Wednesday, September 26, 2018


Feminism according to Daisy Cousens



America has many great conservative women.  I particularly like Kellyanne Conway and Monica Crowley.  But Australia produces talented conservatives too.  Claire Lehman, creator and editor of Quillette has come to international attention in recent times. And Daisy Cousens is very prominent these days in Australia.  She appears on all sorts of shows vigorously promoting conservative views. 

Her great asset is that she uses irreverent humor to punch holes in Leftist nonsense.  And the fact that she is very pretty and ultra feminine does undoubtedly help.

As far as I can tell, however, she is virtually unknown in America.  So I hope that the video below might go some way towards introducing Americans to her. After the video I reproduce an abridged version of a story about her.




For Daisy Cousens, there is more than one reason to celebrate the ascendancy of Donald Trump – or "Uncle Donny", as she refers to the US president.

First and foremost, it is good to wake up in the morning and know that a man of his calibre is in the Oval Office. The bonus? Knowing lefties worldwide are still sobbing into their pillows. "Hilarious," is her summing-up of the situation.

Cousens, 28, is a right-wing political pundit, frequently invited to air her opinions in print and on television talk-shows.

Besides being forthright, she is "smart, hard-working, and extremely well-educated" – at least, that is how she described herself in an article she published online late last year. In the same piece, she attributed her professional success in part to her sparkling personality and attractive appearance.

"Funny and conventionally pretty is a winning combination," she pointed out, "and although looks and charisma won't help me do the task, they assist immeasurably in gaining me the opportunity."

On a warm afternoon, I visit Cousens on Sydney's North Shore, where she lives with her parents and two younger sisters in a pleasant house surrounded by towering gums.

She comes to the door wearing a fulllength dress with a fitted bodice. Her skin is pale, her hair dark, her smile coquettish: she reminds me of Vivien Leigh playing Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind. We take cups of tea to an outside table and I ask how she got into punditry. "I've always been conservative," she says. And confident, obviously. Also – she doesn't mind admitting it – contrarian. "I kinda like arguing with people. I like to talk."

She laughs when I mention that I saw her make a determined effort to speak over the top of host Tony Jones on ABC TV's Q&A earlier this year.

"I was just really annoyed," she says. "I'm like, 'No, let me talk, dammit!' It was very funny." On ABC's The Drum, Cousens was even more assertive. "No-no-no-no-no-no-no," she told a fellow guest who tried to get a word in edgeways. "Don't interrupt me." Both performances drew a big response online. "I didn't read any of it," she says. "But my friends were like, 'Er, Daisy, people are calling you a Nazi.'"

There's nothing like the presence of a Trump supporter to spice up on-air debate.

While I am working on this story, Cousens accepts requests to appear on Sky News' The Bolt Report, Paul Murray Live and Jones & Co, Channel Ten's The Project, as well as Q&A and The Drum. No one could accuse her of shrinking from the spotlight, but even she is surprised by how much screen-time she's getting. "They keep calling me," she says.

I think nowadays, being conservative, it's kind of like the new rebellion.

Daisy Cousens' parents are actors. (Her father, Peter Cousens, is also a producer and director whose film credits include Freedom, starring Cuba Gooding jnr.) "I think they're a bit more centrist than I am," says Daisy, as we sit drinking tea in their sun-dappled garden. She herself dreamed of becoming a musical-theatre star, and spent the best part of a year trying to conquer Broadway. She says she had $10 in her pocket when she returned from New York. What's nice, from her perspective, is that she has ended up in the spotlight any way – even if she finds herself playing to tougher crowds than she encountered in her song-and-dance days. "They booed me!" she says of a section of the Q&A audience. A small pause. "I was really pleased."

CONTROVERSY IS, of course, the pundit's stock-intrade. When Cousens says things like, "I called myself a feminist before I started, you know, thinking," you get the impression she is hoping for a sharp collective intake of breath. She tells me that she and fellow members of the cohort she calls the "millennial Right" aim to be "very, very outrageous … We like to shock people".

In the Trump era, conservatism has lost its fuddy-duddy image, she says. "I think nowadays, being conservative, it's kind of like the new rebellion."

Cousens, who likes that Trump is "very anti-politicalcorrectness", was just 15 the first time she gave us the benefit of her assessment of a US president. It was 2003, a few months after the invasion of Iraq, and US president George W. Bush was visiting Canberra. Cousens, in the national capital on a school excursion,was one of 40 students selected to sit in on his address to federal parliament ("You had to be the worst kind of teacher's pet to get picked for that," she admits).

Interviewed for the next day's newspapers, she said Bush had convinced her that starting the war was the right thing to do: "When he talked about Saddam's torture chambers, I thought, 'Oh my God, this man is trying to defend all of us.' "

Looking back, she is impressed by the chutzpah she showed when the press pack approached. "They said, 'Do any of you girls have anything to say about the speech?' And everyone was quiet except me. I just kept talking and talking." She beams. "Nothing has changed."

