This week I was the victim of two non-crime hate incidents at the hands of the comedy establishment.
The strangest of these came from Private Eye. Once a satirical magazine guided by the genius of Peter Cook. Now, apparently, an organ for pearl-clutching Regime hit pieces.
Its slightly paranoid attack on me and the great GB News started with a claim about Mark Steyn that I can’t be bothered to look into, as it involves listening to a podcast other than my own. But clearly Private Eye felt Steyn’s two very recent heart attacks were not sufficient, and he deserved another blow in the form of their deadly investigative journalism, which went as follows:
Meanwhile, on his personal podcast, GB News presenter Mark Steyn said the slowing of the birth rate of “Aryans”, who built “Western civilisation”, had been accelerated by Covid vaccines.
Knowing the mainstream media, it is likely there some context or comedic intent was deliberately left out here. That was certainly the case with my delightful little mention that immediately followed.
Another purveyor of wacky Covid opinions is Nick Dixon, a host of GB News‘s paper review and presenter of the Daily Sceptic podcast, which grew out of a previous Lockdown Sceptics website founded by armchair epidemiologist Toby Young. When he’s not on GB News, Dixon can be seen online praising people who didn’t get the vaccine, calling them “pure bloods”.
Crikey.
They can only be referring to a tweet in which I jokingly (or so I thought) wrote “pure blood forever” followed by the strong arm emoji. I assumed the inclusion of said emoji marked the tweet as a bit of lighthearted fun. Some gentle bantz after two to three years of unvaccinated people being viciously attacked and ostracised by politicians, media, friends and family.
But no, it turns out this tweet was merely the beginning of my new Aryan eugenics project. At least I think that’s what Private Eye is implying. Why else move straight from the Steyn thing to the ‘pure blood’ reference?
As for “wacky Covid opinions”, well, guilty as charged. I was against, for example, locking people down in their homes, thus creating catastrophic NHS waiting lists, capsizing the economy, damaging children’s mental health, and, as they say, so much more!
What a monster.
Also, our podcast is called the Weekly Sceptic, and I have never even seen Toby sit in an armchair. He moves through his insane and largely self-inflicted work schedule so fast I usually only witness him as a passing blur.
Still, at least they called me the ‘host’ of Headliners. I only host occasionally, so they could have gone with ‘panellist’. Sometimes lazy inaccuracy is a huge win.
Needless to say, I both owned and destroyed these satirists-turned-establishment shills in another classic Dixon tweet, calling them out for their ‘tainted blood’ resentment. I look forward to their next piece examining my wacky fascist agenda.
The other attack was more banal, though even less accurate. I was enjoying an increasingly rare day off (I seem to have become caught up in Toby’s workaholic vortex) when someone sent me the clip. Much as they did the Private Eye piece, in fact. I do not seek these things out, dear reader. Rather, friends simply enjoy ruining my day.
It featured a young man by the name of Sloss. Daniel Sloss, a Scottish comedian and posh mummy’s boy, who got a break writing for Mock the Week at age 16. His comedy suffers from the blandness of one who has never truly known pain.
Of course, I wouldn’t normally be so uncouth as to say any of this. But he started it.
Appearing on BBC radio with Nihal Arthanayake, Sloss stated:
GB News, and I can confirm this, has absolutely no comedians on it at the moment… some people will have the word ‘comedian’ beside their name, but as an actual comedian I can assure you the ‘comedians’ on GB News are not actual, real comedians who’ve done the circuit, or earned the respect of their peers, or put in the hours, or done anything.
As an attack it is flawed by being completely untrue in every regard.
To quote the movie Barton Fink: never mind me, never mind how long I’ve been in pictures. But let’s consider the mighty Simon Evans. Host of GB News’s Headliners, and one of the most respected comics in the business by any metric.
He is represented by the biggest comedy agent in the U.K., whose bio for him literally begins: “Simon is one of the U.K.’s most respected and established comedians.”
