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There’s time only for a short post today.
Here is a powerful, must-see video that is only just over a minute long:
Who said, ‘Ordinary people are too small minded to govern their own affairs’?
It was not George Soros, from whom we get a short soundbite at the beginning of the video. He cannily said that global governance might or could happen, acting as if he did not know one way or the other.
The next person to appear is Obama. It was he who said:
Ordinary people are too small minded to govern their own affairs.
In fact, he says it not once, but twice.
He says that ‘order and progress’ (his words) will come only when:
individuals surrender their rights to an all-powerful sovereign.
But the real kicker comes in starting at the 45-second point with a man reading from a Communist book outlining how to discredit opposition: build up verbal attacks, then label person(s) ‘fascist’ or ‘anti-Semitic’, followed by open discreditation by leftist organisations. That part of the video was filmed in the 1950s or 1960s. The book from which he read was published in the United States.
Please circulate the tweet.
On Monday, July 5, 2021, Richard Madeley, an occasional co-presenter on ITV’s Good Morning Britain (GMB), asked SAGE member Susan Michie if her avowed Communism affects her coronavirus recommendations to the general public:
It must have come as a surprise to a number of GMB‘s viewers who probably did not suspect that a card-carrying Communist works for the Government.
Michie, a psychologist who is also a professor at University College London, works on the SPI-B — behavioural — committee of SAGE which has been driving public behaviour during the pandemic. She appears most frequently on the BBC but also on other television channels.
She was also a speaker at the UN’s Psychology Day in 2020. The Division of Health Psychology of the British Psychological Society, of which she is a member, tweeted:
I’ve written about Michie three times before, twice in the run-up to Christmas (here and here) and once in June.
Before I get to Richard Madeley’s interview with Prof Michie, the tweets below show what Communist health policy looks like. We’ve been living under such rules for 16 months and counting.
2018 Daily Mail article
But first, here is a brief retrospective from the time when Jeremy Corbyn was Labour leader.
In 2018, the Daily Mail posted an extensive article about her support of Corbyn and her praise of Communism. Excerpts follow, emphases mine.
This is her family background. Much of the £52 million she inherited from her mother was in a Picasso, which she and another family member sold:
Susan Fiona Dorinthea Michie is the granddaughter of Henry McLaren, the 2nd Baron Aberconway, an Eton-educated Edwardian industrialist and Liberal MP.
He inherited major interests in coal, iron, steel and engineering conglomerates, and created the sumptuous gardens at Bodnant House, a stately home set in 5,000 acres near Snowdonia.
Her mother, Dame Anne McLaren, was born at Aberconway House, the family’s imposing 2,800-square-metre second residence in London‘s Mayfair, and was one of the world’s leading biologists. When she died in 2007, aged 80, she left £52million in her will.
Ms Michie’s father, meanwhile, was an eminent computer scientist who was the son of a wealthy banker whose photo is among the National Portrait Gallery’s collection.
Despite these moneyed roots, the blue-blooded Susan, 62, marches to the beat of her own drum.
She stretches her every sinew in pursuance of a class war as a member of the Communist Party of Britain.
The article then described the speech she gave in early March 2018:
On Monday night, she addressed a meeting of about 40 true believers at the Marx Memorial Library in London’s Clerkenwell.
She delivered her speech while standing beneath a portrait of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, a bronze of Lenin and an array of Soviet flags.
Seemingly oblivious to the irony, this lifelong beneficiary of inherited wealth began by saying: ‘We, the working class.’
During the course of a two-hour talk, Ms Michie (whose day-job is as a university academic) made a comment that broke almost a century of hard-Left tradition.
Britain’s Communist Party, she said, is urging its members to work ‘full tilt’ to help get a Labour prime minister.
This development — after decades of Communists and Labour operating on very separate lines — is a direct result of Labour’s lurch to the hard Left under Jeremy Corbyn.
Already, there have been signs of this change of policy with the Communists deciding last year not to split the Left-wing vote by fielding their own candidates at the General Election.
With the two parties increasingly in harmony (Ms Michie declared it ‘a really good situation to work much more closely than we have in the past’), the Communists — by way of a ‘priority’ — are advising their comrades to actively campaign on Corbyn’s behalf.
In the general election of December 2019, Labour suffered its worst result since 1935.
Sir Keir Starmer eventually replaced Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader.
Now on to Michie’s activity as a SAGE member.
Regular media appearances
By May 2020, Michie was already becoming a regular guest on various news programmes:
As Guido Fawkes explained, Michie is not only a member of SAGE but also Independent SAGE, a breakaway group (emphases in the original, those in purple mine):
Susan Michie is a Marxist campaigner who has managed to get herself on not only the activist dominated fake SAGE, she is also on the official SAGE. Quite an achievement and evidence of the time and effort she is dedicating to the cause…
Michie is Professor of Health Psychology and Director of the Centre for Behaviour Change at UCL, so prima facie she has the credentials to be a scientific advisor. What is never mentioned at any point to give context to her many media appearances, in which she usually launches a tirade at the government, is that she has for 40 years been a member of of the Communist Party of Britain.
All this has not precluded her from using family wealth to financially support the Labour Party under the Corbyn leadership. In March 2018, it was Michie who said that the Communist Party would no longer stand against Labour in general elections and she should be “working full tilt” for the election of Corbyn as PM. Hardly surprising given her daughter was appointed under him to Labour HQ and her ex-husband was Corbyn’s close adviser. That illustrates the level of her dedication to far-left politics.
Two days later, the Father of the House, Peter Bottomley MP (Con), appeared on Radio 4’s Broadcasting House programme to lambaste the BBC for not revealing her political philosophy and connections:
He said (audio in Guido’s post):
If one of your previous contributors has been a member of a far left party for decades, donated more to the Labour Party under Corbyn than I’ve given to the Tory Party in forty years, was the wife of a former Labour Party special adviser and mother of Labour’s head of complaints, that might have been better than just saying she’s a member of SAGE.
The BBC called Bottomley’s remarks an:
ad hominem attack.
Prof Stephen Reicher, who teaches at St Andrews in Scotland, is another SAGE member who works on SPI-B. He took issue with Prime Minister Boris Johnson for not sacking his then-special adviser Dominic Cummings after his fateful trip to County Durham during lockdown. Michie agreed:
She is clearly not a Boris fan, nor is The Guardian‘s Carole Cadwalladr:
Lockdown and mask fan
In May, it was becoming clear to a segment of the British population that Michie favoured a Chinese-style handling of the pandemic. An Anglican clergyman tweeted:
The accompanying article from Michie in The Psychologist is a mild one about directing the public’s response to the pandemic. Notable is this sentence (emphases mine below):
If these behaviours changed across the population (as seatbelt use and smoking in public places have), the Covid-19 pandemic would extinguish.
