Mao's America

Update 228

Tonight I am featuring a Benjamin Boyce ‘Calmversation’ interview with Xi Van Fleet. It is long but very interesting.

Xi Van Fleet lived through the horrors of the Chinese Cultural Revolution as a schoolgirl. Forced to the countryside with other young Chinese for re-education after high school, she later escaped communism and found freedom and new a life in America. She recalls that, at the start of the Cultural Revolution, all academic subjects at school were withdrawn to be re-written, so to start with they were just going through Mao’s Little Red Book on repeat! The youth were recruited into the Red Guard to indoctrinate people. Thousands and thousands of people were killed. She didn’t get to question anything until after Mao died and she managed to learn about what was happening in the West.

But more than 30 years later, Xi disturbingly sees signs of the same Cultural Marxism that ravaged her birth country of China threatening to destroy the America she now calls home via critical social justice, especially gender ideology and critical race theory applied in an utterly authoritarian manner through government, large institutions, universities, schools etc I think a lot if not all of this also applies to the UK and other Western countries.

Xi compares the woke movement to Christianity - it has a holy trinity, namely Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and original sin, namely ‘whiteness’. She feels the hope for the future is in learning from history and a love of freedom.

She has now written a book called Mao’s America which is out in October but can be pre-ordered now.

The important difference is that the West is democratic. We will always keep on putting forward our arguments even if we are repeating ourselves. Kellie-Jay usually starts LWS by saying: “I can’t believe I have to say this.” But it is, of course, important that we keep saying it. We know that the anti-women activists will not debate but will just throw insults ( see, for example, the secretly recorded Canadian unionists’ meeting I reported on in the last update). The political way forward it seems to me is:

1. Through getting laws, policies and guidance implemented through government (central, federal and local) to prevent gender affirming care for children, to stop the sexualisation of children and the teaching of gender ideology in school, to protect women’s single sex spaces and sports and to stop the erasure of women’s language. This, in turn , can have a knock on effect on the policies and actions of large institutions ( NHS, schools etc) and government departments.

2. Through legal cases concerning the harm caused by so called gender affirming care, dismissal or disciplinary action related to gender critical beliefs, cancellation due to such beliefs etc

All thoughts on this gratefully received.

Let Women Speak

I stayed up this morning to watch Auckland LWS being livestreamed by Kellie-Jay ( so am somewhat cream crackered now!). Hopefully most of you will by now have watched it. It was great and the police did a proper job this time. Unfortunately the sound wasn’t good on the livestream and it was difficult to follow some of the speeches. However, well done the Kiwi women. A great step forward.

Petition

Please sign this petition regarding the removal of the word ‘mother’ by the General Medical Council ( FFS).

https://www.change.org/p/reverse-the-gmc-s-decision-to-remove-mother-from-maternity-documents?recruiter=45818205&recruited_by_id=46affed0-7d0a-0130-d928-3c764e049c4f&share_bandit_exp=initial-37442061-en-GB

Feminist Legal Clinic

Shout out as ever to FLC and just picking up one article today.

Women’s Conference At San Francisco Hilton Attacked By Antifa, Hotel Manager Assaulted ( 20 September)

Two “gender critical” events in San Francisco were stormed by Antifa this weekend, where trans activists showed up with signs threatening to murder women critical of gender ideology. At one conference held at a Hilton hotel, an employee was assaulted while trying to prevent damage to the property.

Approximately 100 members of the US chapter of Women’s Declaration International (WDI), a global group of volunteers who campaign for women and girls’ sex-based rights, were in attendance for the conference, held on Saturday at the Hilton.

Slogans such as “Arm trans women, disarm cops,” and “Dykes hate TERFs,” were seen plastered on the Hilton signage and in surrounding areas, as well as stickers featuring the Antifa logo.

But the trans activist detractors didn’t stop at vandalism, and continued to escalate the situation by taking a hammer to the Hilton’s outdoor sign.

Dansky explained to Reduxx that a hotel manager saw the destruction, and attempted to intervene to prevent further damage. In response, one of the protestors physically assaulted him, reportedly punching the staff member in the head.

Source: Women’s Conference At San Francisco Hilton Attacked By Antifa, Hotel Manager Assaulted – Reduxx

Well done, WDI for battling on.

