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While Nigel Farage took a two-week break from his early evening GB News show, actor Laurence Fox, who also founded the Reclaim Party, was his guest host.
What a surprise viewers had on Tuesday, October 4, 2022, when Fox spoke to Donald Trump on the phone:
It was an excellent interview, done in segments, after which a Democrat or a Republican appeared on air to give his or her views of what Trump had just said.
This is the full hour-long episode:
Fox began by reviewing Trump’s accomplishments while in office, pointing out that he got elected in 2016 because he could connect with millions of Americans and didn’t come off as an elitist like Hillary Clinton did:
America’s 45th president told Fox how surprised he was at Boris Johnson’s change of focus during his premiership, saying that he ‘went woke’:
This GB News article has more (emphases mine):
Donald Trump has called former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson “woke” in a surprising attack on his ally.
In a world exclusive GB News interview, the ex-US President said Boris Johnson “went liberal all of a sudden” in a “crazy” move.
Trump called Mr Johnson a “good guy” but criticised him for “changing” as he spoke to Laurence Fox.
The 76-year-old said: “Boris was a friend of mine, perhaps he still is but I haven’t spoken to him in a while.
“The problem Boris has is he went liberal all of a sudden, and I think that is crazy.
“He’s a good man but something happened to him, he changed, he went for windmills all over the place and he went a little bit wokier than I believe he is and I think ultimately that is the thing that got him out.
“I don’t think it was the party [Conservatives] I think that was just an excuse.”
Although Trump has not met Boris’s successor Liz Truss, he is favourably disposed towards her:
Trump also said that he was surprised at the criticism Truss’s mini-budget received (more here):
The Telegraph reported on that part of the interview:
Former US president Donald Trump had said that he backs new Prime Minister Liz Truss and that he thinks “very highly” of her.
Speaking on GB News to Laurence Fox, Trump said of Truss that he liked “some of the things she’s done”, adding that he had “cut taxes very substantially and we did much more business and she’s done that”.
He said that he thinks “very highly of her and she had a great send-off from the Queen”, adding that as it was the late Queen’s last meeting it was a “big deal”.
Joe Biden’s former Chief of Staff appeared but she didn’t respond to anything Trump had said. She only wanted to bang on about how ‘divisive’ he had been as president. Talk about living in a parallel universe:
In a separate interview, Greg Swenson from Republicans Overseas UK lauded Trump’s economic policy and said that more countries around the world should implement them:
Trump discussed his own major accomplishments during his four-year term, which brought criticism from an adviser to both the Bush II and Clinton administrations. Fox ended this man’s three-minute rant by telling him to go and have another espresso:
Trump rightly told Fox that, if he were still president, there would be no war in Ukraine:
Former Royal Navy Commander Dr Chris Parry agreed:
Trump was discreet about his meeting with King Charles III a few years ago and offered his support to the new monarch. Trump also reminded us that his mother was Scottish:
GB News reported:
He told Laurence Fox: “I think he’ll probably not discuss certain elements of what he believes, in my opinion.
“I think Charles is going to do very well, he’s got a great way about him, I think he did very well during the ceremony [Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral].”
Despite his warm feeling towards the royal, Trump admitted he does not hold look upon Prince Harry and Meghan Markle as favourably.
He told GB News: “I’m not a fan, I was never much of a fan of her [Meghan].
“I don’t get it, but I hope he’s [Harry] happy, he didn’t seem too happy and he doesn’t seem too happy.
“I thought she was disrespectful to the Queen, which is a no no, you can’t do that.”
The Telegraph had more:
“I know him very well, quite well. And I spent a lot of time when I was over there as president with him. And with his wife [who] was absolutely lovely, by the way, and we had a good time together,” he said.
As for the King’s popularity versus his mother’s, he said:
Probably difficult when you’re the King you want to have 100% of the people love you like the Queen did. The Queen had – everybody loved her, right? She didn’t have that kind of an agenda.
And yet, you know, she was a very strong woman. I got to know her too. She was a very strong woman, a great woman.
The interview ended with a discussion about biopics. Fox plays Hunter Biden in My Son Hunter, released on September 7.
Trump said that, if it were ever to happen, he hoped that Fox could play him in a biographical movie:
Oh, that voice!
He enthused for another minute or so about Fox’s accent, then, with both parties happy, the call came to an end.
Fox’s interview style is conversational, something Trump would appreciate. What a great hour of television.
In writing this week’s Forbidden Bible Verses post on Philippians 2:14-18, I used, as per usual, John MacArthur’s sermons.
‘Stop Complaining, Part 1’ begins with his view of an overly indulged, complaining generation.
He says that the problem is getting worse, rather than better.
Emphases mine below:
Let me sort of ease in to our subject a little bit, if I might. We’re in Philippians chapter 2 verses 14 through 16. And I titled the message, “Stop Complaining.” There’s a reason for that, and it’s fairly obvious if you look at verse 14 where Paul says, “Do all things without grumbling or disputing,” which are really two ways of saying stop complaining. And as I was thinking about this very pertinent message about living your Christian life without complaining, it became very apparent to me that we live in a very complaining society. And I really believe we are breeding a generation of complainers, and they seem to be getting worse with each passing generation.