In July 2020, masks had been compulsory on public transport since mid-June, but were not yet mandatory elsewhere. Michie told LBC’s Andrew Castle that they must be required:
By November, more Britons were finding out the truth about Michie:
When Boris banned Christmas, lockdown sceptic Dick Delingpole tweeted:
Michie started 2021 by asking why people were not complying with the mask mandate:
In April, mainstream journalists were finally beginning to reveal Michie’s political persuasion:
Guido Fawkes reminded his readers that he had unearthed the information in May 2020:
In June, despite Boris’s stellar rollout of the vaccine programme — still the best in Europe — Michie, laughing, told Channel 5 News that we would have to wear masks ‘forever’ (00:57 – 1:05):
A week later, she complained to Freddie Sayers of UnHerd that she had been misquoted (video at the link):
I actually used four words [in that interview with Channel 5], and only one of them was reported. The full words I used were “forever to some extent”. What I mean by this is that, sadly, this isn’t going to be the last pandemic. For as long as humans are around viruses are going to be around …
In reality, as you can see in the Channel 5 video above, her first answer was ‘Forever’. When the interviewer expressed her astonishment, Michie gave the longer response.
She told Sayers that she wanted a delay to Freedom Day, which was to have been on June 21. She must be happy:
I don’t think there’s really any alternative other than delaying for four weeks and seeing what’s happening. It’s a very tricky situation… I think [Boris] is right — I think the question is: is it going to be sufficient?
She probably opposes the possible July 19 Freedom Day, too.
She clearly did not want to discuss her communist beliefs with Sayers:
My politics are not anything to do with my scientific advice. And I’ve never discussed my politics with people like yourself, so nor am I going to now. And the important thing is that when one gives scientific advice, one does so using the expertise one has — not going beyond the expertise, being transparent about what expertise you provide. And I think that the kind of articles you refer to are a really disturbing kind of McCarthyite witch hunting, which I don’t think should have any place in a liberal tolerant society.
Richard Madeley’s interview
This brings me neatly to Richard Madeley’s interview from Monday morning, July 5.
Guido Fawkes broke the story, along with the video (emphases in the original):
Guido commends Richard Madeley for being the first TV host in the country to invite “Independent” SAGE’s Susan Michie on to their show and finally confront her about her hard-left politics. Madeley rightly points out that activist expert Michie’s love of national Covid restrictions may not be born from her concern for the nation’s health, rather the default policy position of a hard-core, state-loving communist. It looked like Susan didn’t appreciate this line of questioning…
Lockdown Sceptics has the transcript (emphases in purple mine):
Richard Madeley: There’s a point I really have to put to you and you’ll be aware of this because there’s been a lot of commentary about this in the British media about you and it’s to do with your politics and you know what I’m going to ask you. You’ve been a member of the Communist Party for about 40 years now, you’re still a member, and we know that they’re statist. We look at Communist countries around the world and we see that they are tremendously top down dominant and controlled societies that they rule over. I just wonder – and I’m putting this question on behalf of those who wonder about your politics – if your politics actually informs your sense of control? It’s not just the medical arguments, but you have a kind of a political bent to want the state to tell people what to do?
Susan Michie: I’ve come on your programme as a scientist, as do all people who come on to your programme as scientists. They come on to talk about the evidence, relevant theories, how we approach our scientific disciplines, and you don’t ask other scientists about politics so I’m very happy to speak about science which is what my job is and to limit it to that.
RM: So you’re saying that your politics doesn’t inform your opinion on this subject?
SM: I’m saying that I agreed to come on this programme as a scientist and I’m very happy to talk to you about the issues that you’re raising as a scientist which is the same for other scientists that you invite on to the programme.
Michie has a large house in a leafy part of London, but the video clip says Berkshire for her location. So, she must be one of those privileged people with two homes. Could one call her Berkshire place a dacha?
If Michie thought her interview with Richard Madeley was a one-off, she was wrong.
On Tuesday, July 6, Times journalist Matthew Syed brought up her Communism in his interview with the BBC’s Jo Coburn on Politics Live:
Syed mentioned Michie by name and said that it would be wrong for a political agenda to determine a pandemic response:
Guido Fawkes provided this analysis of what Syed said:
On Politics Live earlier Matthew Syed succinctly made the point that Richard Madeley was inching towards yesterday – the issue of the card-carrying communist Susan Michie, of the self-appointed “Independent” SAGE, being given frequent media platforms to smuggle in her political agenda under the guise of “science”. Michie is a committed Marxist ideologue, and central committee member of the British Communist Party. This is relevant.
Marxist analysis understands socialism itself to be a scientific method for understanding and predicting social, economic and material phenomena to derive probable outcomes and probable future developments. Her life-long ideology feeds into her work as director of UCL’s Centre for Behaviour Change. That theoretical underpinning to her ideas on behavioural change and social compliance has gone unexplored even as she has been given a position advising the government in these matters. She has spoken approvingly of the Chinese Communist dictatorship’s authoritarian methods and of her belief that restrictions in Britain should continue “forever, to some extent.” Her whole mindset is one of top-down control and diktat that is incompatible with a free and open society.
Before anyone claims that Syed is a misogynist or a right-wing Murdoch lackey – he has a very readable intellectual column in the Sunday Times – Guido would remind them that he stood as the Labour candidate in the 2001 UK general election. At the very least it is fair to discount Michie’s advice in the light of her ideological activism.
However, as the aforementioned Lockdown Sceptics article says, complete with a tweet, one woman accused Good Morning Britain of misogyny and asked people to stop watching the programme in protest.
Toby Young, who wrote the article, says that her sex had nothing to do with Madeley’s question. It was her politics (emphases mine):
I really don’t get why it was “misogynistic” of Madeley to ask Susan Michie whether her hard left politics have affected her position on mask mandates. Of course they have! After all, forcing people to wear masks as a condition of participating in certain activities is a flagrant breach of their liberty and the reason Michie doesn’t care about that and thinks public health concerns should take priority (even though there’s precious little evidence that masks reduce transmission of the virus) must in part be because she’s a communist, who famously don’t put much value on individual freedom. And the reason Madeley hasn’t put the same question to other members of SAGE is not because Michie’s a woman, but because she’s the only one who’s been a member of the Communist Party for the past 40 years.
True.
However, by July 8, Ofcom, the media watchdog, received 145 complaints about Madeley’s interview:
Guido reported that one of the 145 complainants was Michie herself (emphases in the original):
Ofcom are unlikely to rule against Madeley for asking a question Michie did not want to answer; that’s an editorial judgement way outside Ofcom’s remit. Yet apparently for 145 viewers, it was all too much. Of course, amongst those complaining was Michie herself, who took to Twitter to write:
“A complaint has been submitted and a public apology requested”.
If Michie and 144 other pearl-clutching viewers were upset by Madeley, Guido has to wonder what they thought of Matthew Syed’s comments on Politics Live yesterday…
What concerns me is that Susan Michie might not be the only Communist in SAGE.
If only we could find out more about the political proclivities of the other members.
Weeks ago, the UK government announced that June 21 could well be Freedom Day, with confirmation coming on June 14.
This week, not surprisingly, the government and SAGE began backtracking.
Matt Hancock’s testimony
Yesterday, Matt Hancock gave four and a half hours’ worth of testimony to the Health and Social Care Select Committee.