Gillian Philip

Ewan Somerville in The Telegraph (Author who says she was fired for backing JK Rowling’s trans views launches legal appeal 19 September) reports:

Gillian Philip © Provided by The Telegraph

A children’s author who claims that she was sacked for supporting JK Rowling’s views on transgender issues has launched a legal appeal.

Gillian Philip, 59, says that the book packaging business Working Partners and the publisher HarperCollins terminated her contract because of her beliefs about biological sex.

She backed the Harry Potter author by tweeting “#ISTANDWITHROWLING” in 2020 when Rowling first went public with her views on the gender debate by questioning the term “people who menstruate”.

At the time, Ms Philip was one of several authors writing under the name Erin Hunter on the popular animal fantasy series that includes Warrior Cats, Survivors and Bravelands.

Ms Philip, from Glasgow, says that she was removed from the Erin Hunter team after her support of Rowling caused a social media row.

After her tweet, Ms Philip says that she received abuse and death threats, and later tweeted “bring it on, homophobes and lesbian-haters” – which only inflamed the situation.

James Noble, the managing editor of Working Partners, responded to the complaints at the time by writing: “The worlds created by Erin Hunter are meant to be inclusive for all readers and we want to let you know that Gillian Philip will no longer be writing any Erin Hunter novels.”

She took the firm to an employment tribunal in April last year that ruled she was not a “worker” of Working Partners, which left her without protection from unlawful discrimination under the Equality Act 2010, so her claim was thrown out.

Now, she hopes to overturn this ruling on appeal at the Edinburgh Employment Appeal Tribunal.

Her lawyers will argue that many factors point to her “worker” status – including the influence and control that her employer had over her and her body of work.

Ms Philip said that the decision made could have wider implications for writers, authors and the publishing industry.

Working Partners is a book packaging company that devises storylines and assembles writers, designers and others to work on books for publishers – in Ms Philip’s case, Harper Collins.

They devise storylines and guidelines under which writers are required to work and have ultimate control of creative content.

Shah Qureshi, a partner at law firm Irwin Mitchell and Ms Philip’s legal advisor, said: “Non-traditional employment relationships are now commonplace, and it is important that those working under such arrangements, like Gillian, get the same protections as others.

“This includes the right not to be discriminated against for one’s beliefs. There are many workers in publishing and the creative industries with unorthodox working arrangements who nevertheless have mutual obligations with their employers akin to that required to be classed as a worker or employee.”

Best of luck to Gillian.

Times Round Up

Thanks, as ever, to Fingers for the cuttings from the Times.

The two articles I have chosen relate to Róisín Murphy.

Jawad Iqbal (BBC must show the music isn’t over for singer in trans row 14 September) writes:

The behaviour of the social media extremists who dominate much of this debate is to be expected. What is shameful is the complicity, unwitting or otherwise, of others in the public arena who really need to show courage rather than running away from any hint of controversy. The BBC could lead the way by reinstating the Róisín Murphy show next week. That is the only way to scotch suspicions that she was “cancelled“ for her opinions on trans rights.

Matthew Syed (To silence cancel culture, our craven elite needs only to change its tune 17 September) writes:

… this reveals the real significance of the Murphy story. It is not that cancellation has met its match; rather, it’s that most modern controversies represent a kind of illusion. Yes, Murphy trended. Yes, her comments were a big deal on Twitter. But most people are not on Twitter and even fewer post on it. What almost destroyed Murphy‘s career wasn’t an online spasm but the craven overreaction of her record label, venues, the BBC. And what saved her? That’s right: thousands of people (far more than those calling for her boycott) sending her album up the charts.

In other words, there was always a latent majority who supported Murphy; people who defended her right to express an opinion; who felt uneasy that a private communication had become a smoking gun; and who also agreed with her views on puberty blockers. The problem is that most people subject to cancellation don’t have a mechanism, album or otherwise, through which majority support can be expressed. This is why they have nowhere to turn when institutions fail them.

The scholar Nassim Nicholas Taleb has coined the phrase “the tyranny of the minority”.

And finally…

To follow on from the above, my Róisín Murphy double album has arrived 😎

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