And as I’ve said to you on a number of occasions, it is a curiosity to me that the most indulged society is the most discontent society, that the more people have, the more they seem to be discontent with what they have and the more complaining they seem to be. In thinking about this, and there would be many ways to approach it, I was just inadvertently flipping on the radio this week and I heard a speech by a sociologist that was quite curious to me and quite interesting. The sociologist made a very interesting point. He was talking about the young people in our culture, talking about their discontent, talking about their complaining attitude, their resistance to responsibility, and how that nothing is ever the way they would like it. And they go through life with a kind of sullen discontent, kind of rejection of things the way they are. And he had an interesting thesis. What he basically said was this: that in many ways this discontented generation of young people is a product of small families. His thesis was that where you have families where the average is two or less, of course the average family now in America is 1.7 children, which is kind of strange to think about; as one brother said to his sister, “I’m the one and you’re the point seven.” But every family seems to come out at about 1.7.7. We realize that families are getting smaller and smaller and moving toward one child families, if that. Most families in America have either none, one, or two children …
And the difference is where you have a small family, the system bends to the child. Where you have a large family, the child bends to the system. And so, what you have, he said, is young people growing up in an environment where the system bends to them. And you have child-centered parenting.
MacArthur grew up in a large family, where choice was not an option:
I know as a child myself, one of the reasons I wanted to grow up was I wanted freedom. I lived in a totally conformed society. I ate what they gave me. I don’t ever remember going shopping with my mother, ever. I wore whatever she brought home. I never picked out a thing, never. I don’t even remember going to a department store clothing section as a young person. My mother brought me what I needed, and I put it on. And I conformed to the system. And I looked forward to adulthood so that I could be free to make my own choices. The reverse is true now; children grow up controlling the family and they don’t want to become adults because that means conformity. Then, they have to go to work, and nobody at work says, “Now, how would you like your office decorated? And what time would you like to take a break for lunch?” Nobody says that. They put you on an assembly line or they put you in a place where you are forced to conform, so what you have then is a generation of young people who don’t want to grow up.
And this sociologist said on the radio, you ask the average high-school kid, what do you want to do when you get out of school? What’s his answer? “I don’t know.” You ask the average college student, what do you want to do when you’re out of college? “I don’t know.” And the reason he doesn’t know is because he is postponing responsibility because responsibility means conformity to a system, whereas childhood for him has been absolute freedom. Eat what you want when you want, wear what you want when you want, and your mother will take you anywhere you want to go whenever you want. And so, you breed a generation of young people who are irresponsible. And when they do get a job, they get a job simply to finance themselves so they can enjoy their indulgences, and then when they’re 28 years old their license plate says, “He wins who has the most toys.” And the whole idea of adulthood is to collect toys, boats, cars, vacation trips, on and on and on.
Now, what you have in this kind of thing, said this sociologist, is breeding moody discontent. And you build young people who cannot conform and cannot be satisfied, over-indulged kids who don’t want to be adults, continue to push off responsibility; they grow up in an environment they control. They don’t like being controlled. And they become discontent. They don’t want to take responsibility. They don’t want to work. And their adult years are sad. They become sullen, very often, they become complainers. And I really believe that he’s right in many cases. One of the curses of our culture are overindulged childish kind of adults who are really complainers about everything. Nothing is ever enough. That’s why we have a whole society with a critical mentality, constantly attacking everything.
The church environment is no different:
Now, I want you to know this has found its way into the church. And the church is full of its own complainers, and what is really sad is many of them are run by their children’s discontent. People leaving the church because their children don’t like it. Can’t imagine such a thing, unless their children control the family. The church has its complainers. And here we are with so much, so much. How in the world could we possibly complain just because every little thing in life isn’t exactly the way we want it? Frankly, I would suggest to you that few sins are uglier to me and few sins are uglier to God than the sin of complaining. Frankly, I think the church at large does much to feed this thing by continuing to propagate this self-esteem, self-fulfillment garbage that just feeds the same discontent. There’s little loyalty. There’s little thankfulness. There’s little gratitude. And there’s very little contentment. And sadly, what happens eventually is your griping, grumbling, murmuring discontent is really blaming God because, after all, God is the one who put you where you are. So, just know who you’re complaining against.
He discusses how famous people from the Bible railed against God, from the very beginning:
Now, having said all of that there is a sense in which this complaining is part of our culture. There’s another sense in which it’s not new at all. Who was the first complainer who ever walked the earth? Who was it? The first complaining human being who ever walked was the first human being whoever walked. And what was Adam’s first complaint? “God, the woman You gave me.” We are in this mess because of this woman. He didn’t blame Eve; he blamed God. Eve had nothing to do with it. God made Eve. Adam wasn’t married; he woke up one morning he was married. God could have picked anybody He wanted, He picked her. Why? It’s God’s fault. She led the whole human race in sin. The woman You gave me, complaining. Cain complained to God about God’s work in his life, Genesis 4:13 and 14. Moses complained to God for not doing what he wanted Him to do when he wanted Him to do it, Exodus 5:22 and 23. Aaron and Miriam complained to God against Moses, His chosen leader and their own brother in Numbers chapter 12. Jonah complained to God because he was mad at God for saving the Ninevites, Jonah chapter 4 verses 9 and 10. And it is still a popular pastime to complain at God. And may I say that all of your complaints in one way or another are complaints against the providential purpose and will of God.
There’s a new book out called “Disappointment With God,” very popular and being promoted very heavily. It seems to me to make complaining against God okay. It sort of tries to define God as a lonely misunderstood lover who is really trying to work things out, but is really kind of a victim of all of us and we shouldn’t complain against Him, we ought to love Him. What a strange view of God. He is not some lonely misunderstood lover; He is the sovereign God who has ordered the circumstances of all of our lives. And to complain against God, to grumble against God is a sin and we must see it as such.
In the ninth chapter of Romans verse 20, “O man, who answers back to God? The thing molded will not say to the molder, ‘Why did you make me like this,’ will it?” Who in the world are you to answer back to God? What an unthinkable thing to do. And when describing the apostates in Jude 16, it says they are grumblers finding fault following after their own lusts. All they want is what they want when they want it, they don’t get it, they grumble and find fault. It’s characteristic sin of the proud and it is characteristic sin of the wicked.