Today, Friday, June 11, talkRADIO’s Julia Hartley-Brewer picked up on the same lockdown point as I did in my post. They will not hesitate to use it again:
The vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi defended Matt Hancock’s claim that there was never a PPE shortage. Good grief. I watched the debates in Parliament at the time. There definitely WAS a PPE shortage (and not just in the UK):
Dominic Cummings, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s former special adviser and Matt Hancock’s nemesis, surfaced as expected:
SAGE
Members of SAGE and Independent SAGE want lockdown to stay.
SPI-M is SAGE’s modelling committee, the one with all the dodgy numbers:
Publican Adam Brooks makes an excellent point, although he meant to write ‘without culpability’. The modellers will continue to rake in their salaries:
Here’s another tweet about the dodgy data modelling — disgraceful:
To top it off, card-carrying Communist Susan Michie, a behavioural psychologist and member of SAGE’s SPI-B committee, says that masks and social distancing should be with us forever:
Michie gave the interview to Channel 5 News (the Daily Mail has more):
Carl Vernon analyses it:
Now, Michie is backtracking:
On April 24, the Daily Mail posted a profile of Susan Michie by Peter Hitchens. Excerpts follow (emphases mine):
The super-rich Communist Susan Michie is so militant that her fellow Marxists once searched her baby’s pram for subversive literature.
They lifted the tiny infant out of the way, to check that the future Professor of Psychology was not smuggling ultra-hardline propaganda into a crucial conference.
No wonder that fellow students at Oxford a few years before had called her ‘Stalin’s nanny’.
The 1984 pram-searching incident, disclosed in 2014 by a far- Left website called The Weekly Worker, is far from being the oddest thing about this interesting person.
The oddest thing about her is that she is a senior adviser to Boris Johnson’s Tory Government, a regular participant in the official Sage committee and the SPI-B committee, which have had such influence over the handling of Covid.
Yet despite, or perhaps, because of being very wealthy indeed, she has been a fervent Communist since 1978, and still clings to the Hammer and Sickle long after the collapse of her creed’s regimes from East Berlin to Moscow.
Her favourite place in the world is Havana, infested with secret police spies and one of the last tottering strongholds of Leninist rule.
It is quite possible to argue that Britain has undergone a revolution in the past year: a cultural revolution in which we have put health and safety above liberty in an astonishing way; a political revolution in which Parliament has become an obedient rubber-stamp and opposition has evaporated, while Ministers rule through decrees; and an economic revolution in which millions of previously independent people have become wholly dependent on the state for their wellbeing.
Perhaps, then, we should look for some revolutionaries. For what an opportunity they have been given by the Covid crisis.
Widespread fear of a mysterious plague led millions to seek safety in the arms of the state. But was this just a natural reaction, or was there any encouragement?
A now-notorious document was issued in March 2020 by Sage, called ‘Options for increasing adherence to social distancing measures’. It concluded that we were not yet frightened enough.
It said: ‘A substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened.’ So we needed to be scared a bit more. It recommended: ‘The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging.’
Well, most of us can recall such messaging. Wherever can it have come from?
The Government, supposedly led by a liberty-loving conservative, deployed intense and repeated propaganda, about the overwhelming of the NHS. It united us around a sort of worship of care workers.
It cleverly portrayed quarantine measures, from house arrest to mask-wearing, as selfless and generous, so making nonconformists and dissenters appear stupid, selfish and mean …
Susan Michie has not responded to my requests for an interview, either directly to her email or through the press office of University College London, where she works. So I cannot say whether her lifelong belief in Communism, apparently inherited from her equally militant scientist parents and shared with her ex-husband, the former Jeremy Corbyn aide Andrew Murray, has had any influence on her advice.
Hitchens says that Michie advocates a zero-COVID policy, which means we’ll die in penury from permanent lockdown and be told by the state — Chinese style — when we can leave the house:
Vaccines reduce illness, and hence death rates, for all variants. Most young and healthy people are safe from Covid-19, and always have been. Most of the old are now protected from serious illness via the vaccine.
But can it overwhelm the idealists – Utopians in fact – of Zero Covid, a well-organised and active lobby who believe that the virus needs to be eliminated completely?
Susan Michie seems to be a supporter of this idea. On July 30, 2020, she tweeted: ‘To get people out & about, schools back, workplaces open, economy recovering we need #ZeroCOVID.’
On February 24, perhaps recognising that Zero Covid might put some people off, she tweeted: ‘ ‘Maximum suppression’ seems to be a good way of expressing the goal of ZeroCOVID (without getting side tracked into wilful or other misinterpretation).’
Where does this desire for elimination of the virus actually lead? Many people have praised China’s response to Covid. But in reality China still has Covid outbreaks, and responds to them with measures of extraordinary ruthlessness.
It has also used Covid to speed up and strengthen its worrying ‘social credit’ system, which puts everyone under surveillance, rewards conformity and punishes misbehaviour by denying access to the small joys of life.
Freedom is conditional, and the gift of the state and the Communist Party. In Peking, which is virtually Covid-free, citizens must use a smartphone to scan a QR code for every mode of transport. Contact-tracing is constant.
Anyone who leaves or arrives in the city must be tested. As David Rennie, Peking bureau chief of The Economist, recently observed: ‘It’s very hard to know where Covid containment starts and a Communist police state with an obsession with control kicks in.’
The government
The Indian variant is being used as the excuse for not reopening on Freedom Day, June 21:
Julia Hartley-Brewer has exposed the government’s new zero-COVID strategy:
It is thought that restrictions on weddings could be lifted:
Adam Brooks has this to say about Freedom Day:
Travel is still a no-no:
Conclusion
I could write more, but knowing that a Communist is controlling our behaviour and is advising a Conservative government makes me nauseous.
Therefore, in conclusion, there is no good reason for the government to refuse to reopen the nation on June 21. Deaths, even from 2020, are still average. This year, so far, they are below average:
We will find out the government’s latest excuse on Monday, June 14. More to follow.
Janet Yellen, the US Treasury Secretary nominee wants more of the everyday American’s money and possibly property.
From patriots.win:
That means you could be taxed on ‘earnings’ that do not exist. The Internal Revenue Service could estimate it for you. You would pay them for a hypothetical gain that doesn’t exist.
How often would the IRS make that assessment? Once a year? Once a month? With every share movement? How would they do it?
Who knows?
It could put a real and permanent dent in the stock market. Remember, a lot of everyday Americans have holdings in stocks and mutual funds. The stock market isn’t just for the big players.
The idea, if it gets traction (heaven forfend), could go further.
The patriots.win thread had the following comment (emphases mine):
Yellen also mentioned having zero problem with government becoming an active ‘shareholder’ in companies and enterprises in the USA, and would encourage the practice.
This is called central planning. It’s a required step to complete takeover of the economy by the state (call it part of the great reset or just the vanilla off-the-shelf plan on the march towards communism, all the same really)
Taxing unrealized capital gains using a mark to market formula is just a way to extort the ownership of private interests over time into the hands of the government.
