘The Frying Pan’). No. 21: Women must not be treated as sex objects, but men can be treated as success objects (‘An Object Lesson’). No. 22: feminist emasculation of the military, and how this imperils our nation’s security (‘A Few Good Women’). No. 23: feminist agitation against male-only associations, but feminist defence of female-only associations (‘Men’s Sheds’). The short story (aside from science fiction and women’s magazines) is a form of writing that has largely disappeared. I find this paradoxical because, today, far fewer people are prepared to invest the necessary time in reading long novels, especially one of those sprawling Victorian tomes. The short story is ideal for today’s attention span. A reader of average ability will finish one of my stories in a few minutes. The stories are also entirely self-contained; there is no risk of ‘losing the thread’. Presently I plan to read my stories aloud, and use these recordings to start a YouTube channel. As with all writers, I am often asked where my ideas come from. Well, I have a simple formula: I just restrict myself to the things in life that irritate me. Whenever I do that, I find that I am never short of material. But I would handle unemployment quite well, I think, if feminists were to stop irritating me. Peter cufwulf@aol.com

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We’re linking daily to selected audio / video files from our YouTube channel. Today’s file is here (video, 4:56).

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Very good.

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Our thanks to Elizabeth Hobson (a speaker at ICMI24 in Budapest) for this. She writes:

Highly detailed, and damming essay. It beggars belief that it passes for acceptable conversation to lay the murder of women in Ireland at the feet of misogynistic Irish men. It seems that the determination of Irish politicians not to protect women was a significant motivation for Dubliners to riot. They’re not only not responsible for murders of women involving misogynistic motives, they will commit civil disobedience to oppose such crimes… I vote McGregor.

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We’re linking daily to selected audio / video files from our YouTube channel. Today’s file is here (video, 1:13:36).

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Our thanks to the Washington DC-based Domestic Abuse and Violence International Alliance (DAVIA) for this press release. We’re an active member of DAVIA which is sponsoring the International Conference on Men’s Issues in Budapest, Hungary, in August 2024.

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McKinsey was launched in 1926 and for many years has been one of the world’s largest and most influential management consulting firms. It has for many years (in its published reports) been promoting the cause of “more women on boards”, inferring a causal link between increasing gender diversity in the boardroom (GDITB) and improved financial performance. In McKinsey’s earlier reports on the subject, they would have a large amount of material on the observed correlation between GDITB and financial performance. What might account for the correlation, you might well ask? In our view, more financially successful companies can better afford to pay for initiatives with social objectives in mind, e.g. increasing GDITB. Such initiatives play well with women, including as customers. It was usually not too difficult to find a paragraph or two buried deep in the reports (sometimes 100+ pages long) clarifying they weren’t claiming a causal link, i.e. they weren’t claiming that increasing GDITB would lead to improved financial performance. But there was invariably a lot of material on why companies should increase GDITB anyway. Campaign for Merit in Business has been reporting since 2012 the evidence that already existed at that time of the causal link between increasing GDITB and financial performance DECLINE. Mike Buchanan presented that evidence to House of Commons and House of Lords inquiries in Decembber 2012, and he’s not aware of any coverage of the evidence in the mainstream media. Yesterday McKinsey published its most woeful report yet on the subject, Diversity matters even more: The case for holistic impact. A sentence taken at random should give you a flavour of this ridiculous report:

The penalties for low diversity on executive teams are also intensifying. Companies with representation of women exceeding 30 percent (and thus in the top quartile) are significantly more likely to financially outperform those with 30 percent or fewer.

It’s impossible to read such sentences without gaining the impression that companies will improve their financial performance if they increase GDITB. I’ve carried out a speed-read of the report and cannot find anything about there being no causal link between GDITB and improved financial performance. The authors:

Sundiatu Dixon-Fyle is a senior fellow in McKinsey’s London office; Celia Huber is a senior partner in the Bay Area office; María del Mar Martínez Márquez is a senior partner in the Madrid office; and Sara Prince is a senior partner in the Atlanta office, where Ashley Thomas is a client delivery director. Dame Vivian Hunt is the chief innovation officer at UnitedHealth Group and a McKinsey alumna.

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