Now, the tragedy of this particular sin is that it is so contagious. Let me take a minute to usher you back into the Old Testament, chapter 13 of Numbers. And I want you to follow me and we’ll at least get through this little introduction and I think set the stage for what is ahead of us. This is really very, very interesting and very important. We go back to the number one illustration of grumbling, murmuring belly-aching griping people the world has ever known, namely whom? The Israelites. Numbers 13 just gives us a little insight in to the potential power of this attitude to spread. Verse 30 says, “Caleb quieted the people before Moses and said, we should by all means go up and take possession of it for we shall surely overcome it.” Joshua, you remember, and Caleb came back from spying out the land and they said we can do it; God is on our side, we can take it. “But the men who had gone up with him said, we are not able to go up against the people for they are too strong for us.” Which is nothing but doubting God. “So, they gave out to the sons of Israel a bad report of the land which they had spied out saying the land through which we have gone in spying it out is a land that devours its inhabitants, and all the people whom we saw in it are men of great size.” And then, they said this, “Also we saw the Nephilim, the sons of Anak are part of the Nephilim, and we became like grasshoppers in our own sight and so were we in their sight.”
So, they come back with this complaining: we’ll never do it, we can’t make it, we can’t defeat them. It’s a bad report. It will fail, it will never make it. Prophets of doom, they are. And they’re really complaining against the fact that God has told them to go in.
God hates complaining as much as He hates sin.
God killed complaining Israelites. The wages of complaining were death:
Now, go over to chapter 14, watch what happens in verse 36, “As for the men whom Moses sent to spy out the land and who returned and made all the congregation,” what? “Grumble against him by bringing out a bad report concerning the land, even those men who brought out the very bad report of the land,” follow this, “died by a plague before the Lord.” You know what the Lord thinks of grumblers? He killed them because they spread a brooding discontent against God. That’s the issue. These people complained against God, they complained against God calling them to go into the land, they complained because the odds were against them humanly speaking. And in their disbelief and complaining against God, they caused the whole nation to grumble, and as a result God killed them with a plague. Grumbling really spreads, and your discontent, and your critical spirit, and your grumbling attitude, and your murmuring complaints will infect other people.
Here were the children of God. They had been led out of Egypt. God had parted the Red Sea for them. They had seen ten plagues, miraculous plagues at the point of their deliverance. And as soon as they got out of the land of Egypt they started to complain, and it never really ended. Can I take you through a little trek? Go back to Exodus and let’s go back to where it started in the Exodus. Verse 11 of chapter 14, “Then, they said to Moses,” and they’re out in the wilderness now. “Is it because there were no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness?” They said, “What do you bring us out here for, because there weren’t any graves in Egypt?” Which is a mocking statement. I mean, wasn’t there a place to bury us there? You’re going to have to take us to the desert to bury us? “Why have you dealt with us in this way, bringing us out of Egypt?” Here’s the complaint, it’s not like they want it. They’ve left Egypt, it’s not the way they want it. Pharaoh is moving after them, and they begin to complain. Of course, God did a marvelous thing, He opened the Red Sea, drowned Pharaoh’s entire army and saved them.
Go to chapter 15, they come through the Red Sea, they’ve been delivered, and in that great 15th chapter, the song of Moses sings of God’s great deliverance. And it’s no sooner than they’ve done that, verse 22, then Moses led Israel from the Red Sea, and they went out into the wilderness of Shur, and they went three days and they didn’t have any water, three days. And they came to Marah, they couldn’t drink the waters of Marah, they were bitter therefore it was named Marah, so the people what? Grumbled at Moses saying, “What shall we drink?” Again, the same attitude. Chapter 16, by the way, God provided water for them. You remember it. Verse 27 of chapter 15, 12 springs of water and they camped there and 70 date palms and they had a feast. “Then, they set out from Elim and all the congregation of the sons of Israel came to the wilderness of Sin which is between Elim and Sinai, on the 15th day of the second month after their departure from the land of Egypt, and the whole congregation of Israel grumbled against Moses.” Nothing is ever enough. Part the Red Sea, provide the water, more grumbling. “Would that we had died by the Lord’s hand in the land of Egypt, we would have been better off there when we sat by the pots of meat, when we ate bread to the full.” Boy, this is a crass crowd, right? They don’t care about anything but food. “We’re all going to die of hunger.” Boy, they’re real deep, aren’t they? Real deep people. “And the Lord provides again.” It’s absolutely incredible. God sends quail, God sends manna down.
Then, you come to chapter 17. “Then, all the congregation of the sons of Israel journeyed by stages from the wilderness of Sin according to the command of the Lord and camped at Rephidim and there was no water for the people to drink. Therefore the people quarreled with Moses and said, give us water that we may drink.” See, here’s more complaining, griping, grumbling, quarreling, disputing. “Moses said to them, why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the Lord? He is the one who has ordained the circumstances. But the people thirsted there for water and they grumbled against Moses and they said, why now have you brought us up from Egypt to kill us and our children and our livestock with thirst?”
Well, Moses is getting to the end of his rope. So, Moses cried to the Lord, and I’m sure it was loud, “What shall I do to this people? A little more and they’ll stone me.” Some group, huh? So, the Lord said, “Pass before the people, take with you some of the elders of Israel, take in your hand your staff with which you struck the Nile and go. I’ll stand before you there on the rock at Horeb and you’ll strike the rock and water will come out of it the people may drink. Moses did so in the sight of the elders of Israel, he named the place Massah and Meribah because of the quarrel of the sons of Israel, and because they tested the Lord saying, is the Lord among us or not?” It doesn’t take very long for people to forget the provision of God.