Starting a new business? When you get that seed round of capital from investors of $2M and your valuation jumps from $0 to $8M overnight, welcome to your new unrealized capital gains tax of $1,650,000 in year 1 of operation. We know you’re a startup and strapped for cash, so Uncle Sam will gladly take a 20% equity stake in your startup in lieu of cash. We’ll be sure to send one of Pelosi’s staff members to your next board meeting to help run the company and make decisions, too.
Have a rental property portfolio? Hey, well, we not only put in a moratorium on evictions due to COVID-19, so you can’t get rid of the deadbeat tenants sitting there and renting out your apartments as Airbnb units and paying zero rent to you, but our assessors estimate your property value went up 28% last year because, you know, you own some prime buildings in the best locations and everyone wants to stay there so you owe us $2,100,000 in unrealized capital gains taxes this year. No cash? No worries, we’ll take on an ownership stake of 9% of your portfolio (minus any liabilities for property taxes or liability, those are YOUR problem, bud), and now since you are technically part federally funded, you must adhere to these federal housing regulations we just put into place where you have to dedicate 20% of your units to refugee housing.
Oh look, how cute.. a couple that worked their asses off the past 25 years, paid off their mortgage, and are living free and clear in their home with just enough savings to maintain their independence and live out the rest of their lives in peace, maybe even one day handing down the property to their children. How quaint and racist/colonialist/sexist/etc. Well, our assessor used a nice little black box formula to estimate your property went up in value 22% last year so pay us $29,000 this year to keep your house. We don’t care that market conditions don’t reflect the actual value of the home according to our estimates, you’re free to prove to us the house isn’t worth as much as we think it is by selling it before December 31st just as all your other neighbors are selling right now because of the plummeting prices thanks to our blanket district-wide appraisal. That’s just a temporary market glut and has no bearing on the actual value of your house according to our mark to market ratio.
IT’S ALL COMING — AND FASTER THAN ANYONE THINKS.
Good grief.
Pray someone does something about Biden and his team.
If this isn’t communism, what is?
Sing the title to the tune of ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’:
Last Wednesday, at the final PMQs of the year, Prime Minister Boris Johnson promised Christmas …
… with a suggestion of a ‘merry, little Christmas’, with the emphasis on ‘little’.
Earlier that day, as I reported on Friday, the Communist, Susan Michie (lower left hand corner in the tweet), member of SAGE and Independent SAGE, wanted to deny us a five-day Christmas celebration:
Sadly, on Saturday afternoon, December 19, people living in London and much of the southeast of England found out that she and the other scientists of SAGE rule their world and that the aforementioned Communist indirectly won the winter match.
The score is now Communists/Socialists/SAGE: 1 to Conservatives/Libertarians: 0.
Wales (Labour) and Scotland (SNP) — both Leftist-controlled nations — quickly followed suit to declare Christmas a one-day event. There will be no Boxing Day lunches or anything on the following days, either.
Christmas celebrations will be allowed only on December 25, meaning short, sharp ‘celebrations’, if one even dares to call them that. Falling asleep in front of the telly with others outside of your household after Christmas lunch is out of bounds.
Atheist Stalin must be rolling in his grave with delight.
Susan Michie doesn’t have to worry about Christmas. She’s an unbeliever with a big house, thanks to the sale of her late mother’s Picasso:
For anyone who is — quite rightly — finding this sudden change of plans unsettling, here are phone lines to ring for help:
Now back to Laura Perrins, the ex-barrister and co-editor of Conservative Woman, whose tweets I featured on Friday.
On Saturday, she took us back to last week.
Boris pledged that every new change would come before Parliament first. Lucky for him that Parliament went into recess early Thursday evening, December 17:
Laura Perrins was not pleased with rebel Conservative MP’s Mark Harper’s response:
I’m not quite sure Laura gave Mark Harper a full hearing. Note his second tweet below. I fully agree with it:
Before returning to Ms Perrins, here are the latest statistics:
And who can prove this? Certainly not Oxford’s Prof Carl Heneghan:
Back now to Laura.
Here’s an MP of whom I’ve not heard. I say that as a regular BBC Parliament viewer:
Note the ‘Stay at Home’ restrictions and closures.
Given all that has happened this year, it is not surprising that some doubt whether there is a mutation:
Understandably, travellers going to the north of England on Saturday evening crowded St Pancras railway station. Tier 4 restrictions in London and surrounds were coming in at midnight — early Sunday morning:
I can’t help but agree with this Labour MP:
Here’s more from Laura Perrins:
I couldn’t agree more.
I also endorse this:
Boris is acting a bit like an abuser:
Try to see your family this Christmas and you could — depending on your tier situation — be breaking the law:
There are Britons who have commented on my blog this year saying that they are not sure whether they will see Christmas 2021. Given those circumstances, they want to hug their children and grandchildren, unfettered by the Government.
I do not blame them at all. In fact, I support them 110%.
Boris has been a huge disappointment when it comes to handling the coronavirus crisis.
Granted, Labour would have been worse.
I hope Boris is up for Brexit — even if it means No Deal. Once again, that’s what so many of us voted for last December. As a reminder: Boris has a majority of 79 (it was 80, until the whip was withdrawn from Dr Julian Lewis this year).
We expect a lot more from you, Boris, especially when New Year’s Eve dawns and our Brexit transition period ends 24 hours later.
What a week. It’s been full of coronavirus news here in the UK.
Vaccine
The UK was the first country in the world to distribute a coronavirus vaccine.
A 90-year-old grandmother, Margaret Keenan, was the first person to receive the Pfizer/BioNtech vaccine.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock wept. He’s never openly cried about those made unemployed and destitute during the coronavirus crisis for which he is largely responsible. Sickening:
Good Morning Britain‘s physician, Dr Hilary Jones, explained that Mrs Keenan could still get COVID-19 and transmit it:
It seems to work the way that a flu vaccine does. If one gets the virus, the effects won’t be as bad as if one weren’t vaccinated.
I wouldn’t advise thinking about that too much, because it could lead down a rabbit hole:
The great scientists of SAGE also said life would not return to normal (see Select Committee section below). We are likely to be in the same situation well into next year, probably the autumn. This is what the ex-barrister and co-editor of Conservative Woman says:
Continuing down the rabbit hole re the vaccine:
Wales
Meanwhile, in Labour-controlled Wales, coronavirus hospitalisations are higher than they were early this year — despite a short, sharp lockdown, ‘firebreak’, that recently ended:
Guido Fawkes opined (emphases in the original):
Lockdowns, even short ones, evidently temporarily drop cases. Yet selling them on the promise that they enable more things to open once they end, as Welsh Labour did, appears to turbocharge case numbers far more than having simple, predictable and steady rules. The psychology of re-openings could well mean that in the long run, Wales’ “short sharp firebreak lockdown” – modelled on Keir Starmer’s demand – did more harm than good…
The Prif Weinidog — that’s First Minister in Welsh — Mark Drakeford blamed his own countrymen for the failure of his ‘firebreak’:
I couldn’t agree more. Lockdowns, firebreaks — whatever one calls them — do not work.
