- “Oxford and Cambridge are locked in death spiral of competitive intolerance” – For too long, our preeminent universities have effectively been outbidding each other over cancellations, says Charlie Bentley-Astor in the Telegraph.
- “The false logic of slavery reparations” – Modern Americans should not pay for past crimes, says Cheryl Benard in UnHerd.
- “Will we end up eating insects?” – Steve Boggan in UnHerd documents the race to embrace insect farming.
- “Germany’s Greens in free fall amid corruption allegations” – “Could Germany get a Green chancellor?” asked many media outlets ahead of the country’s last federal elections in 2021. They’s not asking any more, says Katja Hoyer in UnHerd.
- “Douglas Murray opens up on America, AI and LGBTQ” – Douglas Murray submits to a grilling from Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster on the Triggernometry sofa.
- “Staff invited to hold nine-minute silence for George Floyd at News U.K.” – The staff of News U.K., which publishes the Sun, the Sun on Sunday, the Times and the Sunday Times – and owns TalkTV – were asked to observe a nine-minute silence to mark the third anniversary of the death of George Floyd, reports Guido Fawkes.
- “Treasury idiocy is killing North Sea energy” – Ministers privately admit that hastily extending the windfall tax was a mistake and its true cost is now becoming clear, says the Times.
- “Partygate, Suella and the perils of Tory Derangement Syndrome” – The media’s never-ending scandal-mongering is a blight on British political life, writes Tom Slater in Spiked Online.
- “SUNY & CUNY prof and students need a course on free speech” – College students, faculty and administrators clearly need urgent remedial instruction in freedom of speech and the First Amendment, writes Peter J. Clines in the New York Post.
- “Jeremy Clarke remembered: by Boris Johnson, Sophie Winkleman, Eric Idle and more” – The former editor of the Spectator, as well as colleagues and friends, pay tribute to Low Life columnist Jeremy Clarke, who died last weekend.
- “The Great Covid ventilator death cover-up” – Tens of thousands of Americans died after being placed on mechanical ventilators in spring 2020. It’s long past time we got real answers as to how many were killed this way, says Michael P. Senger.
- “North Face faces boycott for ‘summer of Pride’ drag queen ad campaign” – North Face’s new ‘Summer of Pride’ ad, which features a drag queen called Pattie Gonia, is attracting ire from conservative consumers. Is this another Bud Light disaster, asks the Mail.
- “The excess deaths series – an introduction” – Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson return to the issue of excess deaths in their Substack newsletter.
- “Liz Truss was right and the experts were wrong” – Borrowing costs are surging again, even though the so-called grown-ups are in charge, writes Lance Foreman in the Telegraph. Does this mean Liz Truss’s mini-budget wasn’t the real cause of surging bond prices last year?
- “The Tories aren’t victims of the Blob. It’s a monster of their own making” – Former Special Advisor to Jacob Rees-Mogg Radomir Tylecote says the Conservative Government has no one but itself to blame for the rise of activist Civil Servants.
- “Can Trump’s opponents prove him wrong on Ukraine?” – Boris Johnson, Britain’s most sought-after Churchill impersonator, visited Texas on Monday to urge a group of rich right-wing Americans to never, never, never give in to Vladimir Putin, writes Freddy Gray in the Spectator.
- “There is such thing as a stupid question” – Douglas Murray in his Spectator column says the only time he feels ashamed of being British is when he hears the questions asked by British journalists at overseas press conferences.
- “FDA Detects Serious Safety Signal for COVID-19 Vaccination Among Children” – Children of certain ages who received Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine face an elevated risk of heart inflammation, according to the FDA.
- “Free Speech: Where is the line?” – In this episode of Parallax Views, IEA Head of Cultural Affairs Marc Glendening sits down with Bryn Harris, Chief Legal Counsel at the Free Speech Union.
- “Have-a-go-hero woman hoses down Just Stop Oil zealots” – A woman at the Chelsea Flower Show hosed down three Just Stop Oil protestors who poured orange powder over one of the exhibits, reports the Mail. Give her a CBE!
- “Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit ‘was inspired by African slave tales’” – Dr Emily Zobel Marshall, an expert in postcolonial literature at Leeds Beckett University, has called for wider acknowledgment of the debt Potter owed to the stories told by African slaves in American. The Mail has more.
- “Net zero zealots are treating the public like fools” – Instead of a real debate on the economic pros and cons of Net Zero, we get smears and cancellations, says Lord Frost, summarising his recent lecture at the Global Warming Policy Foundation (which we will republish shortly).
- “The Tories have a dirty secret: they don’t want to reduce immigration” – The whole government system is hardwired to favour mass migration, writes Fraser Nelson in his Telegraph column.
- “Campus puritans come for an astronomer” – Lawrence M. Krauss in Quillette on the latest scientist to be cancelled by woke zealots.
- “Covid inquiry demands diaries and texts in Boris Johnson parties row” – The official COVID-19 inquiry is pressing the Cabinet Office to release ministers’ WhatsApp messages and diary entries relating to Downing Street parties, reports the Times.
- “Shocking ‘legacy of harm’ from lockdowns” – Pandemic lockdowns caused “more harm than benefit” with “substantial and wide-ranging collateral damage” that will be felt for years to come, including millions of non-Covid excess deaths, a rise in child abuse and domestic violence, and trillions of dollars in economic losses, according to a new research paper.
- “The Times view on Baroness Falkner: Hit Job” – Hollie Adams in the Times says the Chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission is the victim of a politically-motivated assassination attempt.