Now, go over to Numbers for just a moment or two because I want you to see this pattern. Now, they’re at the other end of the 40 years. They’re ready. Time is ready to go into the land. And it’s not much different. Verse 1 of chapter 11 of Numbers, “Now, the people became like those who complain.” You ought to underline that. “They became like those who complain of adversity. Complaining of adversity in the hearing of the Lord.” That’s where their complaint really was directed. “And when the Lord heard it His anger was kindled, and the fire of the Lord burned among them and consumed some of the outskirts of the camp. The people therefore cried out to Moses and Moses prayed to the Lord and the fire died out. So, the name of the place was called Taberah because the first of the Lord burned among them.” 40 years later, and they have been complaining the whole time about everything.
Verse 4 says, “The rabble who were among them had greedy desires, and the sons of Israel wept again and said, who will give us meat to eat? We remember the fish and the cucumbers and the melons and the leeks and the onions and the garlic, and we’ve got nothing but manna, crummy manna.” Day after day, this is typical complaining. Chapter 14, God keeps on providing. God sends the spies into the land. And what happens? They come out, they give this evil report, we can’t do it. Verse 27 of chapter 14, “How long,” the Lord says to Moses and Aaron, “shall I bear with this evil congregation who are grumbling against Me? I have heard the complaints of the sons of Israel which they are making against Me. Say to them as I live, says the Lord, just as you have spoken in my hearing, so I will surely do to you. Your corpses shall fall in this wilderness, even all your numbered men according to your complete number from 20 years old and upward who have grumbled against Me.” God says I’ll kill the whole lot of you, you’ll never enter the promised land, and He did it. He did it.
Chapter 16 verse 41, “On the next day,” what next day? The next day after God had just punished some people for invading the priesthood. The next day after God’s object lesson about serious treatment of His law, “All the congregation of the sons of Israel,” verse 41, “grumbled against Moses and Aaron, and they’re saying you are the ones who caused the death of the Lord’s people.” And the Lord was furious. Verse 45, He says, “Get away from among this congregation that I may consume them instantly. Then, they fell on their faces.” And Moses said to Aaron, “Take your censer and put in a fire from the altar and take incense in and bring it quickly to the congregation and make atonement for them, for wrath has gone out from the Lord, the plague has begun. Then, Aaron took it as Moses had spoken, ran into the midst of the assembly, for behold the plague had begun among the people so he put on the incense and made atonement for the people. And he took his stand between the dead and the living and the plague was checked, but those who died by the plague were 14,700, besides those who died on account of Korah,” where the ground swallowed them all up. God just starts slaughtering thousands of them because of their grumbling, complaining, discontent.
You find it again in chapter 20. You find it again in chapter 21. I won’t read them to you. I suppose the summary of all of it could be in Psalm 106, just listen to this, verse 25. It says, “They didn’t believe in His word but grumbled in their tents. They didn’t listen to the voice of the Lord. Therefore, He swore to them that He would cast them down in the wilderness.” And that’s exactly what He did.
I read with interest and thought that this must be quite a recent sermon.
How old do you think it is?
MacArthur delivered that sermon on January 15, 1989!
Let’s return to our generation of complainers from that era, 33 years ago, as I write in 2022.
Their parents would have been born in the late 1950s through to the early 1960s, in most cases.
Those young adults, their children, in 1989, would have started getting married and bearing their own offspring in the 1990s.
Here we are, three decades — and three generations — later.
I have an update on today’s youth from Saturday’s Telegraph, July 30, 2022: ‘Our fixation with feelings has created a damaged generation’.
The article is about British youth. Post-pandemic, the main topic that appears in many news articles and parliamentary debates is mental health.
If I had £1 for every time I’ve heard the words ‘mental health’ in parliamentary debates between 2020 and 2022, I’d be living in Monaco right now.
Not only do we have a new generation of complainers, they say they are suffering.
They are suffering because they are too introspective.
Feelings are the order of the day. A dangerous solution to that is the Online Safety Bill currently in the House of Commons. Pray that we can put an end to it, because it has provisions for ‘legal but harmful’ speech. The Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport — currently Nadine Dorries — can decide what is ‘legal but harmful’ speech.
Whoa!
That is a very dangerous route.
Even more dangerous are the voices coming from Labour MPs, who say that if they are ever in government again — a likely possibility — they will clamp down on whatever free speech remains.
Even worse, the legislation has not been passed, yet, here are Hampshire Constabulary just last Saturday, July 30, 2022, arresting a military veteran for tweeting a meme. The person who complained said that the meme caused him or her ‘anxiety’.
The police don’t ordinarily go to people’s homes to investigate crime these days. Yet, they are all too ready to look into social media.
Five officers attended this man’s residence and arrested him. It appears that no charges stuck, possibly because of the Reclaim Party’s Laurence Fox’s video of the incident. Perhaps the police were embarrassed?
The man tweeting this — unrelated to the incident — is former firefighter Paul Embery, a GB News panellist and Labour Party member who is active in unions, someone concerned about freedom of expression:
Guido Fawkes has more on the story and points out (emphasis in the original):
Arresting people for causing offence or anxiety, all while Hampshire recorded 8,000 burglaries in the last year, probably isn’t the best use of police time…
How did we get here?
The Telegraph article consists of an interview with Gillian Bridge, 71, who is an addiction therapist, mental health advocate, teacher and author of many years’ experience in schools and prisons.
Now you might think she makes all manner of apologies for today’s youth.
Au contraire!
Gillian Bridge was aghast to find that the BBC put great emphasis earlier this year on how young Britons were reacting to the war in Ukraine. She said:
… there was this expectation that they were going to be enormously distressed – and about something that was not affecting them directly. Meanwhile, what were they doing in Ukraine? Living in bomb shelters; giving birth in cellars. But we were supposed to worry about the ‘anxiety’ young people were experiencing here? Frankly, I found that terrifying.