Why would anyone trust a government to dictate their lives? This is a photo of Grenfell Tower (public housing) in London, which burned in June 2017 because of faulty cladding:
And that brings me neatly to the next topic.
PCR versus Lateral Flow testing
The UK Government rejected a petition about PCR (swab) testing because they said they are not responsible for it. Hmm:
This is the nub of the problem. The Government absolves itself of responsibility. So do the scientists. People actually believe this guff.
Where do Government ministers get the idea for lockdown and excuse potentially faulty test results if it weren’t for the scientists and health organisations working with them?
But I digress.
Returning to testing, a few weeks ago, nearly all of Liverpool’s residents took the Lateral Flow test in a pilot programme. The Lateral Flow test works similarly to a pregnancy test and could be used on a daily basis as an ‘all clear’ strategy to give people more freedom and certainty to go about their lives. If successful, its use could allow visits to patients in care homes.
Very few of the Lateral Flow results were positive. If I remember rightly, the figure was 0.3%.
No doubt if those same people had taken the PCR test, the results would have been very different.
Therefore, this is interesting:
I’m just posting it to show there is a huge question over which test is more accurate.
PCR could work, provided the cycle thresholds were lowered from 40 to 35. But that is not happening.
The scientists of SAGE: Susan Michie
Anyone who reads Guido Fawkes regularly will know that SAGE has some questionable members, including this woman who appeared regularly on BBC News during the first lockdown. She might still be appearing on the BBC. I only watched between March and June to watch the spin they put on the Government’s coronavirus briefings:
Michie’s mother was worth a fortune:
The Daily Mail said the owners of the painting were a mystery, until all was revealed (emphases mine):
The painting was in fact sold by 30-year-old Ms Murray’s mother, Professor Susan Michie. She and her two siblings had been left the picture by their mother, the celebrated IVF pioneer Dame Anne McLaren.
When she died in 2007 she left an estate valued at £52,105,910. The vast bulk of that sum represented the value of the painting.
In her will, the Mail can reveal, she stated that if her children chose to sell then ‘if possible it should be sold to an art gallery or museum in the United Kingdom’.
According to a source, family members were ‘disappointed’ at the decision to put the painting on the market. While the sale attracted a tax bill of £20million, that would have left the trio about £10million each — more than enough to share around other members of their extended family.
Three SAGE members appear before Select Committee
Moving on to other SAGE members, Sir Patrick Vallance, Prof Chris Whitty and Dr Jenny Harries appeared once more before the Science and Technology Select Committee on Wednesday, December 9, for a year-end review of lessons learned during the pandemic. Greg Clark MP, who heads that Select Committee, and MPs from both Conservative and Opposition parties asked probing questions. You can watch the three-and-one-half hour session here.
Unfortunately, Vallance, Whitty and Harries were no clearer about lessons learned. In fact, they were vaguer than they were in earlier sessions:
– The vaccine will not be a fix for coronavirus. Not everyone will be able to take the Pfizer/BioNtech vaccine because it will not be suitable for them.
– Human behaviour (Harries’s speciality) is very hard to predict. Harries admitted that.
– Hospitality has been the scapegoat because that is where alcohol can be consumed.
– Conclusions on BAME communities’ susceptibility to the virus are unclear.
– Lockdown restrictions will be with us well into next year.
– The worst admission — and I have been saying this to my far better half for at least a month — was when Vallance said that self-isolation is better for the person who has a steady job and can work from home. Self-isolation, he said, is not suitable for someone in precarious employment who has to show up to work every day! (Who knew?) Good grief!
They have no real answers, yet they’re still ruling our lives via the Government!
Sky News suspends newsreader
Kay Burley, one of Sky News’s star newsreaders, celebrated her 60th birthday on Saturday, December 5, in London.
Unfortunately, the celebrations did not take place in an entirely COVID-compliant way.
Ms Burley was suspended until early January 2021. (See update below.)
Guido Fawkes has the story:
Some people won’t see that as big news, but it is.
It points out the hypocrisy of the media, who were clamouring for a lockdown in March then flout the rules when we are still in one via the tier system. London is in Tier 2.
This was Kay Burley’s apology:
The Guido Fawkes team delved deeper. This is what they discovered (emphases in the original). Guillaume Depoix (point 5 below) owns the Folie restaurant:
The trouble for Kay is that this statement does not address the whole story, and contradicts what the owner of the restaurant told Guido about the event yesterday. Either the restaurant owner was not telling the truth to Guido, or Kay has been fibbing…
-
- Her party at the “Covid compliant” club was made up of ten people, split across two tables. Yet the ‘Rule of Six’ apples to social events like birthday parties inside or outside. The only other gatherings such as business meetings can exceed it...
- Kay’s statement presumes she walked all the way to the restaurant Folie to spend her penny. Despite it being not exactly next door to the club she came from.
- Kay does not mention the other people who came with her into the second restaurant. Yet the owner admitted to Guido yesterday that “several people” came in to the restaurant.
- Guido was initially told by the restaurant owner that Kay and her friends had gone in to the second restaurant after curfew “to pay a bill, that was it”. Not to go to the loo…
- When Guido put to restaurant owner Guillaume Depoix that Kay and company had been in the restaurant for quite a while, “a couple of hours”, this was not denied. Guido certainly got the impression the group were there for a considerable amount of time.
- Kay does not mention the other people who came back to her home. Yet she didn’t deny it.
Whilst Kay’s statement tries to take all the blame, Guido has yet to hear what her Sky News colleagues and party guests Beth Rigby, Inzamam Rashid, and Sam Washington have to say …
On Tuesday, December 8, i reported (emphases mine):
Sky News presenter Kay Burley has been taken off air after she admitted to breaching coronavirus restrictions, i understands. She has been replaced on the breakfast show for her remaining shows this week and is already due on annual leave until 4 January …
The TV host is facing an internal inquiry for what she described as “an error of judgment”.
Sources told i the presenter was called into Sky’s headquarters in Osterley, west London, for an urgent meeting with bosses on Tuesday morning. The channel’s most senior staff, John Riley, head of news, and Christina Nicoletti Squires, director of content, were seen entering the newsroom at the time the meeting was due to be held.
Burley will be replaced by early morning presenter Niall Paterson on Wednesday and other presenters will cover her programme for the remainder of the week. Burley was already set to be on annual leave from next Monday until 4 January 2021.
A source close to the presenter said she “doesn’t have a leg to stand on” after breaking the Government’s rules, while being employed to grill politicians over the need to follow guidelines.
It is not clear if she has been removed from air as part of formal disciplinary proceedings.
When the news of the breach broke on Monday night, Burley was in Coventry, where she was due to anchor the news channel as the first Covid vaccines were administered. She was hastily replaced and ordered back to London for Tuesday’s meeting …
Too funny.
Burley, along with colleague and birthday guest Beth Rigby, were among the media stars who endlessly criticised Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s advisor Dominic Cummings, who is staying on until the end of the year, for his lockdown breach during the first lockdown during the Spring:
Burley, who presents a daily breakfast show on Sky News, has grilled politicians on lockdown throughout the pandemic.