- “At high school debates, debate is no longer allowed” – At national high school debating tournaments, judges are making their position clear: students who argue ‘capitalism can reduce poverty’ or ‘Israel has a right to defend itself’ will lose, reports James Fishback in the Free Press.
- “My garden shed is institutionally racist” – Andy Lambeth is worried he might have to ‘decolonise’ his garden shed.
- “Ron DeSantis explains why he wants to ‘burn’ the CDC and NIH ‘to the ground’” – The Governor of Florida doesn’t pull his punches when discussing the pandemic response of the CDC, the NIH and, above all, Anthony Fauci. Make that man President!
MUST WATCH: Governor @RonDeSantis addresses reports that he said he hopes to “burn” the CDC and NIH “to the ground” pic.twitter.com/aXwCNDHRJr
— DeSantis War Room(@DeSantisWarRoom) May 25, 2023
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Good article, although I still think the author finds it hard to cut himself loose from the past. The fact he always felt good to be part of the ‘centre left’ is also strange. What good has any left wing Government done anywhere?
Glad he made it to Texas and found sanity. Hopefully he will never vote Dumb again.
Finally did the author mix up log and splinter in 3rd para?
It is a start. You (we) can’t expect everything in one step. Nobody can cast off long-held views overnight.
Peter Hitchens would agree!
Come on you smug Rightists.. Whilst it is true that relatively less on the Right have fallen for the Virtuous Covid Hoax than the naive Leftists, that still doesn’t include most of the Conservative Party!
This is far more than shallow point scoring between Left and Right, this is about seeing through a scam/hoax, as promoted by the Establishment. Some of us can see it, but sadly most not.
Like the author, I would have regarded myself as Centrist or possibly slightly Leftist in terms of economy, but we can likewise see horse faeces for what it is!
Orwell observed that the real divide is not between Left and Right, but between authoritarians and libertarians.
Yes but most of today’s conservative party are not right of centre. It was Tories that gave us Net Zero after all in 2019. It is Tories who speak of things like “Social Justice”. It is Tories that have allowed people to roam about with knives and gangs of people with rucksacks to walk into stores and fill up. It is Tories who have allowed 750,000 people to enter the country with 100,000 of them just arriving uninvited. All these people will have to live somewhere and presumably that will be in a house, but where are all these houses? So no we don’t have a conservative party now, we have Labour and we have Labour Lite.
Which just shows the absurdity of the whole left-right paradigm when not discussing France circa 1790.
The laughably misnamed ‘Conservative’ Party is dominated by Blue Blairites (if you don;t believe me, look at the tax rates & observe what happened to Truss when she dared suggest a meaningful change of approach). People will be shocked when the soon-to-be-in-power Red Blairites just dial all the idiocy of the last 14 years up to 11, resulting in more of the same but faster.
I found solace with Left Lockdown Sceptics that now call themselves Real Left.
https://real-left.com/
Off topic but the DS boffins have fixed notifications
I’ve encouraged them to give those features a plug as I feel they enhance the experience, but if they don’t I’ll post about it tomorrow
Good article by Dr Bell. I hadn’t been a “lefty” since my youth but I realised my London “liberal” tribe abandoned me over Trump and Brexit so by the time “Covid” came I was not surprised.
Both David & Bell arose from The America™ and their total cluelessness of European history of the first half of the 20th century is only shadowed by their apparently indomitable desire to keep making stupid remarks about it both David & Bell from The America™ certainly believe to be profound.
As I’m not in the mute of trying to explain this history to boneheads again, what about a question instead: Is the reason that you always write fascism when you mean totalitarianism that the idea that Stalin really wasn’t a nice guy offends your communist sympathies?
David, you should ask these “superior” specimens whether they believe that epidemics grow exponentially. If they say yes you can tell them that are bad at both “Math” and basic literature reviews.
It certainly has been very interesting – if not very pleasant – seeing ill-liberalism take centre stage in the attitudes of quite intelligent friends and acquaintances. It suddenly became a real clear dividing line, though no doubt it was always there under the surface, in less ‘clarifying’ times.
Excellent article.
Comparing far-left and far-right (the actual far-right, not someone who thinks Bearded Bill perhaps shouldn’t be donning a frock, slapping on the makeup, and reading stories to schoolchildren) is like comparing a red apple to a green apple – peel away the skin and what you’ll find beneath is always an apple. Communism is bold, brash totalitarianism, fascism is quiet, shy totalitarianism. The green and red skins of your totalitarian apple. The reason why so many more on the left succumbed is, quite simply, because so many more on the left – particularly the modern left, which is now the party of the middle-class ‘educated’ – consider themselves superior. And if you ‘know’ you’re superior then you have a duty to control the inferior – for their own good of course. Superior opinion isn’t opinion, it’s fact. Fact, because all superior people hold the same opinion, and all superior people can’t be wrong. And, because it’s fact, any inferior people holding a contradictory opinion must be forced in line. Because, fact.
The last few years has laid bare how many people enjoy the idea of total authority; either enforcing it or being subjected to it. The biggest social experiment in history and the results are not only bloody depressing, but a clear window into what comes next. We, on this site, are in a minority. Buckle down the hatches.
Thank you for this article.
Overnight, the British Establishment turned into Tyrants and the vast majority of the population demonstrated that they are gullible idiots who have no common-sense, ability or willingness to think or take responsibility for themselves.
It was the most depressing revelation of my life.
Yes, but I believe even Texas is covering the place in thousands of turbines. I suppose no one is perfect.