Lol.
Simon has performed on Live at the Apollo, done multiple tours of the country, and just about every other ‘real comedian’ thing you can think of.
Then we might mention Carey Marx, a comedy circuit stalwart for many years, or Josh Howie, Leo Kearse, Roger Monkhouse, Lewis Schaffer (because he’ll complain if I don’t include him). And many, many more.
Even humble old ND. I did the comedy circuit for 11 perfectly gruelling years, performing weekends at the Comedy Store (the peak of the U.K. live club scene) and every other club in the land. Two national tours with Tom Stade. Two TV appearances on Comedy Central at the Comedy Store. Weekends in windowless Manchester hotel rooms after playing the Frog and Bucket. Five hour night coaches back from the Leeds Hi-fi Club. I have performed at the L.A. Comedy Store and the Hollywood Improv, and done a comedy festival in Portland. I supported Europe’s biggest comedian, Gad Elmaleh. I won the Comedy Store King Gong show in 2012, for pity’s sake. I could go on.
But no one cares. Except me. And Daniel Sloss.
Why Regime comedians, and faded establishment rags, feel the need to rag on GB News, employing whatever pernicious calumnies they see fit, remains somewhat unclear.
Since their words have no meaning, and refer to no known reality, we can only conclude they are mere automatons. Ideologically-captured ‘NPCs’, wandering through a rather violent video game called ‘Culture War’, doing only what they are programmed to do, then disappearing, one can only hope, into mindless oblivion.
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A genetic bioweapon is forced onto the world’s population through outlets like Private Eye and you’re the Nazi if you make any oblique reference to it?
It shows you’re over the target and they’re scared and projecting, but for some reason you won’t pull the trigger and all you seem to care about is the insult to your reputation.
From here there are only 3 questions worth asking:
1) What is the extent of the damage to this and future generations? I have a sneaking suspicion (from watching Utopia) that the plan may well have been to introduce recessive genes into the population that cause ovarian failure in subsequent generations.
2) Who is responsible? Magazines like Private Eye are a good start.
3) What’s to be done about it?
What the people at Private Eye and the rest of the mainstream have forgotten, or don’t know or prefer not to remember is that 10 years ago when the Swine Flu jab was found to cause narcolepsy in a handful of people the media jumped.on it and the jabs were quickly stoped.
This is just one glaring example of how much their behaviour has changed.
I suspect many of these people are oblivious to their radicalisation.
When it comes to state reactions to 9/11, Swine Flu, the financial crash, the Icelandic ash cloud and SARS, it all begins to look like a rehearsal for COVID-19. The people in charge of governments had 20 years to see which media outlets would argue back, who would flag up narrative inconsistencies, who would point out vaccine failures, and which companies would ignore the rules (airline companies who restarted flights during the ash cloud incident, for example.)
When the Chinese coronavirus was released into the population, everything was in place to shut down those opponents from the outset. They made sure someone like Tim Martin couldn’t say ‘Go to Hell!’ and reopen all the Wetherspoons pubs after three weeks.
For the likely COVID-30, presumably they’ll have a database of everyone who argued against COVID-19 lockdowns in newspapers and below-the-line comments, everyone who funded the likes of the Daily Sceptic and everyone who refused the jabs or to mask up, so we’ll be the first people they go after next time. Presumably our Central Bank Digital Currencies block us from funding ‘disinformation’ sites like The Daily Sceptic!!
Cynical? Moi?
I was compared to Hitler by one of my work colleagues.
Any ad hominem attack just reveals our enemies as lazy and weak, unable to muster logical arguments.