In May, she questioned cabinet minister Michael Gove on the controversy over Dominic Cummings’ trip to Barnard Castle.
A Sky News spokesman said: “We place the highest importance on complying with the Government guidelines on Covid, and we expect all our people to comply.
“We were disappointed to learn that a small number of Sky News staff may have engaged in activity that breached the guidelines.
“Although this took place at a social event in personal time, we expect all our people to follow the rules that are in place for everyone. An internal process is under way to review the conduct of the people involved.”
Sky News declined to comment on Burley being taken off air.
This tweet shows Beth Rigby having a go at Dominic Cummings in May during his press conference:
The Guardian had more on the story:
All of the Sky staff are facing a review of their conduct by their employer, which said it was “disappointed” by the incident.
Burley’s usual 7am breakfast programme was presented from Coventry University hospital on Tuesday by Sarah Hewson. Burley is understood to have already been in the city, where the UK’s first vaccine dose was administered, when the decision was made. There was no mention of the reason for Burley’s absence when the show began …
Burley is understood to have blamed the situation on misunderstandings in planning and organising the event. But she did not address why a group of four people, including Rashid and former Sky News royal correspondent and Huawei PR executive Paul Harrison, returned to her home after the dinner, a claim that is not believed to be in dispute. Other Sky News staff are understood to be irritated by details of the event.
Under the tier 2 restrictions in London, indoor social gatherings of any kind are barred except among those who live together or have formed a support bubble. Groups of up to six can socialise outdoors. Police can impose fines of £200 for a first-time breach.
Under the rules, Burley’s initial gathering would only have been allowed if the two tables remained separate throughout and sat outside. It is not clear how many of the group went to the second venue, but Burley’s tweets suggested that the rules were broken during this part of the evening. A group of four gathering at her home would be against the rules unless they remained outside throughout.
Burley has been a stern interrogator of politicians who have been perceived as making excuses over lockdown breaches this year.
In May, she conducted a widely shared interview with the cabinet minister Michael Gove about the Dominic Cummings affair, repeatedly asking him to clarify what the government advice would be for a member of the public “struggling with Covid-19 and you think you’ve got a problem with your eyesight”, in reference to Cummings’ explanation of his trip to Barnard Castle.
She also interviewed the health secretary, Matt Hancock, after Prof Neil Ferguson was forced to resign as a government adviser and asked: “What did you think when you read it? Did you bang your head on the desk?”
Burley’s colleague Adam Boulton, the other star of Sky News, was deeply unhappy with her. The Guardian told us all about it in ‘Kay Burley row could undermine Sky News, warns Adam Boulton’:
The Sky News presenter Adam Boulton has warned that the row over a breach of coronavirus restrictions by his colleague Kay Burley has raised concerns over “the credibility of our journalism”.
With executives at the broadcaster weighing their decision over what sanctions are merited by the actions of Burley and three colleagues who attended her 60th birthday party last weekend, Boulton retweeted several posts about the story on Wednesday, including one that read: “Look at the state of Sky News. The morons spent all summer preaching to us and now look at them!”
Speaking to the Guardian, Boulton noted that his retweets did not necessarily constitute endorsements. But he went on: “That said, I retweet things because I think they’re of public interest, and certainly my feed has reflected a lot of people who are very concerned about the credibility of Sky News, and that I think is the important issue: the credibility of our journalism.”
The intervention from the station’s editor-at-large and former political editor is the first significant comment on the situation from a senior broadcaster at Sky News, where executives have been considering how to deal with the fallout from Burley’s celebrations since Monday.
Boulton said: “My view is that Sky has worked very hard during the whole Covid crisis and has taken a very clear line about public safety, and obviously something like this perhaps underlines [the importance of] that.” And he noted that he believed the matter to be “of widespread concern” to colleagues at the station.
Since Guido Fawkes broke the story on Monday, December 7, Burley’s fellow colleagues who celebrated her birthday have also been suspended:
Beth Rigby, Inzamam Rashid and Sam Washington have all been taken off air during discussions over what sanctions will be imposed. On Tuesday, Burley was withdrawn from consideration for a prestigious TV award, while two of the group signed non-disclosure agreements as Sky sought to limit damage from the row.
Other staff at Sky share Adam Boulton’s consternation:
“The situation is just excruciating,” one producer said. “The longer it goes on, the worse it gets and the harder it is to see this ending without serious punishment.”
Boulton noted that he viewed Burley as a “remarkable” journalist who deserved her success on the station. And he added: “Whatever happens next is not my decision and obviously it’s not up to me to criticise colleagues.”
Nonetheless, his comments will be viewed with alarm by executives hoping to keep staff concerns under wraps until they reach a decision, which is expected to be this week.
It appears that Burley had a safari holiday booked:
Burley herself deleted a tweet saying she was going on holiday on Friday to go “sit with lions”, adding: “They kill for food, not sport” – a possible reference to the media coverage of the situation.
Well, she can take her time and enjoy an extended safari holiday.
————————————
UPDATE: Early this evening, news emerged that Sky News has suspended Burley for six months! Excellent.
Furthermore, Beth Rigby has been suspended for three months; Sam Washington and Inzamam Rashid have also been suspended pending an internal Sky News enquiry. Result!
How pleased Kay and Beth were with themselves only a few days earlier …
————————————
It is a bit rich to defy coronavirus regulations then pole up to a hospital, especially one giving COVID-19 vaccinations:
I’m really glad this has come to light:
Agree. I don’t understand why people give these hypocrites any credibility.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
As I mentioned in my July 4 post, last Saturday — June 29, 2019 — journalist Andy Ngo was seriously injured in a melée in Portland, Oregon. He is suffering from a brain haemorrhage.
Incredibly, no one in mainstream media has said much about this attack. Andy Ngo’s ‘crime’ is that he is a gay conservative.
In a short video, Stefan Molyneux explains that Antifa, Ngo’s alleged attackers, fit in the Communist mould of ‘sociopathy’, whereby any political opponents must be destroyed. Molyneux points out that Communist regimes around the world have slaughtered 250 million people over the years:
Incredibly, he got quite a few sceptical comments and denials to his tweet.
However, he is correct.
Michelle Malkin has a long Twitter thread with photos from the day’s events in Portland. They are painful to view, so I’m only going to post a few. It is hard to believe that such things are going on a) in the United States and b) with police passivity. What these attackers are doing is criminal.
He was not the only one injured that day. So was this man:
Ngo writes for a number of publications and is an editor at Quillette, which is a free-thinking multi-media magazine. On June 30, his colleagues wrote an article about his attack, ‘Antifa’s Brutal Assault on Andy Ngo Is a Wake-Up Call — for Authorities and Journalists Alike’. I highly recommend it.
Excerpts follow, emphases mine.
The article’s first paragraph ends with a reference to Communism:
as Bolshevik theorist Nikolai Bukharin put it, “In revolution, he will be victorious who cracks the other’s skull.”
