- “Young people at risk of disease as concerning numbers miss out on life-saving vaccines” – Uptake of adolescent vaccines offered to young people in school year nine are yet to return to pre-pandemic levels, according to the U.K. Health Security Agency.
- “Chicago must rehire, pay back wages to workers punished over COVID-19 vaccination mandate: Judge” – Then Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot implemented a COVID-19 vaccination mandate for city employees in October of 2021, reports Fox News.
- “The disturbing truth about ‘safe’ vaccines for mothers-to-be” – In TCW, Alex Kriel and Dr. David Bell analyse Pfizer data published under an FOI request and uncover red flags relating to fertility and safety in pregnancy.
- “Chinese censorship is quietly rewriting the COVID-19 story” – Under Government pressure, Chinese scientists have retracted studies and withheld or deleted data. The censorship has stymied efforts to understand the virus, write Mara Hvistendahl and Benjamin Mueller in the New York Times.
- “New JCVI advice for high risk 0-4s” – HART Group responds to the latest vaccine advice from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation: “This product should under no circumstances be recommended for children.”
- “How does Cochrane normally handle wide confidence intervals?” – Prof. Vinay Prasad reckons the Cochrane Review Editor-in-Chief has caved to pressure from mask zealots. He elaborates with a Substack post that explains a recent pre-print he co-authored.
- “Arcturus already makes up one in 40 new Covid cases” – The variant, thought to be the most infectious yet, is spreading rapidly in India. Health chiefs have now detected 135 cases in the U.K., according to MailOnline.
- “Climate protesters gather in Parliament Square as fossil fuel deadline passes” – Four days of activism led by Extinction Rebellion fail to elicit pledge from Government to ban new oil and gas projects, reports the Guardian.
- “‘Be afraid Australia’: Climate change the ‘holy writ’” – Australian Sky News host Chris Kenny highlights parts of the Defence Strategic Review that should be “deeply worrying”.
- “Why are we allowing solar panels to swallow up our farmland?” – In the Spectator, Ross Clark challenges the wisdom of covering the countryside in solar panels.
- “The inhumanity of the green agenda” – The ‘sustainability’ regime is impoverishing the world, argues Joel Kotkin in Spiked.
- “Vandals spray ‘gas-guzzling’ vehicles with ‘this machine kills kids’ slogan” – Protesters daub SUVs in wealthy part of Bristol with phrases to shame “climate criminal” owners, reports the Telegraph.
- “Rishi Sunak pledges to protect women’s rights” – The Prime Minister pledges his support for MPs Miriam Cates and Rosie Duffield, who joined forces across the political divide in the battle to defend single-sex spaces, reports the Express.
- “Oxford students call for feminist Kathleen Stock to be no-platformed at Union over trans views” – University’s LGBTQ+ society says it’s “appalled” the “transphobic” academic has been invited to share her views on gender identity theory, reports the Telegraph.
- “Tucker Carlson out at Fox News” – Tucker Carlson is out at Fox News, after reigning over the network as one of its most beloved hosts for nearly a decade, reports DailyMail.com.
- “Was Tucker Carlson getting too big for his boots?” – Gossip Columnist Steerpike explores the reasons for Tucker Carlson’s abrupt Fox News departure in the Spectator.
- “CNN anchor furious after being fired” – Don Lemon has hit out at the network after his firing, which came after accusations of misogyny and misbehaviour, reports the BBC.
- “Media Contagion” – Latter-day journalism is helping to realise its own false narratives, says Steve Salerno in Quillette.
- “The media needs urgent and drastic reform” – Whatever the reason, it is abundantly clear that the media has failed its mission. It must be reformed, immediately and from the ground up, says Thorsteinn Siglaugsson via Substack.
- “Why is Netflix treating the Boston bombers as victims?” – The woke elites’ pity for radical Islamists is just nauseating now, says Brendan O’Neill in Spiked.
- “Nigel Farage warns ‘the Remainers are back in charge’ after Raab resignation debacle” – Dominic Raab’s resignation and cabinet reshuffle means there are almost equal numbers of 2016 Remainers as Brexiteers, according to the Express.
- “Keir Starmer signals end of Diane Abbott’s Labour career over ‘anti-Semitic’ comments” – Former Shadow Home Secretary faces calls to resign over “appalling” remarks as Labour figures insist there can be no “hierarchy of racism”, reports the Telegraph.
- “Bud Light suffers ‘staggering’ 17% sales plunge amid boycott” – The beer brand has experienced a major decline in business following a marketing tie-up with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, reports the New York Post.
- “Antifa members arrested after allegedly attacking protestors outside of ‘family-friendly’ drag show” – On Sunday, three members of Antifa were arrested outside of a Fort Worth, Texas family-friendly drag show after allegedly attacking protestors of the event, reports the PostMillennial.
