Thursday, September 22, 2022



The Ottoman legacy is more toxic than Britain

Almost everyone from the transnational Woke elite and their tribalist proxies has had their say regarding the passing of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, the history of Britain, and the Commonwealth at large.

Despite their ‘diversity’, these critics display an ideological homogeneity shaped by post-colonialism and identity politics. Their consensus? The British monarchy and Commonwealth nations are uniquely wicked legacies that must be made to pay for their allegedly terrible existence.

Incidentally, the existence of Britain is the reason these awful people have been able to enjoy political freedom and the highest standard of living known to humanity.

These critics are so comfortable living within their colonial framework (and the nations Britain shaped) spewing bigotry that they have no intention of emigrating to a country more aligned with their worldview. Even if the opportunity were offered, none would skip over to Russia, Cuba, China, or Venezuela.

The bile from such figures need not be mentioned here in great detail. They have attributed to the Royal Family things they could not have humanly done, just as they have slandered British and Anglo-Saxon people for things they had nothing to do with (except the sharing of a skin colour). If anything, it underlines that the most vocal of ‘anti-racists’ are often guilty of the accusations they level at others.

And what of the history of other nations?

Mehreen Faruqi, born in Pakistan, has said some truly awful things about Britain and the Queen but remains quiet about the sins of her home country.

Pakistan is a nation where antisemitism is normalised along with a high degree of intolerance for religious minorities and oppression of a number of ethnic groups within the country. Many of the most vile hate speech directed against Jews and Armenians (despite Pakistan having little to no presence of either) originates from Pakistan-linked accounts on social media.

Pakistan, also an ally of Azerbaijan and Turkey, would be a clearer candidate for the most openly racist country in the world ahead of increasingly diverse Anglosphere nations.

In addition, Turkey not only actively denies the Armenian Genocide, but funds denial of it abroad and has captured swathes of high-powered political figures to its side in the West.

Last year, a video captured a passer-by on a Turkish street calling for the murder of Armenians. Similarly vile social media posts are a regular occurrence on Turkish and Azerbaijani social media, and also among their Diaspora communities. Most recently, a Turkish politician likened Syrian refugees to garbage. A case can be made that Armenians are one of the most racially abused and threatened group of people on social media, subject to degrading and dehumanising language on a regular basis.

Astonishingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, none of this vile hate speech draws condemnation from the West’s extensively-funded multicultural and anti-racism industries.

This comes as no surprise given that many involved in this industry turn out to be peddlers of bigotry and hate, such as one recent beneficiary of Canada’s anti-racism funding programs.

Many of those purporting to be vocally against racism and Islamophobia have been similarly exposed, along with their links to dubious foreign regimes who see the industry as an open door to interference in Western politics.

Erdoğan’s Turkey, along with Qatar and Pakistan, have keenly taken advantage of this system.

The awful legacies left by the Ottoman Empire would easily dwarf any negatives left by the British and other European empires.

Similarly, the Russian Empire, and the Soviet Union which succeeded it, also left a toxic legacy along with virulent racial prejudice manifesting itself in Russia’s attitudes towards neighbouring countries showcased on Putin’s propaganda media outlets. Russia’s ‘Special Military Operation’ in Ukraine encapsulates this dehumanisation, which is especially evident in the rapes and murders of young Ukrainian women by Russian soldiers. And their justification? Ukrainians and other Eastern Europeans must be subject to ‘denazification’, using much the same language the Western Left uses against its opponents.

Racism against non-Russians was a feature of life in the Soviet regime, just as it has been a feature of life in post-Soviet Russia. South African jazz musician and anti-Apartheid icon Hugh Masekela discovered on a tour that Soviet Russia was in fact more racist than South Africa, which must have been a shock given Soviet support for the ANC and ‘anti-racism’ causes globally.

The Soviets created much of the anti-Western propaganda in our societies today to divert attention from this and from the atrocities of communism generally.