She said that this was not surprising, because in our post-pandemic world, feelings in a world of short attention spans are the only thing that matter.
As such, Ukraine is less important now. It shouldn’t be, but it is:
Terrifying, but “not surprising”, she adds with a sigh. “And you’ll notice that just like other political subjects that have prompted huge emotional outpourings on and off social media of late, things have now gone very quiet on that front. Once we’ve had these ‘big’ emotions, we are no longer particularly interested, it seems.” She cites our celebration of the NHS as another example. “People were virtually orgasmic about their pan-banging, but how many of them then went on to volunteer or do something tangibly helpful?” It’s in part down to our gnat-like attention span, says Bridge, “but also the fact that a lot of the time we’re not interested in the actual subject, just the way we feel about it.”
Mental health problems, real or otherwise, have spun out of control over the past few years, even pre-pandemic:
… the 71-year-old has watched our “fixation with feelings” balloon out of all proportion, eclipsing reason, and predicted how damaging it would be, especially for the young. However, even Bridge was shocked by figures showing that more than a million prescriptions for antidepressants are now written for teenagers in England each year, with NHS data confirming that the number of drugs doled out to 13 to 19-year-olds has risen by a quarter between 2016 and 2020.
Child mental health services are reported to be “at breaking point”, with referrals up by 52 per cent last year and some parents even admitting that they have been sleeping outside their children’s bedrooms in order to check they are not self-harming. There is no doubt that we are dealing with an unprecedented crisis – one that was definitely heightened by the pandemic. “But Covid cannot be held responsible for all of it,” cautions Bridge. “And while antidepressants can be very effective, we need to be asking ourselves how we reached this point? Because whatever we’ve been doing clearly isn’t working.”
Bridge blames this on too much introspection:
At the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference in 2019 Bridge told the 250 independent school heads in attendance what she believed to be the root cause of this mass unhappiness: “This focus on ‘me, myself and I’ is the problem… It’s taking people who are vulnerable to begin with and asking them to focus inwards.” And in Bridge’s ground-breaking book, Sweet Distress: How Our Love Affair With Feelings Has Fuelled the Current Mental Health Crisis, the behavioural expert explains why too much emphasis on emotion is as bad for our health as a surfeit of sweet treats. Indeed the “empty calories contained in some feelings” have only helped our “sense of self-importance to grow fat”, she says. Hence the “emotional obesity many are suffering from now”.
Cancel culture and censorship are part of this dreadful focus on feelings:
The book – which kicks off with Bridge’s assertion, “We’ve been living in a gross-out world of personal emotional self-indulgence and sentiment for decades now … decades which have seen the nation’s mental health worsening” – is a succession of equally magnificent declarations. Magnificent because she has pinpointed the cause of a whole range of societal problems, from mental distress and the determined fragility of the young to the woke chaos of universities and cancel culture.
Interestingly, Bridge believes that this toxic focus on feelings began in the 1970s. MacArthur and the sociologist he cited spoke in 1989. The timing makes sense.
Bridge told The Telegraph:
Certainly the touchy-feely approach to things had already started in classrooms back in the 1970s.
From there, it gradually expanded, year after year, decade after decade:
Flash forward to today, when every boss can be silenced by an employee starting a sentence with: “I just feel that …”
Whereas you could do so in the old days, it is now taboo to downplay someone’s feelings, and that is not a good thing:
The great value of feelings today, Bridge tells me, “is that no one else can ever deny them … so if you feel offended then someone has genuinely harmed you”. Celebrity culture has promoted this new way of thinking as much as social media, “where you can witness people actually gorging on themselves, getting high on the strength of their own feelings just as they do on sugar – self-pleasuring, basically. And listen, it may feel good in the short term, but it’s very bad for us in the long run.”
People can convince themselves that their feelings are the truth, their truth, anyway. That omits fact, what really happened. Bridge mentioned Meghan Markle’s complaints:
Take the Duchess of Sussex, she points out, and her litany of “heartfelt” complaints. “Just last week there she was explaining that she didn’t lie to Oprah about growing up an only child, because she felt like one, so it was, as she put it ‘a subjective statement’.” Bridge laughs; shakes her head. “We really are tying ourselves up in knots now, aren’t we? Because it’s all about me, myself and I, and someone like Meghan has made it so much easier for people to follow in her footsteps, when the reality is that feelings are not immutable. They are not fixed, an absolute. They are not fact. And they are certainly not something that must override everything else.”
Yet there is a natural neurological process whereby the brain is able to turn feelings into fact, Bridge explains. “If you revise, rehearse, repeat and reinforce, then you create a fact, and that fact will then be embedded in your memory: ‘your truth’. Going back to Markle, that’s crucially a truth that no amount of counter-evidence can challenge.”
Bridge says that encouraging children to emote and focus on their feelings is unhelpful for them and for society at large. The focus on feelings originated in the United States, the source of all bad ideas in our time:
“The worst possible thing you can do with a child is to give them a fixed idea that they are feeling a certain way,” she says with aplomb. So those “emotional literacy” classes that started in California and are now being taught at schools here in the UK? The ones using a “traffic light” system, with pupils as young as four being asked to describe their “happiness levels” accordingly? “A terrible idea,” Bridge groans. “Feelings are simply physiological sensations mediated by cultural expectations; they go up and they go down!” Yet thanks to the pervasive narrative that every feeling should be given weight, “instead of enjoying the limitless health and optimism of youth” many youngsters “are now entrenched in their own misery”.