- “Senior official at Arts Council England taking the organisation to an employment tribunal” – Watch Denise Fahmy explain to Andrew Doyle on GB News how she was “harassed and victimised” due to gender-critical beliefs.
'He felt it was an anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ+ organisation.'@DeniseFahmy explains how she was 'harassed and victimised' due to gender-critical beliefs.
— GB News (@GBNEWS) April 23, 2023
Part 1/2GB News on YouTube https://t.co/Wa58gYGZwF pic.twitter.com/saedn1Vwcu
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I note that her apology is in regards to her bone-headed comments regarding the Jewish community. However this is only one part of the letter that is both racist and offensive. Her ignorance of the Barbary Slave Trade and the appalling privations suffered by white Europeans held as slaves of the Ottoman Empire in the middle east are equally bad if not worse. This organised slave trade continued substantially after the Atlantic Slave Trade was ended, and conditions for its victims where equally unpleasant.
I also find it disappointing but not especially surprising that this is completely ignored by the entire MSM.
You forgot to mention the castrations, which is why you don’t see to many descendants of Africans held as slaves back then running around the middle east
Bigoted, hypocritical, pig-ignorant … and a Labour MP for 35 years. And there are plenty more just like her on the Labour benches.
Well done.
Absolutely needed to be said. Thirty five years an MP and still as thick as the day she was born. A loathsome woman who has never been anything but an utter disgrace to this country. Amongst a den of thieves, layabouts, incompetents and inadequates she reigns supreme.
Not quite never – she opposed the medical mandate!
This blundering buffon had to be gotten rid of one way or another before the next election. Starmer may be a beady eyed incompetent, but at least he realises you cannot win elections with blithering idiots like this in your party.
Racism, gender, vax status, climate etc etc. These are all ‘contentious’ issues fostered and fuelled by the powers that be. In this way, people waste their energies squabbling amongst themselves. The privileged get away without scrutiny, feathering their nests and tightening their control.
I take it that Traveller is a modern euphemism for Romany gypsies, who have distinct racial characteristics, rather than tinkers, commuters, sales reps and holiday makers.
I would also be interested to hear what special racial characteristics apply to the Irish (who included he late Phil Lynott), as opposed to any other Western European national.
Plenty of Romany died along side Jews in Hitler’s death camps and have suffered because of their race in Eastern Europe.
Parliament debated the WHO pandemic treaty last week which will open the door to full global dictatorship. DEFRA are making quiet Danish style plans to destroy the UK farming industry, our energy security is hanging by a mosquito’s ball bag and extraordinary numbers of people are dying with ’cause of death unknown’.
And what do we have in the MSM? A racist in a race baiting panto, a government bullying soap opera, claims that increasing trace gas plant food ruins baseball matches and an article musing on the type of technology potentially needed to shrink bingo wings.
Musk come on man, we need that spaceship.
She’s an idiot, has always been an idiot and always will be an idiot. However this is the Daily Sceptic associated with the Free Speech Union. I defend her right to say what she said. The world should be free to hear her words without censorship or misrepresentation so we can judge for ourselves just what we think. And in all honesty, I think context has been lost and she made a legitimate point. What she actually said is not how it is being reported. I may be right wing and I may hate identity politics, but even I can appreciate her point that being black is an ever present fact that can lead to more exposure to racism (from the few racists that are out there – my point not hers). If you are Jewish, it is much of the time, for most Jews, not evident to the racists who are potentially going to be hostile that you are Jewish. Of course that she is being hit by the kind of misrepresentation tactics she has so often deployed against others has a delicious irony. But that doesn’t change the fact I deplore it when she and her leftist ilk do it, so deplore others doing it now.
Do you really think that’s the point she’s making? It’s possible to read that into it, but not obvious, at least to me. I think you might be projecting your own logic onto what she wrote.
She seems to draw a distinction between “racism” and “prejudice” which I struggle to follow. Isn’t “racism” just “prejudice based on race”? Is she saying that the other groups are not separate “races”?
I don’t think anyone here thinks she should be censored or stopped from saying these things. Whether she should keep her job in the Labour Party is a matter for them – most likely a tricky decision for them.
I agree it’s true that discussing anything to do with Jews or Israel seems to be impossible to do calmly, but I don’t think her remarks are part of that general area of discussion, though of course she is entitled to her view that blacks are a “special case”.
Overall I think it’s great that the woke left seem inclined to eat each other from time to time, and this represents one of the few hopes I have that their ideas will in the eyes of the public at large be discredited.
I’m very literal. She doesn’t say Jews are merely subject to “red head“ prejudice. In fact everything she has said, sentence by sentence is factually correct. Granted you can easily believe her to be be implying the same point as she makes about redheads applies to the groups she identifies later in the paragraph, but that is an assumption on your part. I’m pretty sure everyone commenting on here will have argued a case the other way with exactly this reasoning I am giving, when that person is a part of their political tribe. Pretty sure Boris and Jeremy Clarkson provided quite a few pertinent examples in their writing and the subsequent furore when something “controversial” is said.