Quite insane isn’t it. People who defend reality and freedom were apparently then and now, issuing endless propaganda equating deniers with vermin and disease; establishing ghettoes, locking people down, planning to gas
Jews and Christiansthose who don’t support the scam, putting people into camps, injecting them, forcing them to wear distinctive face nappies…oh wait, that seems to have been the Rona cult….dear me. How confusing. But I am Hitler. Okay.For the last couple 10 years or so, being compared to Hitler, being called far-right/extreme-right, fascist, populist, etc. has merely become a get-out clause for people to end an argument with anyone who disagrees with them and is winning the argument. It is pathetic and as far as I’m concerned, the thickos that use it may as well say they’re going to take back their ball and go home, so there.
Faint praise – everyone is Hitler these days.
Yes, it’s irritating, because much of the COVID-19 era censorship resembles Nazi techniques, such as isolating unvaccinated people, giving them a specific name, claiming they’re in a conspiracy to undermine the public’s trust in the government, traducing them as disease carriers threatening the rest of the population (the Nazis claimed Jewish people carried typhoid) and allowing calls for their locking up in internment camps to go unchallenged.
However, people who question the narratives are called ‘Nazis’ – even libertarianism is now ‘white supremacist’!! There was a bloke in the Telegraph comments who persistently referred to ‘far right libertarians’, and that attitude has persisted, so clearly the intention has been to destroy people who believe in the old classical liberal values that most in our society up to that point believed in.
Who reads Private Eye? I haven’t in years. It’s trash, unfunny, politically irrelevant.
Actually, I do.
I agree that it is often as you describe it, however, I have a habit of buying a copy once a year, and reading it cover to cover, just to see where it is.
In general, I go out of my way to use a wide range of sources, yes, even The Guardian, as I am acutely aware of how easy it is to frequent only those places where I feel most comfortable with the views expressed.
Yes, I very much like to see what people are reading and watching to see where they get their information. I read the Guardian, Times, Telegraph, Spectator , Herald Scotland (I know, but I’m Scottish) as well as a variety of on-line blogs and what not. Obviously I don’t read them all every day but I do read them. I like seeing the same event or story presented from different angles.
I know people who only get their information from Facebook or similar but I don’t do Facebook.
What killed Private Eye was Thatcher leaving Office, followed soon after by New Labour from 1997 to date.
It has never been the same since.
Yes, the 1980s’ annual cover collections were wonderful.
My dad has it on subscription, he seems unable to see that they’ve morphed from satirical magazine to yet another propaganda mouth piece of the state.
Oh well at least some of the cartoons are mildly amusing. But even then I have to explain to him what many of the modern idioms / memes used actually mean.
Medical Fascists calling the clear-sighted, critical thinking, freedom supporting, natural law rights affirming, individual-autonomy defending…..a Nazi. Everyone who is not to the left of Mao is apparently a Nazi. But only if you are White of course. ‘The guy is literally Hitler, and I am shaking right now….’ These people have the mentality of 5 year olds. You think that ‘data’, ‘reason’, ‘dialogue’ and ‘compromise’ will ‘win over’ this cult? Ha ha. The real Nazis are the Rona fascists. Nazism and Communism share similar traits of course, but it is clown world when totalitarians call those who opposed the end of our existence, what they themselves are (Nazism includes corporatism which is what we saw with Rona and see all around us now).
I get the impression that many people who have been in media for a long time are not really aware of how detached from reality the mainstream has become.
To them, nothing much has changed, the establishment is broadly trustworthy and reliable, the tensions in society mostly the same as they always have been and are generally represented by the differing positions of the political parties. And anything outside of that are society’s misfits ranging from a bit looney but harmless to threatening and dangerous.
They seem completely oblivious to how far the mainstream has drifted. They don’t seem to realise that everything has been bought up and is being run and manipulated by plutocrats and it is no longer representing or serving the broader society it once was.
They think that the misfits have grown in number, radicalised by social media and “dangerous” people like Trump and Andrew Tate and people they might have admired like Joe Rogan have lost their way. Their “deeper” explanation for that is the out-of-the-box explanation they’ve been given: it’s the consequence of inequality.