Bridge then tapped unknowingly into what MacArthur preached about in 1989, the notion that there were once roles for us in life, conformity to social expectations:
The desire to feel significant (either by embracing victimhood or by other means) is hardly new where young people are concerned, Bridge reminds me, and her tone is notably empathetic. “Let’s not forget that people used to have a role in life assigned for them within their communities. You might do an apprenticeship and then go and work in a factory or go into your father’s firm, or you might be preparing to get married and have babies. Now people have to find their role, they have to choose an identity, and that is much more complicated for them.”
Remember when we older folk — the 60+ group — were taught resilience at home when we were children? ‘Tomorrow’s another day’? It meant that today’s setback was temporary and, sure, we were hurt or upset, but better times were on the way. And, sure enough, they were.
Parents and schools are not teaching children about the temporary nature of setbacks. Therefore, today’s children lack resilience, which gave all of us who learned it so long ago hope for the future:
“The reason ‘everything will look better in the morning’ is so important,” says Bridge, “is that just like the children who did well in [Walter Mischel’s famous 1972] marshmallow experiment, they were able to predict the future based on their past.” That ability to delay and see the bigger picture is closely associated with the development of the hippocampus, she explains, “which is memory, navigation and good mental health. Yet by immersing ourselves in feelings and the now, we’ve blotted out the ‘OK so I’m feeling bad, but tomorrow will be another day’ logic, and we’re trusting the least intelligent part of our brains. As parents, we should all be discouraging this in our children. Because a child has to believe in tomorrow.”
Developing resilience is good for brain health, and it helps us to survive.
Bridge says that altruism also helps our brain health. We look out for others, not just ourselves. She says:
Studies have shown that it protects us from mental decline in our later years, but that the self-involved are more likely to develop dementia.
She cautions against cancelling or revising our history, whether it be factual or cultural:
Learning and a sense of history are equally important when it comes to brain health. “Yet again we seem to be distancing ourselves from the very things that we need to thrive. We’re so threatened by history and its characters that we try to cancel them! When you only have to read something like Hamlet’s ‘to be, or not to be’ speech to understand that it encapsulates all of the issues and irritations we still suffer from today. And surely knowing that gives you a sense of belonging, a sense of context, continuity and, crucially, relativity?”
Alarmingly, Bridge says that some young people believe that suicide is a melodrama, not a final act:
… they don’t actually realise it’s the end of them. Instead, they are almost able to view it as a melodrama that they can observe from the outside. Which is a deeply distressing thought.
Scary.
Bridge warns that too much introspection can lead to criminality:
Although it’s hard to condense everything she learnt about the criminal brain during those years down to a tidy sound bite, “what was notable and important in this context,” she says, “was their fixation on themselves. So the more a person looks inwards at the me, myself and I, the more they’re likely to run afoul of everything, from addiction to criminality. In a way, the best thing you can do for your brain is to look beyond it.”
She tells me about a prisoner she was working with “who came up to me and said: ‘I’ve got mental health’ – as though that were a disorder. Because people have become so ‘into’ the problem that the phrase is now only negative. That’s surely one of the most worrying developments of all. And it’s why I refuse to use or accept the term ‘mental health’ unless it is prefixed by ‘good’ or ‘bad’.”
Incredibly, with all the misplaced importance on feelings, Bridge says she has never had a bad reception to her talks:
… she stresses she “has never encountered negativity anywhere I have spoken”. Yet another reason why Bridge isn’t about to dampen her argument.
She thinks there might be the seeds of a turnaround, based on news items over the past few weeks:
“I think people understand that it’s time for some tough talking,” she writes in Sweet Distress. “There is increasing evidence that families, schools and universities are being overwhelmed by an epidemic of mental ill health.” So whatever we are doing isn’t just “not helping”, but harming? “Absolutely. But I am seeing more and more people speaking up about this now. The narrative is changing. Just look at what the Coldstream Guards fitness instructor, Farren Morgan, said last week about body positivity promoting ‘a dangerous lifestyle’. He’s right.” She shrugs. “It’s no good saying ‘it’s OK to be any size you please’ when we know that if children have bad diets, that can in turn lead to obesity – which in turn makes it more likely that they will suffer both physically and mentally later on.”
She mentions the new smart dress code implemented by the head of Greater Manchester Police – the one that, according to reports last week, helped turn the force around into one of the “most improved” in the country. “These officers were performing better at work because they were dressed smarter. So what does that tell us? That if you have a disciplined life and if you accomplish the things you set out to do, that gives you self-esteem – which makes you happier. But of course none of this happens if we are just sitting around ‘feeling’ things.”
She suggests that a good way of getting young people out of the cancel culture narrative is to point out that, someday, they might be cancelled, too. Also note the final word:
How do we get people out of themselves when they are so entrenched, though? How do we root them when they are flailing to such an extent? “By giving them a sense of being part of history! By getting them to see that if they want to cancel someone who lived 50 or 100 years ago, then in 50 or 100 years’ time someone may have entirely ‘valid’ reasons to cancel them. By building the inner scaffolding that will keep them standing throughout life’s ups and downs. And you know what that inner scaffold is called?” she asks with a small smile. “Resilience.”
Get Gillian Bridge into the new Government, coming soon, as an adviser. The nation needs someone like her. She would be perfect in helping us to defeat our mental health pandemic.
One wonders if Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has Conservatives on his PR team.
He certainly has not had a good campaign for his party’s candidates in the run up to England’s local elections on Thursday, May 6.
On Monday, April 19, he got off to a rocky start with a visit to a pub in Bath in the West Country, shortly after pubs were allowed to reopen for outdoor service after our winter lockdown. Publican — and Labour voter — Rod Humphris of The Raven gave Starmer a piece of his mind, saying that he did a lousy job of opposing the Government’s coronavirus restrictions:
I have been a Labour voter my entire life. You have failed to be the Opposition … You have failed this country.