In post-Soviet Russia, racist attacks and murders of migrants from the Caucasus and Central Asia have drawn some attention, and highlight the prevalence of racial prejudice against non-Russians from Russia’s former colonies.

Much of the modern debate on race relations in the Anglosphere focuses on colonial legacies and non-white and indigenous peoples. But the alleged racism against them positively pales in comparison to the toxic legacies left behind by Ottoman and Russian imperialism, manifesting itself in a far more violent, hateful, and degrading treatment of ethnic groups from lands colonised by them.

Just ask the Armenians, Assyrians, Ukrainians, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Poles about that.

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Forget multiculturalism

British culture and Christianity are a cultural treasure worth defending.

The best of British culture has been on display these past ten or so days. We can use words like pomp and pageantry, ceremony and tradition… But this is all British culture and it’s worth preserving and promoting.

Its enemy is multiculturalism.

No, you flaming racists (those who accuse others of racism for nothing more than patriotism), I didn’t say other cultures are the enemy of British culture. I said multiculturalism, as an ideology, is the obvious enemy of any cultural constancy or single unifying cultural event.

Multiculturalism means we should invite the fabric of our national identity to be woven with more and more random threads until the pattern and design of a nation is unrecognisable. Nations lose their identity and its people lose their heritage. Multicultural is to dilute that which makes us who we are by the grace of God until the remaining flavour is bland and indistinct.

Why should every culture other than British culture be carefully preserved and curated for future generations? There is no insistence on multiculturalism in most other nations. Of course, cultures must be capable of embarrassment and maturation, but not at the cost of sacred identity.

When one leaves their homeland and settles in another, one must not expect the host nation to change to accommodate one’s own culture – unless one brings an army to conquer and colonise. If you are a guest and welcomed as a resident or even citizen, you must adapt and change, not your host.

I am Australian. Australians are British. My culture is not mere centuries old. My laws are not begun in 1901.

My culture is millennia old.

My laws are older than Magna Carta. My civilisation civilised the world and brought the finest of music, arts, government, science, industry, and civil administration that the world has ever seen.

The withdrawal of the British administration is often marked by the advent of corruption, incompetence, and instability.

Of course, Englishmen should be embarrassed by the worst of the Empire’s greed and brutality, a global history not peculiar to whites. But because we were embarrassed, we matured, and ushered in an era of unprecedented stability, peace, and liberty no other civilisation on record.

When I speak of a culture’s capacity for embarrassment, I mean its capacity to shake off its backwardness, injustice, ignorance, and incompetence. In many historical examples one culture has learned from another and advanced. But the only perfect culture we can and should safely emulate and calibrate to is Kingdom culture, the will and ways of the only true Sovereign, Jesus Christ.

Part of the British Crown Jewels and of immense significance in the coronation of our Kings and Queens is the Sovereign’s Orb. They are reminded when given the globe topped with the Holy cross:

"Receive this orb set under the cross, and remember that the whole world is subject to the Power and Empire of Christ our Redeemer."

Their oath is to ‘maintain the Laws of God and the true profession of the Gospel’, and to rely on help from God to perform and keep their promise.

What a tragedy to consider setting our wonderful culture adrift from the anchors of political humility and accountability represented in oaths and allegiances to our Monarchy. God save us from a politicians’ republic like France or America!

British culture and Christianity are a cultural treasure worth defending. Every nation should promote its own culture, balanced with the capacity for reformation and constant recalibration with the Kingdom of God. Multiculturalism and humanism, however, are the enemy of stability, peace, justice, and liberty.

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The U.S. Government’s Vast New Privatized Censorship Regime

One warm weekend in October of 2020, three impeccably credentialed epidemiologists—Jayanta Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta, and Martin Kulldorff, of Stanford, Oxford, and Harvard Universities respectively—gathered with a few journalists, writers, and economists at an estate in the Berkshires where the American Institute for Economic Research had brought together critics of lockdowns and other COVID-related government restrictions.