After Cousens accepted that her future was not on the stage, she obtained a master's degree in creative writing and began contributing articles to an online women's magazine, SheSaid. She also started writing about tennis, a sport she has always adored. Then she knocked out a piece called "Islam and Sexual Slavery", which the conservative journal Quadrant published in November 2015 under the pseudonym Victoria Kincaid (because it was so "controversial", she says). This was her break. She landed a job as an editorial assistant at [conservative magazine] Quadrant, later joining The Spectator Australia's stable of columnists.

Cousens' political pieces invariably excoriate the Left. "I wait to write things until I'm in a terrible mood," she says. "It's usually 2am and I have a block of chocolate and I'm irrationally annoyed because Rafael Nadal, who's my favourite tennis player, has lost in the early rounds." Her objective when she composes a column is "to make people think, and to make them laugh, and to punch a hole in something that hasn't had a hole punched in it before".

Factual accuracy isn't necessarily a top priority. "The single mother, popping out children at 16 for government benefits, is hailed as a 'working-class hero'," she writes. (Really? By whom?)

In spoken commentary, too, Cousens can seem to have an airy disregard for detail: she has claimed, for instance, that Trump's Democrat rival for the presidency, Hillary Clinton, "sort of like robbed Haiti of all this stuff after the earthquake".

Sometimes, Cousens' main aim looks suspiciously like self-promotion. In a widely derided Spectator article last month about the late cartoonist Bill Leak, she wrote that he referred to her as "beautiful Daisy" and ended their only face-to-face meeting by predicting: "You'll go far, my girl."

"I'm happy to have a political discussion with people who disagree with me, because that's interesting and I don't take it personally," Cousens says. "But the psychology of the Left is different. They get very, very emotionally attached to what they believe."

At my first meeting with Cousens, she says becoming a political provocateur has lost her about a dozen friends. "It's a shame," she says, sounding not particularly despondent. And yes, she gets plenty of online abuse from strangers, but she doesn't allow that to upset her: "It's an occupational hazard."

SOURCE






UK: Modern marriage only for the rich, says former judge Sir Paul Coleridge

Marriage rates have halved in 50 years and the institution is now only for the rich, a former High Court judge said last night.

Sir Paul Coleridge, chairman of the Marriage Foundation, said that marriage must be modern and relevant to combat the “scourge of family breakdown”. Marriage was not made more attractive to the disaffected “by encasing it in divorce and marriage laws which have their roots in Victorian Britain”, he added.

Sir Paul was addressing a debate on reforming the divorce laws at The Times’s offices in London, organised by the newspaper and the foundation as part of their “family matters” campaign. He said that family breakdown in Britain was worse than in any developed country in the western world. Only 50 per cent of 15-year-olds are living with both parents and, of those, 93 per cent of the parents were married.

“The reduction in marriage rates is mainly a feature of the lives of the less well off, so they suffer far higher rates of family breakdown,” he said. “However that was not always so: it is a serious social justice issue which should not be ducked.”

Each reform urged by The Times and the Marriage Foundation was aimed at making marriage more relevant. The first involved reforming the process of divorce, to which ministers are committed and have published a consultation paper. Couples could divorce without alleging fault but had to wait at least two years. So they “cook up false facts and courts do not have the time or inclination to interfere”, he said.

Sir Paul advocated other reforms including civil partnerships for all, pre-nuptial contracts and changes to the law on financial arrangements on divorce — both “long overdue for proper attention by parliament” — and rights for long-term cohabitants.

Fault-based divorce laws should be abolished as they increased conflict at a time when children needed support and not “animosity and blame”, Lucy Frazer, QC, the justice minister, said. Conflict over fault is at odds with the approach taken in the rest of the family law system, which aims to put the child at the centre and be non-adversarial, Ms Frazer said at the debate.

A recent YouGov study found that 27 per cent of divorcing couples who asserted blame said that allegations of fault were not true.

SOURCE





Rally in Washington Will Urge Disillusioned Democrats, Leftists to ‘Walk Away’

The founder of the movement that showcases stories of why people are walking away from leftist ideology and the Democratic Party is bringing a march and rally to Washington next month to send a message he hopes the mainstream media won’t be able to ignore.

It’s a milestone for what he calls the #WalkAway Campaign.

“We are only just over 3 months old, and at this point on all social media platforms, we have over 370,000 people who are members of the #WalkAway Campaign who have created testimonials that are a part of it,” Brandon Straka, founder of the campaign, told The Daily Signal in a phone interview.

“No one from the left-wing media has ever even reached out to me for a comment, let alone an interview or to have me on to talk about it,” Straka said, adding:

What they have done instead is put out stories saying it is a fake campaign, that it’s Russian bots, that it’s Russian propaganda, that it’s paid actors, that the testimonials are fake, that they’re stolen images from Shutterstock with fake testimonials attached, just anything you can imagine.

The march and rally will be held Saturday, Oct. 27. The event will start near the Democratic National Committee headquarters building on Capitol Hill and end on the lawn of the Capitol. The date is 10 days before the midterm congressional elections.