These unaware people in the mainstream don’t realise it is the mainstream that has radicalised, that they are the ones behaving strangely and dangerously and that we are watching them drift away like you might while standing on a shore see a dingy drifting away with the people on it so busy and distracted by each other to realise they are no longer anywhere near the shore.
That is spot on Stewart , worthy of a slot in Private Eye back when it was relevant.
Yes, I agree. In fact, you only have to look at cinema and TV critics for the nub of the problem: these days, critics give high ratings to a film or TV show and the audience rating is in the toilet; critics trash a film or TV show and the public love it! I remember a review of The Terminal List describing it as a deranged right wing revenge fantasy: my reaction was ‘Oh goody!!’
The mainstream is no longer really ‘mainstream’ anymore!
From one ND to another.
while ever they are doing this proves your winning!
All this ridicule is proof that you are all doing a great job wether it be on GB news or the sceptic, Opinions that make people feel afraid or insecure need to be attacked
Keep up the good work guys
Ian Hislop?
Isn’t he the guy who used to be quite funny fifty years ago, worked with Eric Morecambe?
Ian Hislop, the guy who at one time brought a legal challenge against a ridiculous ‘super-injunction’ taken out by Andrew Marr. The issue was not just about the hypocrisy of Andrew Marr, who felt the private lives of people he interviewed was fair game, but not his, but also about what the so-called super injunction meant in terms of the rule of law and freedom of the press. It potentially allowed for people to be incarcerated without public scrutiny, theoretically for people to face legal action for saying something prohibited in an injunction they had never even seen, for the wrongdoings of (rich and powerful) people to be hidden away, their right to privacy supposedly trumping the need to investigate and report on potential negligent, fraudulent or ciminal acts.
What happened to that Ian Hislop? Why does he not care about freedom of the press, freedom of expression now? That super-injunction nonsense was merely a forerunner of what we are seeing today. A lot of people got hung up on the privacy aspects of it (and I’m no fan of people’s privacy being invaded), without understanding that for public figures, it is often impossible to separate their public life from their private life and particularly those who can influence the lives of millions of people must be held to account. For example, if a prominent figure were to now be hospitalised with covid, we would not be told his vaxx status as a matter of privacy – even though a year ago we had to tell a 16-year old at a counter our status just to get a cup of coffee. Nor could we demand that we be informed whether people who openly pushed for vaxx mandates show proof that they themselves were factually vaxxed.
Ian Hislop is a EUrophile. EUrophiles are happy to see the UK burn.
Thanks Nick..a joy to read…..
I’m reminded of the film Downfall….the last days in the bunker as they all lash out and get more and more paranoid!!
One can only imagine the amount of Copium they’re having to ingest to keep up the charade…LOL!
Private eyes was readable till about 2016 then became insufferably woke, whereas HIGNFY was never actually that funny.
Agreed. I used to get the Private Eye annual for Christmas every year but stopped reading it around then. They suddenly started taking sides over Brexit, while beforehand they’d poke fun at anybody – especially before Hislop’s tenure. I hate it now, almost as much as the Grauniad.
Ian Hislop. The man who thinks he’s funny because he makes himself laugh.
Classic comment, JXB!
‘...a Scottish comedian and posh mummy’s boy, who got a break writing for Mock the Week at age 16. His comedy suffers from the blandness of one who has never truly known pain. ‘
Excellent.
Luke said it like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sRS1dwCotw
The fact that they have stopped pretending that GB News doesn’t exist and are now in attack mode, only shows to highlight what a great job you guys are doing. Keep up the good work. The only blot on the GBN copybook for me is the amount of attention you give to the ongoing car crash/circus act/soap opera that is The Spare and his Wife’s pathetic publicity seeking.
Agreed; perhaps following that story helps them to sell adverts, which, after all, is funding it.
Reminds me of the famous Bob Monkhouse: “They laughed when I said I wanted to be a comedian. Well, they’re not laughing now, are they?”. Keep the jokes coming Nick. That will wipe the smile off their faces.