On Sunday morning shortly before the guests departed, the scientists encapsulated their views—that lockdowns do more harm than good, and that resources should be devoted to protecting the vulnerable rather than shutting society down—in a joint communique dubbed the “Great Barrington Declaration,” after the town in which it was written.

The declaration began circulating on social media and rapidly garnered signatures, including from other highly credentialed scientists. Most mainstream news outlets and the scientists they chose to quote denounced the declaration in no uncertain terms. When contacted by reporters, Drs. Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins of the NIH publicly and vociferously repudiated the “dangerous” declaration, smearing the scientists—all generally considered to be at the top of their fields—as “fringe epidemiologists.” Over the next several months, the three scientists faced a barrage of condemnation: They were called eugenicists and anti-vaxxers; it was falsely asserted that they were “Koch-funded” and that they had written the declaration for financial gain. Attacks on the Great Barrington signatories proliferated throughout social media and in the pages of The New York Times and Guardian.

Yet emails obtained pursuant to a FOIA request later revealed that these attacks were not the products of an independent objective news-gathering process of the type that publications like the Times and the Guardian still like to advertise. Rather, they were the fruits of an aggressive attempt to shape the news by the same government officials whose policies the epidemiologists had criticized. Emails between Fauci and Collins revealed that the two officials had worked together and with media outlets as various as Wired and The Nation to orchestrate a “takedown” of the declaration.

Nor did the targeting of the scientists stop with the bureaucrats they had implicitly criticized. Bhattacharya, Gupta, and Kulldorff soon learned that their declaration was being heavily censored on social media to prevent their scientific opinions from reaching the public. Kulldorff—then the most active of the three online—soon began to experience censorship of his own social media posts. For example, Twitter censored one of Kulldorff’s tweets asserting that: “Thinking that everyone must be vaccinated is as scientifically flawed as thinking that nobody should. COVID vaccines are important for older, higher-risk people and their caretakers. Those with prior natural infection do not need it. Not children.” Posts on Kulldorff’s Twitter and LinkedIn criticizing mask and vaccine mandates were labeled misleading or removed entirely. In March of 2021, YouTube took down a video depicting a roundtable discussion that Bhattacharya, Gupta, Kulldorff, and Dr. Scott Atlas had with Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, in which the participants critiqued mask and vaccine mandates.

Because of this censorship, Bhattacharya and Kulldorff are now plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden, a case brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, as well as the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), which is representing them and two other individuals, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty and Jill Hines. The plaintiffs allege that the Biden administration and a number of federal agencies coerced social media platforms into censoring them and others for criticizing the government’s COVID policies. In doing so, the Biden administration and relevant agencies had turned any ostensible private action by the social media companies into state action, in violation of the First Amendment. As the Supreme Court has long recognized and Justice Thomas explained in a concurring opinion just last year, “[t]he government cannot accomplish through threats of adverse government action what the Constitution prohibits it from doing directly.”

Federal district courts have recently dismissed similar cases on the grounds that the plaintiffs could not prove state action. According to those judges, public admissions by then-White House press secretary Jennifer Psaki that the Biden administration was ordering social media companies to censor certain posts, as well as statements from Psaki, President Biden, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas threatening them with regulatory or other legal action if they declined to do so, still did not suffice to establish that the plaintiffs were censored on social media due to government action. Put another way, the judges declined to take the government at its word. But the Missouri judge reached a different conclusion, determining there was enough evidence in the record to infer that the government was involved in social media censorship, granting the plaintiffs’ request for discovery at the preliminary injunction stage.

The Missouri documents, along with some obtained through discovery in Berenson v. Twitter and a FOIA request by America First Legal, expose the extent of the administration’s appropriation of big tech to effect a vast and unprecedented regime of viewpoint-based censorship on the information that most Americans see, hear and otherwise consume. At least 11 federal agencies, and around 80 government officials, have been explicitly directing social media companies to take down posts and remove certain accounts that violate the government’s own preferences and guidelines for coverage on topics ranging from COVID restrictions, to the 2020 election, to the Hunter Biden laptop scandal.