Pub customers must remain outdoors unless they need to use the loo. Humphris and other publicans could be doing better business if they were allowed to have customers indoors. He showed Starmer a chart with ONS statistics showing coronavirus is no longer the threat it was a year ago. He also gave the Labour leader a brief talk about other statistics on the harm lockdown has done to Britain, from children to the economy.
Starmer dismissed it and told Humphris he did not need any ‘lectures’ from him — then proceeded to enter the pub.
The nerve of Starmer. He knows the rules.
Humphris tried to push Starmer’s security man away from the door but failed. The burly security man held on to Humphris on the staircase. Shouting about being assaulted, Humphris tried to break free. Meanwhile, Starmer was having a look around the pub’s interior.
Humphris shouted:
Get out of my pub!
Somewhere along the line, Humphris’s spectacles fell off. Starmer had them in his hand. On his way out the door, he quietly returned them to Humphris. Starmer and his two security men then left, telling people to get out of their way, adding a stern ‘please’.
This is the electioneering video of the year — and the full version:
I’ve watched that video several times and would encourage others to see it at least once.
It paints a perfect portrait of what another Labour government would be like, barging in wherever they like with burly security detail.
Heaven forfend.
Rule No. 1 of pubgoing: the publican is in charge of his/her public house — ‘My gaff, my rules’.
Here is the late Barbara Windsor as Peggy Mitchell, the publican on BBC’s EastEnders, ordering customers to ‘get out of my pub’:
Meanwhile, elsewhere in England that day, Prime Minister Boris Johnson had a pleasant conversation with two pubgoers:
As questions mounted about Boris’s Downing Street flat refurbishment, Starmer paid a visit to a John Lewis store to look at wallpaper last Thursday:
Guido Fawkes wrote (emphases in the original):
Guido’s interested to see Starmer arrive at John Lewis this afternoon for a smug photoshoot amid flat-gate. It’s undoubtedly a smirk-raising photo-op, though it’s undermined by Starmer’s own words at PMQs yesterday, who ranted at Boris:
This is a Prime Minister who, during the pandemic, was nipping out of meetings to choose wallpaper
Now the Tories are able to accuse Starmer of playing party politics, and doing so during a pandemic.
On Friday, May 30, the former Director of Public Prosecutions found himself trolled by a young Conservative in Manchester:
Guido Fawkes had the story:
He may have thought a trip to Labour’s Manchester heartland would have been a safe choice after his infamous Bristol pub confrontation, however Sir Keir was once again caught out. Posing with Twitter user Jordan Hutchinson he smiled and gave a thumbs-up, only to have Hutchinson tell viewers “Vote Conservative”. It’s appropriate Starmer spent yesterday in John Lewis’s home furnishings section, as it’s looking curtains for him…
Jordan Peterson’s video amused James Cleverly MP, Minister for Middle East & North Africa in the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office. A member of the public replied to say that Labour have only themselves to blame:
Starmer ended the week with a visit to a gym. Oh, dear. The late Margaret Thatcher was more adept with a handbag:
Actor and musician Laurence Fox of the libertarian Reclaim Party is running for Mayor of London. He posted an interesting video on May 1 showing Starmer and other Labour Party members, including at least one other MP, enjoying drinks together indoors, something we are not allowed to do at present because of the pandemic:
Laurence Fox stands by the video and his tweet:
Starmer’s Labour seems to be all about rules for ‘thee but not for me’. Who would want that, even at a local level?
On Thursday, January 16, 2020, the BBC’s Question Time (QT) had an unusual guest: an actor.
He was no ordinary actor, as the presenter, panel and live audience were to discover.
Laurence Fox, co-star of the popular Detective Morse-spin-off series Lewis, spoke his mind cogently and calmly.
What he said was controversial to half the people who heard it and common sense to the other half.
Guido Fawkes promptly posted Fox’s ‘best of’ moments early Friday morning (emphasis in the original):
Few knew who Laurence Fox was before last night’s Question Time appearance. After this barnstorming performance Guido reckons his appearances will be more keenly anticipated.
Most viewers would make time to watch QT were Fox on it again. However, unlike Guido, I doubt whether he will be invited again. Although his views are centrist, that’s too balanced for the programme, known for its overwhelmingly left-wing panel and presenter (Fiona Bruce) as well as the blunt, emotional discussions, if one can call them that.
No one with any common sense watches QT unless there’s someone on they want to see. I only watched the programme in full after seeing Guido’s post.
This was one of the best QTs ever, because of Fox.
One wonders if the programme researcher who booked him still has a job. I hope so, because ratings on the online replays of the show must have gone through the roof over the past week.
This is what Spiked‘s columnist, Patrick West, wrote about the actor only a few weeks ago in November 2019 (emphases mine below):
We need more Laurence Foxes
Most intelligent grownups don’t pay attention to the political opinions of actors. The film Team America summed it up. Their opinions are usually shallow and conformist. Not so the actor Laurence Fox.
He is decidedly un-luvvie in his opinions and pastimes. The Lewis actor told The Sunday Times the other week that he recently walked around south London in a MAGA hat. He’s fine about multiracialism, but hates multiculturalism: ‘You have to be a Somewhere person. If you’re in England, be English.’
He openly doesn’t hate Donald Trump. He doesn’t think there should be 50-50 gender quotas for scriptwriters at RADA. He calls his fellow thesps ‘hypocrites’ for supporting Extinction Rebellion while leading ‘high-carbon lives’. He is irked most by today’s culture of conformity. ‘Our parents taught us to think for ourselves and then stayed out of the way. Now our kids turn up with a preconceived idea which they’re getting from school.’