She talks about various “white” groups including Jews that “undoubtedly experience prejudice” which is “similar to racism”.
Sure you can interpret it that way, but I think the far more important point is, sheesh, that the culture war leads to thin skinned offence taking IS the problem. No let me rephrase that, because isn’t the point here, if we are being honest, that people are feigning taking offence just to inauthentically use it as a political weapon? I mean, honest question, are you honestly offended by what she said, or do you see it more as an opportunity to make counter comments? I’m not criticising you here on a personal level, because I know I can certainly enjoy some comment jousting and anyway we are on the same side. But isn’t that honestly more the point?
I am not at all “offended” by what she said. Perhaps I would be if I were Jewish or whatever. Let her speak – never interrupt a fool!
I think her arguments are weak. She cherry picks instances of racism taken to extremes to which only blacks have been subjected and uses them to conclude that other groups she refers to do not suffer racism, only something similar.
This we can certainly both agree on!
It was the left that weaponised the concept of “offence”. I’m more than happy to turn it back on the left, at any time of the day or night.
I don’t accept that there is a race called “Jews”: Simon Schama and Jeff Goldblum clearly don’t belong to the same ethnic group.
I thought there were clear differences in bits of their DNA but of course there has been a lot of mixing.
That’s because of the level of inbreeding – they have a number of very common genetic disorders as a result (in much the same way as islam).
Excellent comment tof.
The backlash against her letter has been extraordinary. I don’t like her, and she is not an asset to the Labour party, but it seems all nuance is lost when it comes to discussion about race.
I can sort of see what she is driving at, while at no time defending anti-Semitism. Unless they open their mouths and speak, I would be unable to pick out an Irish person or a ‘traveller’ or Roma in a crowd, whereas a black person is more obvious. (One of my children is ginger so I tend to warm to this group…)
She has got many facts wrong, as the article points out, and she was unwise to poke this particular ants nest, but the rush to condemn her articulating an unfashionable view shows that society at large is as cowardly and prone to herd-mentality as ever.
In a crowd, the Roma is the one saying “Beeg Ishooo”
I don’t see why it’s extraordinary. She’s trying to pull rank in the “victims of racism” stakes, and any victim group that she says she or her people outrank are probably going to feel pretty pissed off by that. I’m not offended personally, just think she is talking rubbish. Different races and nationalities have been victimised in different ways since time immemorial – arguably some races have suffered more than others overall, but that’s not really what she’s arguing.
The difficulties surrounding any discussion regarding Jewish people, Israel, anti-Semitism etc are IMO a different matter. I agree that it seems impossible for anyone to discuss it rationally without it descending into name-calling, but I don’t think that’s really the issue here (though obviously the usual suspects have been wheeled out to use the “anti-semitic” card which I am not sure applies in this case). A big part of the problem isn’t history, it’s where we are today and the relative levels of success enjoyed by different groups and the countries they populate.
I think it’s your latter point that has struck me the most: the way the critics of DA have leapt onto the antisemitism bandwagon, no doubt owing to her association with the Corbyn Labour party.
I don’t detect anything particularly anti Semitic in what she said, but that hasn’t stopped all the offence-takers hitting the nuclear button thereby shutting down discussion.
She’s still a pain in the neck.
I agree that belittling the suffering from racism of Jews isn’t anti-semitic, just daft/inaccurate. I might be offended by it, were I Jewish, but that’s not the same as anti-Semitism. The professional victim brigade have a bit of a problem in this area though; hopefully it will be their undoing.
It’s a case of over-compensation. See l we are not bigots and don’t just censor people on the Right, we are ‘fair’ and believe in ‘equality’.
Its just Panto complete with comical, grotesque dame.
The moment I open my mouth, people realize that I’m a foreigner. The more educated ones recognize my German accents, others tend to think that I must be Polish. I’ve been asked Are you Polish? with this characteristic, latent aggression in the voice of the speaker for more times than I can remember and contempt for foreigners, especially foreigners believed to be Polish, is by no means uncommon in England.
Isn’t Diane Wrong shoes suppose to be an Oxford grad?
The fact that she chose to air her ignorant and extremely distasteful views in a national newspaper shows these are her true beliefs. The guff about it being an early draft is laughable. Thankfully we still have a semblance of free speech and the Observer published her letter, showing her up for what she really is, a hypocritical race baiting bigot. She is not fit to be an MP.
Diane Abbott – “I misspoke.” Whoops caught lying.
“It was an early draft.” Whoops, I dropped a right firkin clanger but I didn’t mean it. Honest.
Diane Abbott – never been known to leave home without the race card in her handbag.
She has been know to leave home with two left shoes.