Correspondence publicized in Missouri further corroborates the theory that the companies dramatically increased censorship under duress from the government, strengthening the First Amendment claim. For example, shortly after President Biden asserted in July of 2021 that Facebook (Meta) was “killing people” by permitting “misinformation” about COVID vaccines to percolate, an executive from the company contacted the surgeon general to appease the White House. In a text message to Murthy, the executive acknowledged that the “FB team” was “feeling a little aggrieved” as “it’s not great to be accused of killing people,” while he sought to “de-escalate and work together collaboratively.” These are not the words of a person who is acting freely; to the contrary, they denote the mindset of someone who considers himself subordinate to, and subject to punishment by, a superior. Another text, exchanged between Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and another CISA employee who now works at Microsoft, reads: “Platforms have got to get more comfortable with gov’t. It’s really interesting how hesitant they remain.” This is another incontrovertible piece of evidence that social media companies are censoring content under duress from the government, and not due to their directors’ own ideas of the corporate or common good.

Further, emails expressly establish that the social media companies intensified censorship efforts and removed particular individuals from their platforms in response to the government’s demands. Just a week after President Biden accused social media companies of “killing people,” the Meta executive mentioned above wrote the surgeon general an email telling him, “I wanted to make sure you saw the steps we took just this past week to adjust policies on what we are removing with respect to misinformation, as well as steps taken further to address the ‘disinfo dozen’: we removed 17 additional Pages, Groups, and Instagram accounts tied to [them].” About a month later, the same executive informed Murthy that Meta intended to expand its COVID policies to “further reduce the spread of potentially harmful content” and that the company was “increasing the strength of our demotions for COVID and vaccine-related content.”

Alex Berenson, a former New York Times reporter and a prominent critic of government-imposed COVID restrictions, has publicized internal Twitter communications he obtained through discovery in his own lawsuit showing that high-ranking members of the Biden administration, including White House Senior COVID-19 Advisor Andrew Slavitt, had pushed Twitter to permanently suspend him from the platform. In messages from April 2021, a Twitter employee noted that a meeting with the White House had gone relatively well, though the company’s representatives had fielded “one really tough question about why Alex Berenson hasn’t been kicked off from the platform,” to which “mercifully we had answers”

About two months later, days after Dr. Fauci publicly deemed Berenson a danger, and immediately following the president’s statement that social media companies were “killing people,” and despite assurances from high-ups at the company that his account was in no danger, Twitter permanently suspended Berenson’s account. If this does not qualify as government censorship of an individual based on official disapproval of his viewpoints, it would be difficult to say what might. Berenson was reinstated on Twitter in July 2022 as part of the settlement in his lawsuit.

In 1963, the Supreme Court, deciding Bantam Books v. Sullivan, held that “public officers’ thinly veiled threats to institute criminal proceedings against” booksellers who carried materials containing obscenity could constitute a First Amendment violation. The same reasoning should apply to the Biden administration campaign to pressure tech companies into enforcing its preferred viewpoints.

The question of how the Biden administration has succeeded in jawboning big tech into observing its strictures is not particularly difficult to answer. Tech companies, many of which hold monopoly positions in their markets, have long feared and resisted government regulation. Unquestionably—and as explicitly revealed by the text message exchanged between Murthy and the Twitter executive—the prospect of being held liable for COVID deaths is an alarming one. Just like the booksellers in Bantam, social media platforms undoubtedly “do not lightly disregard” such possible consequences, as Twitter’s use of the term “mercifully” indicates.

It remains to be seen whether Bhattacharya and Kulldorff will be able to show that Fauci and Collins explicitly ordered tech companies to censor them and their Great Barrington Declaration. More discovery lies ahead, from top White House officials including Dr. Fauci, that may yield evidence of even more direct involvement by the government in preventing Americans from hearing their views. But Bhattacharya, Kulldorff, and countless social media users have had their First Amendment rights violated nonetheless.

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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