Research by King’s College London’s privacy institute published last month showed that young people today had much more liberal views on soft drugs, homosexuality and abortion than they did 20 years ago …
This is the great paradox of our day: young people are more tolerant than they used to be, except towards those who question the consensus.
You can see an interview here from December 1 in which he describes his MAGA hat experience in London and the Trump Derangement Syndrome he received:
This is the full 27-minute interview:
The Telegraph‘s Madeline Grant was also on the QT panel last Thursday. She wrote about it on Friday morning, including a clip of the show when the Sussexes departure from the Royal Family was discussed:
The woman attempting to take Fox on over his views on the topic turned out to be a BBC plant, a lecturer at Edge Hill University (a former teacher training college):
Now on to Madeline Grant’s article, most of which lies behind a paywall:
To say I was in a state of panic on the way to Liverpool for my maiden Question Time outing on Thursday would be an understatement. I imagined vomiting onstage, trying to speak and croaking, wardrobe malfunctions, furious audience members throwing tomatoes, and more. I considered pulling a sickie or emigrating.
Yet the experience defied my expectations; with a rare Right-leaning panel, a terrific audience posing intelligent questions, a generally polite and enjoyable conversation without the point-scoring tedium that often accompanies such shows.
Perhaps the most astonishing revelation, however – the needle in the haystack, the flying pig, the blue moon – was the presence of a non-woke actor on the panel. My new friend Laurence Fox, who perfectly captured public resentment of stifling identity politics and the culture of permanent offence. He skewered the hypocrisies of pontificating celebrities and disconnected politicians. And, like Ricky Gervais’s tirade against the Hollywood elite at the Golden Globes, his words found a receptive audience …
The aforementioned lecturer, Rachel Boyle, accused Fox of being ‘privileged’ in his comments about the Duchess of Sussex. The Telegraph‘s Jamie Johnson wrote an article, free to view, which recapped some of what the actor said:
Responding to a claim from an audience member that the media’s treatment of Meghan amounted to “racism”, Mr Fox responded: “It’s not racism… we’re the most tolerant, lovely country in Europe.
“It’s so easy to throw the charge of racism and it’s really starting to get boring now,” he continued.
The audience member then described Fox as a “white, privileged male”, to which he responded: “I can’t help what I am, I was born like this, it was an immutable characteristic.
“To call me a white privileged male is to be racist,” he claimed.
You can read an analysis of Boyle and QT here. She tweeted on Saturday, January 18, and got a number of pro and con responses, including this one:
Fox believes that the media turned on the Sussexes when they decided they did not want to put in the hard work as Royals yet still get paid a salary:
Further discussing Meghan and Harry’s decision to quit as senior royals, he told host Fiona Bruce: “When you’re younger you do want to make a life for yourselves.
“So I do empathise with them, but I do think there’s a little bit of having your cake and eating it which I don’t enjoy.”
Absolutely! The more one reflects on this, the more one can see the British public’s indignation at the indirect insinuation by the Sussexes that we’re just not good enough for them. They cannot bear the idea of pressing our oh-so-common flesh on a regular basis. They’re far too good for the likes of us. What snobs.
Returning to QT, the first of Fox’s brilliant comments came on the subject of climate change and frequent flights. He willingly admitted to flying a lot:
Joking about the hypocrisy of celebrities who fly regularly, Fox said: “The carbon footprint’s huge.
“But we make up for it by preaching to everyone how they should change their life.”
Yes! (Looking at you, Sussexes — along with dozens of others!)
Fox received lots of praise from QT viewers:
The Mail on Sunday has more reactions from Twitter on Fox’s views as expressed on QT.
In this interview with journalist and polemicist James Delingpole from January 16, Fox discusses his attitude towards dating:
The aforementioned Mail on Sunday article reported some of what Fox, 41, said on the topic:
Laurence Fox has revealed he once broke up with a girlfriend because she liked a pro-#MeToo TV advert.
The actor, 41, told his ex-lover: ‘Bye. Sorry I can’t do this with you,’ after she praised Gillette for their TV campaign on ‘toxic masculinity’.
He also said he no longer dates women under 35 as they are ‘too woke’ and most of them are ‘absolutely bonkers’ …
The controversial Gillette advert subverted the razor brand’s famous ‘The Best A Man Can Get’ slogan by challenging traditional views of what it means to be a successful man.
It featured news clips of reporting on the #MeToo movement, as well as images showing sexism in films, in boardrooms, and of violence between boys.
In an interview with the Delingpod podcast, Mr Fox, who has two children with actress Billie Piper, 37, said of his Gillette argument: ‘I don’t know how we ended up together. It was a very short relationship.
‘We were walking down the road together and she was talking about how good the Gillette advert was. I just looked at her and went, ‘Bye. Sorry I can’t do this with you.’
It is not clear which former girlfriend Mr Fox was referring to.
He told the podcast that before his current relationship began, he was put off dating women under 35 because they are ‘primed to believe they are victims’ …
Mr Fox’s previous girlfriends include DJ Lilah Parsons, Sky Sports News presenter Kirsty Gallcher, 43, and Vogue Williams, 34.
Asked what his former flame would think about him sharing the unusual reason for their break-up he told the podcast: ‘She will probably sit there and say, ‘See I told you he was patriarchal. He’s abusing me and I’m offended.’
That same day, Fox gave an interview to Spiked’s Brendan O’Neill, an ex-leftist who is now centrist and/or libertarian. This is a good discussion, just a little over an hour long. O’Neill clearly agrees with Fox:
Fox said, among other things, that he was very grateful that people were beginning to be more open about their views in the face of political correctness. As a result, he believes the tide is beginning to turn.
Millions of us are grateful to Laurence Fox for going on national television and unreservedly voicing his opinions in a calm, civilised manner.
Churchmouse Campanologist 