Quillette describes their colleague, pointing out the irony in the attack:
Andy Ngo is an elfin, soft-spoken man. He also happens to be the gay son of Vietnamese immigrants—salient details, given Antifa’s absurd slogans about smashing the heteronormative white supremacist patriarchy.
The article reminds readers that Antifa also forced Milo Yiannopoulos to cancel a talk at Berkeley in 2017. Milo is also gay. He is British and has a black boyfriend. Again, his crime is that he is a conservative gay.
The article explains:
the reason Antifa activists were so eager to beat up our colleague Andy Ngo, a Portland resident who has been relentless in exposing the true face of Antifa. They attacked him for the simple reason that he has challenged their ideological propaganda—an Antifa tactic that any true fascist would recognize and applaud.
It points out that media attention is focussed on ‘far right’ groups, but never those on the left, like Antifa:
But this attitude of vigilance must be broadened to include all radical groups. It shouldn’t require an actual fatality to goad Portland’s mayor and police into real action. Surely, a brain hemorrhage should be enough.
We also are hoping that our fellow journalists might awaken from the delusion that Antifa is a well-intentioned band of anti-fascists with a few bad apples sullying the cause. As Quillette reported last month, a simple statistical study serves to show that the journalists who cover Antifa most often and most energetically have turned their outlets into pro-Antifa propaganda organs. Indeed, this bias is so entrenched that some left-wing media responded to our report not with introspection, but with paranoid and maudlin claims that Quillette and its authors must be secretly in league with Antifa’s fascist enemies. One might hope that the brutality inflicted on one of Quillette’s editors will help disabuse them of such conspiracy theories.
Also:
These are the same people who would (rightly) respond with howls of outrage if a journalist were assaulted by right-wing protestors. And it is appalling that anyone in our industry would excuse violence against a journalist on the basis of political orientation.
The article concludes as follows:
We wish our colleague Andy Ngo a speedy recovery. For more details about the attack he endured, interested readers can follow him on Twitter at @MrAndyNgo. Although we lament his ordeal, we salute his journalistic courage in exposing a movement that seeks to crack skulls under cover of fighting fascism.
Amazingly, many of the 700+ comments defend not only Antifa but also violent crime against political opponents!
Fortunately, there are still some decent people in this world:
I pray that Andy makes a full recovery soon. I am still wrapping my head around the fact that such a vicious ‘milkshake’ assault even happened, let alone in the United States.
It’s always nice to see how history can evolve in a positive way.
A Conservative Treehouse reader posted the following tweet from the London-based History Lovers Club over the weekend (full photo here):
Look how time has moved on — in a good way — since The Red Iceberg appeared in 1960. Not only is there a reunified Germany, but Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia all joined the EU in 2004.
Freedom, rather than Communism, prevails.
Happy days!
This year, President Donald Trump is negotiating with Kim Jong Un of North Korea. South Korea is holding talks with the North in the hope of reunification. Eventually, these could break the hold that China has on North Korea. Who knows what effect that will have on China itself?
This could be the last known remaining copy of The Red Iceberg, published by the now defunct Impact Publications. It is on sale at mycomicshop.com for $699.95 plus an additional buyer’s premium of $21.
Mycomicshop.com says The Red Iceberg was a Catholic anti-Communist publication during the Cold War:
“We the People” back cover identifies this 1st version of this rare Catechetical Guild (Impact Publishing) Catholic anti-communist comic book. Cover price $0.10.
Other issues — Numbers 2 through 5 — have been sold. These are mycomicshop.com’s descriptions:
“Impact Press” back cover identifies this 2nd version of this rare Catechetical Guild (Impact Publishing) Catholic anti-communist comic book. Today you have to go to Cuba, China or a western university to find people dumb enough to still embrace communism, but when this comic book was published, the commies of the world were still a threat to democracy. Cover price $0.10.
“Explains Comic” back cover identifies this 3rd version of this rare Catechetical Guild (Impact Publishing) Catholic anti-communist comic book …
“Impact Press” with World Wide Secret Heart Program ad on the back cover identifies this 4th version of this rare Catechetical Guild (Impact Publishing) Catholic anti-communist comic book …
“Chicago Inter-Student Catholic Action” back cover identifies this 5th version of this rare Catechetical Guild (Impact Publishing) Catholic anti-communist comic book …
What a fascinating bit of history.
In sensible hands, comic books can be an easy means of sound teaching.
Maybe I can just squeak by with this, as a local eatery near us is advertising Valentine’s Day dinner specials through the weekend.
I saw Jamie Glazov’s Front Page article about Valentine’s Day on February 15: ‘Hating Valentine’s: Why Islamists and the Radical Left loathe the Day of Love’.
Glazov starts by giving a near-comprehensive review of penalties for and protests against celebrating Valentine’s Day in Muslim countries. I’ll let you read that in your own time.
The more puzzling aspect, which he explains nicely, is why the notionally tolerant Left don’t like February 14. Aren’t they the ones in favour of love?
Glazov tells us (emphases mine):
As an individual who spent more than a decade in academia, I was privileged to witness this war against Valentine’s Day up close and personal. Feminist icons like Jane Fonda, meanwhile, help lead the assault on Valentine’s Day in society at large. As David Horowitz has documented, Fonda has led the campaign to transform this special day into “V-Day” (“Violence against Women Day”) — which is, when it all comes down to it, a day of hate, featuring a mass indictment of men.
Why, oh why, oh why?
Because:
Islam and the radical Left both revile the notion of private love, a non-tangible and divine entity that draws individuals to each other and, therefore, distracts them from submitting themselves to a secular deity.
Valentine’s Day is a day of two people celebrating their love and devotion to each other — not to a collective or to a government regime. Therefore, opponents want it stopped.
Incidentally, I wrote about the St Valentines various and the traditions behind the day. The following post from 2015 discusses the different St Valentines, all of whom brought two people together in the name of love:
A bit of history about Valentine’s Day
The next post, from 2016, describes ancient traditions surrounding Valentine’s Day and the meaning of ‘x’, symbolic of the cross of St Andrew:
More history about Valentine’s Day
From its post-Lupercalian origin, Valentine’s Day has been about two people and their fidelity to each other.
This brings us neatly back to the present day and the totalitarian resistance — whether religious or socio-political — to the Day of Love.
Glazov explains:
The highest objective of both Islam and the radical Left is clear: to shatter the sacred intimacy that a man and a woman can share with one another, for such a bond is inaccessible to the order. History, therefore, demonstrates how Islam, like Communism, wages a ferocious war on any kind of private and unregulated love. In the case of Islam, the reality is epitomized in its monstrous structures of gender apartheid and the terror that keeps it in place. Indeed, female sexuality and freedom are demonized and, therefore, forced veiling, forced marriage, female genital mutilation, honor killings and other misogynist monstrosities become mandatory parts of the sadistic paradigm.
Totalitarian regimes are similar:
In Stalinist Russia, sexual pleasure was portrayed as unsocialist and counter-revolutionary. More recent Communist societies have also waged war on sexuality — a war that Islam, as we know, wages with similar ferocity. These totalist structures cannot survive in environments filled with self-interested, pleasure-seeking individuals who prioritize devotion to other individual human beings over the collective and the state. Because the leftist believer viscerally hates the notion and reality of personal love and “the couple,” he champions the enforcement of totalitarian puritanism by the despotic regimes he worships.
