The casual authoritarianism of the Europe-lovers

In 1945, Clement Attlee said referendums were ‘the instrument of Nazism and fascism’. In 1975, Margaret Thatcher, nodding to Attlee, said referendums are a ‘device of dictators and demagogues’.

These quotes have been dug out time and again since the EU referendum, by Remainers horrified by the result. They slot Attlee’s and Thatcher’s remarks into their own warped view that democracy equals fascism. People are so dumb and wicked, goes the thinking, that we’re just waiting to elect genocidal maniacs. Referendums are not democratic exercises because it is all too easy for demagogues to mislead the sheeple.

But if anyone has been trying to use nominally ‘democratic’ processes to authoritarian ends recently, who has been trying to use the language of democracy against democracy, it is the Remainer elite. And in recent days, two of the political leaders of the Remain outlook, Liberal Democrat leader Jo Swinson and Green Party MP Caroline Lucas, let slip their authoritarian intentions.

Swinson and Lucas are among those calling for a second referendum on Brexit. But when pushed by separate BBC interviewers as to whether they would accept the result of another referendum if the country voted Leave again, they both said no. On BBC News yesterday, Swinson said ‘No’, adding that ‘I’m going to do what I was sent here to do’. On Politics Live today, Lucas was at least more direct: ‘Um, no I probably wouldn’t.’

These admissions explode the argument the so-called People’s Vote campaign is still trying to make with a straight face. That is that while the electorate voted for Brexit, we didn’t vote for any particular Brexit deal. We should therefore have a right to vote on the terms, and if we now want to change our minds – that’s fine too!

Clearly, this was always bollocks. A second referendum is not about us having a final say – it is a means to an anti-democratic end, and the result would also be ignored if it went the ‘wrong’ way.

Given the anti-democratic bile that has been been spewed from Remoaners these past three years, Swinson’s and Lucas’s slips are hardly shocking. But we need to make clear what they are saying here. They are saying they are only willing to accept the outcome of democratic votes if they win them. This is the attitude of autocrats, happy to hold an election but only if one party is on the ballot. They are willing to use the ballot box to bolster their position, but just as willing to reject the result if they lose.

It’s amazing how inured we have become to these kind of authoritarian Remoaner arguments. Remember when Donald Trump refused to say whether he would accept the result of the 2016 US election if he lost? Liberals lost their shit – and rightly so, for once. But when essentially the same attitude is voiced by two leading Remainers, it is deemed by commentators to be eminently sensible – the leadership Britain needs!

For all the pearl-clutching over Boris Johnson’s history of spicy statements, what Swinson and Lucas have said in the past 24 hours is far worse than anything our new PM ever dashed out on a deadline. And this casual authoritarianism has become worryingly mainstream among the chattering classes.

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Donald Trump Jr. announces book attacking ‘leftist elites’ and ‘political correctness’

Donald Trump Jr., the eldest son of President Trump, announced that his first book will be released this fall.

“Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us” will be published by Center Street, a Hachette imprint. Trump Jr. announced on Twitter that the book is available for preorder, writing, “This is the book the leftist elites don’t want you to read!”

On a web page for the book, Center Street said that Trump Jr. “will expose all the tricks that the left uses to smear conservatives and push them out of the public square, from online ‘shadow banning’ to fake accusations of ‘hate speech.’ No topic is spared from political correctness.”

“Trump, Jr. will write about the importance of fighting back and standing up for what you believe in,” the publisher said. “From his childhood summers in Communist Czechoslovakia that began his political thought process, to working on construction sites with his father, to the major achievements of President Trump’s administration, Donald Trump, Jr. spares no details and delivers a book that focuses on success and perseverance, and proves offense is the best defense.”

Center Street is known for publishing books by conservative writers and supporters of President Trump. Its stable of authors includes Jeanine Pirro, Michael Savage, Newt Gingrich and Charlotte Pence, a daughter of Vice President Pence.

“Triggered” will be the first book from Trump Jr., who serves as executive vice president of development and acquisitions for the Trump Organization, which his father owns. His sister Ivanka Trump is the author of two books, “The Trump Card: Playing to Win in Work and Life” and “Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules of Success.”

Trump Jr. was an influential advisor to his father’s 2016 presidential campaign and is known for his bombastic presence on Twitter, where he regularly attacks members of the press and critics of his father’s presidency.