If Ian Hislop is funny I’m a banana
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The called you something even worse than a Nazi. Pure bloods (and muggles) is Harry Potter terminology, hence, they’ve called you a JK Rowling fan and thus, transphobic and generally a supporter of all things evil.
Yes I read that bit in Private Eye – you’ve clearly hit a few nerves. MD, as I have mentioned before, initially called C…D a mild unimportant disease back in Mar. 2020 but then did a full 180 and said he was wrong and that it was very serious indeed… He has then gone on to double down again and again on jabs for all including children and confessed his 3 or 4x jabbed status. PE is wholly in the real and scary camp and have not yet begun to realise what is really going on. They couldn’t possibly have got it so wrong could they?
This 180 degree turn was the specific reason why I stopped buying the magazine (after years of being a regular reader). I admit that I also became increasingly annoyed with the constant anti-brexit stuff. While my opinion at that time was close to the position of the eye, one eventually needs to accept that a certain discusssion is over and move on to other issues.
It is quite bizarre to witness how Ian Hislop has gone downhill in the last 5 years. I used to buy Private Eye but started to get irritated by his increasing partisanship in certain matters. Another Hislop vehicle, HIGNFY, was a TV programme that used to be essential Friday night viewing in my house for many years until Hislop (with a perpetually smug face) and, sadly, Paul Merton went more woke, and therefore less funny, than I could handle.
I used to really enjoy Private Eye when I was young. We are talking about the 1980s. It went down hill after the smug and not very amusing Ian Hislop took over. He is today a fully signed up member of the Liberal establishment. During Covid his organ became a Government mouthpiece. How can a journal that fights the corner only of those in power claim to be satirical? The magazine is complete rubbish and has been so for years now. It is amazing to me that anybody still reads it.
Well said Nick. Love the Weekly Sceptic keep up the good work. Ian Hislop has turned into an arrogant knob. I gave up watching Have I got News for You years ago just before I gave up watching the BBC altogether. His “satire” became increasingly pernicious and more and more woke. Indeed the whole programme became a leftist’s fest.
It keeps the dust off the shelves in most supermarkets. Ian Hislop reminds me of the punchbag who used to have his dinner money taken off him at school.
Shame how PE has gone. Been a subscriber for over 10 years but their performance through the Rona madness pushed me to cancel my sub last year. Dr Phil MD takes most of the credit.
I cancelled my subscription to Private Eye because of its clear nd obvious bias in several areas. I’m afraid it is no longer what it once was.
‘Regime comedians’. I love it!
Private Eye used to be fearless but as a substantial part of editor Hislop’s income depends on his TV slot “ hHave I got News for you” he may now be bought and paid for.
Always follow the money trail!
Keep up the good work Nick. Private Eye has been off my reading list since 2016 and I am amazed it is still going. Its nice to see you on GBNews and sometimes on “The LotusEaters” channel.
This isn’t exactly a ‘free speech’ issue–though it is related–but if you try to put a small ad in the Eye saying where readers can be told what’s wrong with the magazine, the Eye will refuse your money. I know because about 18 years ago it refused mine and last year it refused Michael Curzon’s, editor of Bournbrook Magazine. And it wasn’t just the office boy who refused my ad either but the Great Satirist himsel (“Sorry to disappoint”), and without, as far as it was possible to tell, supposing that there was anything to satirise in his doing so.
From one point of view, of course–the commercial–what could be more reasonable? What else would you expect? After all, who, running a business, wants to be another Gerald Ratner? But is it still reasonable and to be expected when you are, after all, not Gerald Ratner, frankly purveying jewellery tat, but Ian Hislop purveyor, fortnightly for 37 years, of morally elevated criticism? What! Hislop–so demanding of disinterestedness in others–behaving so self-interestedly himself? Lord Gnome, it turns out, was no joke after all. Which is, of course, the best joke of all.