Some may say that the earliest Communists promoted promiscuity — and abortion. Yes, they did, but note that a) promiscuity violates tender, loving fidelity between two people and b) abortion prevents the fruit of that beautiful union.
Glazov goes on to discuss famous dystopian novels, each of which involves a totalitarian state that forbids love between two adults. HG Wells’s novels described the totalitarian atmosphere. A Russian literary editor and novelist, Yevgeny Zamyatin, who had edited translations of Wells’s works in Russian, was inspired to take the concepts further in his 1924 novel We, which the early Soviet government banned. Zamyatin’s novel describes a couple who experience devotion to each other. Because this is illegal, the protagonist D-503 must undergo the Great Operation, which deadens the parts of the brain dedicated to passion, imagination and, by extension, love. D-503’s lover O-90 gives birth to his child. O-90 cannot bear to give their child up to the state, so D-503 manages to get her and their child smuggled out of the state to safety.
We inspired other dystopian works, the most famous of which are Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984. Those also contain story lines of forbidden love.
Totalitarianism encourages promiscuity, but not faithful love. Religious totalitarianism values sexual segregation, but not mutual devotion:
And that is why love presents such a threat to the totalitarian order: it dares to serve itself. It is a force more powerful than the all-pervading fear that a totalitarian order needs to impose in order to survive. Leftist and Muslim social engineers, therefore, in their twisted and human-hating imaginations, believe that the road toward earthly redemption (under a classless society or Sharia) stands a chance only if private love and affection is purged from the human condition.
However, as we know, that is impossible. We are hard-wired to be like Adam and Eve. God created them so they could be loving, supportive companions who could create a family.
This brings us to the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Those of us who are old enough to remember recall slogans of ‘free love’ and so on. Various sexual positions, some of them non-procreational, were vaunted. If couples weren’t engaging in these, they were not ‘doing it right’. The Joy of Sex was a newlywed’s go-to book in the 1970s. Swingers’ clubs were popular amongst small segments of the middle class.
And, yes, there were swingers living near my home in the 1970s. My parents and I knew two. This middle-aged couple — second marriage for both, grown children — tried to recruit my parents. Mum and Dad were appalled. My mother tried to engage the couple in a philosophical discussion about the nature of love and marriage. Their response was, ‘Who needs it?’ Not surprisingly, they divorced and moved away within the year. If I remember rightly, the woman started cavorting with a fellow swinger and left her husband. He was very angry with her and changed his tune. ‘What happened to her fidelity to me?’ he asked my parents. Lesson learned? For him, yes. For her, it came afterwards when her swinger boyfriend dumped her. That was the last we heard of or about them.
The sexual revolution — still continuing today, with teenagers engaging in oral or copulative sex as if it were nothing — is something sensible people must resist. Sex education in schools is not designed to tell children about the birds and the bees in a biological way. It is intended to subvert the sanctity of married life and bringing children into the world.
During this same era, Bill Ayers — a longtime educator who goes on public speaking tours across America — was a radical who escaped a prison sentence on a technicality. You can read more about him here:
Obama friend Bill Ayers’s magnum opus: Prairie Fire
Obama friend Bill Ayers’s commitment to radicalism … and state education
He was one of the leaders of the Weather Underground, a group of violent radicals. Glazov tells us:
as Peter Collier and David Horowitz demonstrate in Destructive Generation, the Weather Underground not only waged war against American society through violence and mayhem, but also waged war on private love within its own ranks. Bill Ayers, one of the leading terrorists in the group, argued in a speech defending the campaign:
Any notion that people can have responsibility for one person, that they can have that ‘out’ — we have to destroy that notion in order to build a collective; we have to destroy all ‘outs,’ to destroy the notion that people can lean on one person and not be responsible to the entire collective.
That was at the time of the ‘free love’ sexual revolution in the late 1960s.
Similarly, promiscuity was the order of the day in communes, also popular then, whether large or small. Invariably, even though they started out with an egalitarian programme, all of them ended up with an alpha male leader who seduced the women in the group, creating a harem. Other men ended up being marginalised. Couples were fractured. People got hurt emotionally. Some required deep therapy to bring them back to a trusting, loving state of mind.
Although I digress somewhat, these vignettes from half a century ago tell us that we should be wary of deviating from a biblical norm when it comes to love.
Now to the present day. A bewildering series of protests have been taking place over the past few months. The most bemusing involve feminists veiling themselves as if they were Muslim. Why?
Glazov explains that totalitarian regimes rely on clothing that conceals one’s sexuality. Historically:
As sociologist Paul Hollander has documented in his classic Political Pilgrims, fellow travelers were especially enthralled with the desexualized dress that the Maoist regime imposed on its citizens. This at once satisfied the leftist’s desire for enforced sameness and the imperative of erasing attractions between private citizens. As I have demonstrated in United in Hate, the Maoists’ unisex clothing finds its parallel in fundamentalist Islam’s mandate for shapeless coverings to be worn by both males and females. The collective “uniform” symbolizes submission to a higher entity and frustrates individual expression, mutual physical attraction, and private connection and affection. And so, once again, the Western leftist remains not only uncritical, but completely supportive of — and enthralled in — this form of totalitarian puritanism.
With regard to today’s female protesters:
This is precisely why leftist feminists today do not condemn the forced veiling of women in the Islamic world; because they support everything that forced veiling engenders.
As Glazov points out, even European law enforcement officers have been advising women to cover up so they won’t be targets of immigrant Muslim men.
Before I conclude, it is essential at this point to offer documented proof that, 40 years ago, Muslim women — except for those out in the sticks — wore normal Western clothing. I wrote about this in 2015 with loads of links to photographs:
From the modern to the mediaeval in 40 years
Today, I saw two more items relating to Muslim women’s attire during that time. Rare Historical Photos has a good piece, ‘Women protesting forced hijab days after the Iranian Revolution, 1979’. Here’s an unrelated tweet from someone too young, perhaps, to know what I remember from my youth:
Glazov concludes that:
Valentine’s Day is a “shameful day” for the Muslim world and for the radical Left. It is shameful because private love is considered obscene, since it threatens the highest of values: the need for a totalitarian order to attract the complete and undivided attention, allegiance and veneration of every citizen. Love serves as the most lethal threat to the tyrants seeking to build Sharia and a classless utopia on earth, and so these tyrants yearn for the annihilation of every ingredient in man that smacks of anything that it means to be human …
This day reminds us that we have a weapon, the most powerful arsenal on the face of the earth, in front of which despots and terrorists quiver and shake, and sprint from in horror into the shadows of darkness, desperately avoiding its piercing light.
That arsenal is love …
Love will prevail.
Long Live Valentine’s Day.
With work schedules and business trips such as they are, some readers might be celebrating a Valentine’s weekend. I wish you a very happy time. May it be love-filled today and always.
Churchmouse Campanologist 