In 2016, weeks before the presidential election, Trump Jr. posted a tweet comparing Syrian refugees to Skittles candy. “If I had a bowl of skittles and I told you just three would kill you, would you take a handful?” the tweet read. “That’s our Syrian refugee problem.”

And in 2018, Trump Jr. retweeted a post from Roseanne Barr in which the actress falsely claimed that hedge fund manager George Soros, who is Jewish, was a Nazi collaborator.

In a 2017 profile of Trump Jr., Times journalist Barbara Demick wrote that the president’s son was a “virtual attack dog” and “his father’s fiercest champion.”

“Unlike Ivanka, who gives the impression of being torn between loyalty to her father and her own more liberal politics, Trump Jr. appears to be unequivocally behind his father’s agenda,” Demick wrote.

“Triggered” is slated for publication on Nov. 5, just under a year from election day in 2020.

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Most Still Say Political Correctness Kills Free Speech

Just 28% Think Americans Have True Freedom of Speech Today

President Trump and others are routinely accused of hate speech by political opponents, but for a sizable majority of Americans, political correctness remains the bigger problem.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that just 26% of American Adults believe Americans have true freedom of speech today. Sixty-eight percent (68%) disagree and say Americans have to be careful not to say something politically incorrect to avoid getting in trouble. These findings have changed little in surveying for the past several years. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

The survey of 1,000 American Adults was conducted on July 15-16, 2019 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC.

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The balls now in feminists’ court

If a penis is female, does it enjoy human rights? A Canadian trans woman, Jessica Yaniv, who retains intact her boy bits, believes she’s entitled to a Brazilian wax. Rejected by 16 beauticians in Vancouver, including migrant women working from home with children, Yaniv trotted off to a human rights tribunal. Some of the beauticians paid money to make her go away, some still face the prospect of being branded hateful transphobes and ordered to pay fines.

Ignored by most mainstream media, this has Twitter transfixed as the #WaxHerBalls case. British comedian Ricky Gervais tweeted: “It’s a sad state of affairs when a lady can’t have her hairy balls waxed.” All of which gives the impression it’s nothing more than the latest grotesquery of social media. But Gervais has detected a fundamental question of principle that Victoria’s politicians — and Anglophone elites generally — seem mostly oblivious to.

An Andrews government bill allows a self-declared trans man or woman to go back in time and alter the sex on their birth certificates, even if they’ve had no surgery, no treatment, no change at all, apart from a stated wish to make their debut with a new pronoun. The bill is back before parliament next month.

“It’s seen as the next civil rights issue — oh, now we have gay marriage, on to the next thing,” says Holly Lawford-Smith, a young University of Melbourne philosopher and lesbian writing a book on radical feminism.

But there are stirrings of civil war in what’s called the LGBTI community, and angry sniping over who qualifies for an entry pass to women’s sport, toilets, dorms, prisons and, yes, the waxing studio. For the Yaniv case is seen not as an aberration but a logical extension of pick-your-own-gender into the anti-discrimination apparatus. If blokes can become official sheilas in the blink of an eye, what happens to the rights, protections and political culture inspired by feminists and gay activism?

In Australian sport, where hormone controls can complicate things, an awkward debate has begun but it is more advanced in Britain. Brits have a well-organised lobby, Fair Play For Women, and this week The Guardian surprised readers with an even-handed piece by sport blogger Sean Ingle, who declared: “No longer can men tell women, such as Martina Navratilova, that when they stick up for a separate women’s sport category that they are ignorant or prejudiced.”

It’s a question not only of competition but also trust and vulnerability. Troubled by the Yaniv case, National Review writer David French has warned that a proposed Democratic change to US law might expose schoolgirls to so-called “female penises” in toilets and locker rooms. As well, he said, “the very act of objecting to the sight (of a penis) could itself be considered to create a hostile environment for the trans girl”.

Meanwhile, sex is turning philosophy into fight club. This month Australia’s thinkers had their annual talkfest at Wollongong University. Lawford-Smith was booked to argue the case for excluding “all male people, regardless of gender identity” from female-only or lesbian-only spaces. Activist academics tried to “deplatform” her and student agitators girded their loins for a demo under the banner “F..k off Holly Lawford-Smith”. Their Facebook post said she was “not welcome to spew her disgusting discriminatory and exclusionary hate speech at our university”. They ignored her nuanced arguments, dismissing her as a TERF or “trans-exclusionary radical feminist”.