Oh yes. Brilliant.
She needs to stay, purely for the comedy value.
Lammy can fill that slot quite well.
It’s truly excellent that she has outed herself as the racist bigot that she clearly is, in a national newspaper, The Observer no less. You couldn’t make it up.
Haha.. you just have to laugh.. Diane Abbot of all people caught out by the racist card.
She obviously wasn’t aware of old Voltaire’s wise perception all those years ago.. “If you want to really know who rules over you, just look who you’re not allowed to criticise”. A quote now being denied by every fact checker on planet earth.. proving without doubt its authenticity.. haha
I’ve zero time for any politician of any political persuasion, they’ve proven themselves to be bought and paid for charlatans time and time again. However, I am surprised by Abbot, who being a loyal Corbyn supporter, surely must have know who brought him down with the same smears of anti-semitism.. and of course who they put in his place.. the self confessed, kneeling, zionist friend of Israel.. Career Starmer.. You couldn’t make it up.. could you????
The Apology of Death…
What is a ‘white-seeming’ person? How does one ‘seem’ to be white?
She is all the more stupid because that Whoopi creature in the US made the same observation about the Jews a few months back and ordure was heaped on her from a great height from all quarters.
‘And at the height of slavery,’
When was slavery at its height exactly? During Greek times, Roman times, Persian times? Or how about the island of Britain pre-Roman, during the Roman occupation and after colonisation by the Angles, Saxons and Jutes up to the Norman Conquest?
What about the slaving raids by the Irish on the West Coast of Britain and Viking raids?
What about English people transported to the colonies to serve their sentence as indentured slaves?
Until the early 19th century, all maritime powers around the Mediterranean operated fleets of galleys rowed by galley slaves manacled to their benches. Slavery was a fixture during antiquity and probably reached its height in the times of the Roman Empire. It still existed in England in the middle ages. The old testaments already contains laws regarding the treatment of slaves. And none of this was about black people from Africa.
The problem with identify politics is that it’s done by Amercians who know preciously little, if anything, about the world and its history outside of the USA and who couldn’t care less about it. They’re apparently thinking an attitude like “Yo, world, suck it up! You’re much below us, anway!” is sufficient with respect to that. Instead of discussing how many structurally oppressed people can dance on the head of a pin, ie, what is or isn’t proper racsim, a much better reaction would F***k off back to the motherland, ignorant dumbasses, and take the likes of Diane Abbot with you.
Indeed, and it’s telling that despite the article to which she is responding talking explicitly about Britain, she quotes examples from pre-Civil Rights USA, as if they applied equally here.
“Whatever the source of these ideas, though, they are clearly factually dubious and likely to exacerbate racial divisions rather than heal them.”
Not sure her aim is to heal racial divisions.
Those who earn a living from stoking racism and finding it wherever they look are not interested in healing divisions. There is no money in it.
Harmony doesn’t pay.
Indeed – no money, no votes and no power.
Still, at least she went against her party to oppose the medical mandate!
True. Labour were more covidian than the tories but there were some patchy rebellions towards the end
I repeat, my ancestor Sir Cloudesley Shovell played a part in the redemption of English slaves from Africa in 1675. And some English people in the 19th Century endured slave like conditions in England. Seriously, what do they teach in these schools?
What a glorious name!
I’m Jewish and I agree with Dianne Abbott’s original comments.
For a start, Judaism is a religion, a creed, not a race, so you can’t be racist towards or about Jews; what you can be is prejudiced, which is what she said. Although now lapsed, I’m from an orthodox family and as a kid you would have seen me walking to shul on Saturday mornings with the rest of the congregation looking distinctly Jewish! So how many times was I or anyone I knew subjected to so-called racism in working class Leeds. That’s right, none. Don’t remember any of it. I simply don’t believe British Jews walk in fear. I don’t think black people walk in fear any more either, but if we were to go back a decade or two this might have been true for black and asian members of the population. Certainly Pakistanis were the victims of appalling racism, literal racism, where I’m from as recently as the 90s.
Of course none of this is has got anything to do with any genuine regard or concern about the plight of the UKs minorities. It’s a divide and conquer tactic meant to fracture and weaken society and embed the idea that we are a nation of bigots who need top down control, censorship and surveillance. I wish Diane Abbott had said that instead of her nauseating apology.
Finally, and very controversially, Jews need to stop feeding into this nonsense and playing victim. It’s not a good look. I’m in Vietnam, a country that was bombed, burnt, poisoned, raped and otherwise razed to the ground just a few generations ago. You do NOT see Vietnamese playing victim. They rebuild, remember – yes, forgive, and move on. My erstwhile homies could learn a thing or two from them.
Good to hear from you CG. Great post.
Diane Abbott opens her mouth to change her feet. Hardly a shocking revelation to compare with the classic “Man bites dog”!