The event includes a gala dinner the night before and a closing brunch the next day.

Some venues and speakers have yet to be finalized, Straka said, but he hopes the rally, march, and related events will send a message that the mainstream media will be forced to recognize.

“We are going to fight back, and that’s when I came up with the idea for the march on Washington, because we are going to get [tens of thousands] … of people together to walk away from the Democrat Party, and we are going to do it in a live demonstration that they cannot dispute,” he told The Daily Signal.

Straka, 41, who calls himself a “gay conservative,” did not always describe himself as such.

“In 2017, I had what is commonly referred to as a ‘red pill experience’ because I was a lifelong liberal and a lifelong Democrat,” he said of his ideological epiphany.

A “red pill experience” is a term some use to describe finding the truth behind a situation, even if it’s hard to accept.

“I voted for Hillary Clinton and I was devastated when Donald Trump won the election, because I had completely bought into the liberal media narrative that Trump was a racist, a bigot, a homophobe, the second coming of Hitler, and that his followers were no better,” Straka told The Daily Signal. “I literally believed the left-wing narrative—hook, line, and sinker.”

Then his onetime babysitter challenged Straka about a post he shared on social media about Trump allegedly mocking a handicapped reporter.

“After I posted about the disabled reporter, she just came to me, and she said, ‘Have you seen this?’ It was a clip from YouTube called ‘Debunking That Trump Mocked the Disabled Reporter,’” Straka said, adding:

It was a compilation of footage showing Trump doing that same exact voice and gesture as he did that day, in numerous circumstances over the years, imitating numerous people, but the commonality was that he was imitating someone who was caught in a lie, or someone who had done something shady, or somebody who was groveling, but … it became clear when you watched it that he wasn’t imitating someone’s disability.

He was imitating someone who happened to be disabled who was caught in a lie.

A self-described actor, singer, and hairstylist turned political activist, Straka told The Daily Signal that the dishonesty of the left was a significant factor in his conversion:

I started doing a lot of research and discovering how dishonest they had been time and time again throughout [the Trump]  campaign, but also just in general.

I really started to see, finally, things started to make sense. Because as a liberal, I was always concerned with social justice and equality and all of these things. But at the same time, a lot of it wasn’t making sense to me because … it’s like the news, and the liberal society would have you believe that black people can’t go to their mailbox without being attacked by police officers and fighting gunfire, and I am not seeing it. …

And I started to really understand that they use race, they use homophobia, they use a war on women, they use all of these things as divisive, wedge issues to further their narrative.

Once again, it all started to make sense to me what was happening.

On May 26, Straka released a video of himself explaining why he was walking away from the Democratic Party and building a platform for folks who shared similar experiences.

“I realized that there is something larger here, because I know I am not the only person who is feeling this way. I know I am not the only person who is having this experience and feeling isolated and lonely and fearful,” Straka said.

He said he hopes the #WalkAway Campaign will foster a supportive community for those who want to leave the Democratic Party.

“There is more of us. I know it,” Straka said. “So I decided rather than just make this about me putting out a video, I am going to create a campaign, and I am going to encourage other people to make their own videos and kind of build this network of support.”

Christopher Wright of the Potomac Tea Party said his organization, which wrote an open letter in support of the #WalkAway movement, will be represented at the October event. He said he hopes those in Straka’s movement will find a home in his.

“Our message is, you have friends in the tea party. Please look at our open letter. It’s on our website,” Wright said. “Our main message is: Take a look at America’s founding principles and consider the tea party. You’ve got friends here.”

SOURCE





Swedish PM voted out by parliament after losing confidence vote

Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven lost a no-confidence vote in parliament on Tuesday, with the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats threatening to block any new government unless they are given a say in policy.

The rise of the far right across Europe has forced many traditional parties into an uncomfortable choice of sharing power with populist forces or reaching out to long-standing opponents to keep them out.

Sweden, long seen as a bastion of liberal values and political stability, now faces the same choice with its centre-left and centre-right blocs evenly balanced after the September 9 election and the Sweden Democrats holding the balance of power.

"Now the excitement will really start," said Ulf Bjereld, a political scientist at Gothenburg University. "The parties will have to show their true colours now."

The Sweden Democrats have been shunned by all other parties since entering parliament in 2010, making any tie-up unlikely.

But if there is no viable government after four attempts by the speaker, then a new election would have to be called within three months, with the main parties likely to face a similar dilemma again.

Voters delivered a hung parliament in the September 9 election when Lofven's centre-left bloc won 144 seats, one more than the centre-right opposition Alliance.

The Sweden Democrats, a party that has its roots in the white supremacist fringe, got 62 seats and backed the Alliance in Tuesday's vote, which was an obligatory test of the prime minister's parliamentary support after an election.

A new government could take weeks or months - as was the case in Germany and Italy - to thrash out. The speaker will start discussions with party leaders on Thursday.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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