The Australasian Association of Philosophy, the conference organiser, issued a statement acknowledging “serious concerns” about Lawford-Smith’s presentation. There followed a sprinkling of diversity-speak platitudes. No stated concern about the abuse and threats directed at Lawford-Smith, no defence of her academic freedom.

She felt “quite intimidated” going in to her talk, but the university had beefed up security and the protest was muted. Even so, this is not how philosophy is supposed to be. “It’s our bread-and-butter to really dig down into the details of things and have these really difficult conversations in a calm, dispassionate way,” Lawford-Smith says.

Like other “gender critical” feminists, she has been banished from Twitter. It’s supposedly “hateful conduct” to use pronouns in a way that tracks sex rather than gender identity. But this “progressive” platform allows #punchaterf as a trending hashtag, and trans activists can attack a TERF as a “c..t” or “bigoted piece of shit” with impunity. Anti-TERF tactics include campaigns to dislodge people from their jobs, smearing them as fascists, threatening harm to their families and, in one case, pissing on an academic’s office door. Nobody denies there are genuine cases of distress among trans people, and some gender-critical feminists may seem high-handed.

One Oxford don took to Twitter with the hashtag #transawaythegay, conjuring up a story that “Emmett wasn’t allowed to be a lesbian and had to wear skirts and makeup. But when he realised he was supposed to be a boy and started taking testosterone, his church accepted him. All better now!”

In March, activists successfully pressured 3:AM Magazine, a fearless online journal of radical philosophy, to pull an interview with Lawford-Smith because it touch­ed on the TERF war. Her remarks seem temperate: “My stance is that a person can’t change sex (not even with sex reassignment surgery), that ‘gender identity’ has no bearing on sex, and that with very few exceptions gender identity should have no bearing on a person’s sex-based rights.”

Things have got so unpleasant that 12 prominent philosophers from around the world, including Australia’s Peter Singer and Melbourne-based Cordelia Fine, felt moved this week to publish an open letter deploring the attempt to silence gender identity sceptics with “frequently cruel and abusive rhetoric”. The letter says: “Policymakers and citizens are currently confronting such metaphysical questions about sex and gender as What is a man? What is a lesbian? What makes someone female? Society at large is deliberating over the resolution of conflicting interests in contexts as varied as competitive sport, changing rooms, workplaces and prisons. These discussions are of great importance.”

This month Lawford-Smith interrupted the chorus of bland approval for Victoria’s law, which magically transforms the enduring truth of birth sex into the changeable wish of gender identity. In a Melbourne newspaper she wrote: “Despite the fact that this bill changes what it means to be a person of a particular sex in law, and despite the fact that sex is a protected attribute in both the Victorian Equal Opportunity Act and the Australian Sex Discrimination Act, the group that faces the most sex discrimination — namely female people — have not been consulted about the bill, and the implications of the bill on their legal protections, if any, have not been adequately acknowledged or explored.”

Might horrified fascination with Canada’s #WaxHerBalls case rouse our MPs to ask some hard questions? This week Vancouver-based writer Meghan Murphy (banned from Twitter) issued an “I told you so”. “(The Yaniv case) is precisely what feminists tried to warn politicians, the media, activists and the public would happen should we accept the notion that it is possible for men to ‘identify’ as female. How can we possibly protect women’s boundaries, spaces and rights if men can be women, regardless of their male biology? No woman should be bullied into touching a man’s penis against her will.”

Surprising things keep happening. Early this year at a free-market think tank in Washington, DC, radical feminists and political conservatives made common cause in a public debate on the trans conundrum. “Together they argued that sex was fundamentally biological and not socially constructed, and that there is a difference between women and trans women that needs to be respected,” reports gay conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan. Some may feel schadenfreude recalling the feminist track record of denouncing mainstream research on sex differences as a patriarchal plot. And the anti-trans argument built on biology is a delicate one for gay and lesbian identity.

The whole agonising affair is a reminder that abstruse ideas on campus can turn the world on its head. Without postmodernism and its reality-busting offshoots, who could ever have imagined a troublesome “female penis”?

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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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