New York Police Department (NYPD) Officer Frank Serpico ( Al Pacino) is rushed to the hospital, having been shot in the face. Chief Sidney Green fears that Serpico was shot by another cop. The rest of the film is shown as a long flashback. One of the central themes is corruption within the NYPD.
In the UK, we are concerned not with corruption within the police but with capture by identitarian politics and two tier policing ( see recent updates). We need a return to policing without ‘fear or favour’.
Thanks as ever to two wonderful readers for suggested pieces.
That Letter
I presume that most if not all of you will have caught up with the letter from a self styled ‘group’ ( if they can be called a group) calling themselves ‘gender critical anti-far right’.
In case you have missed it here it is:
https://twitter.com/RosieDuffield1/status/1823801458015535442
I note, at the outset, that the trans rights activists do not engage in debate but simply throw insults at us Terfs such as calling us fascists or nazis. It seems to me that this letter is very much in that style.
I have been involved in campaigning on other issues for far too many years! I have come across ( verbal) back room brawls within a campaign before. However I have never come across a letter like this before. Normally one group might quote certain alleged facts to another group and arrive at certain putative conclusions arising from these alleged facts. This at least gives the impugned group the opportunity of responding to those facts and those conclusions.
But the broad brush approach of this letter makes it very difficult for anyone to respond rather than just denying the broad brush accusations.
Indeed I feel that the letter is actually defamatory - not that I would advise anyone to waste the time and effort in taking such an action.
It is presumed that the letter is directed at Kellie-Jay Keen and by implication the members and supporters of Let Women Speak and the Party of Women.
We are not prepared to accept the hard work done by so many being co-opted and endangered by people inciting and defending race riots.
This it total nonsense and highly offensive. It is based on no evidence whatsoever. I am a supporter of LWS and POW and I find these bullshit accusations extremely annoying.
Not that she really needed to say this but, in her latest Terf Talk Tuesday, KJK made it clear that she does not condone violence or rioting.
I also presume that the writers of this letter do not like us speaking out about two tier policing and the threats by the Government to free speech and do not like us criticising the Labour Government in general. The Party of Women have made their position clear.
I agree with the questions posed by EDI Jester. I join with what KJK says in the video below. As Rex Landy says, in her usual forthright way, this is virtue signalling.
https://rexlandy.substack.com/p/goodie-whemper-doth-saw-thee
I am glad that some signatories have had a re-think and have withdrawn their support. I hope others have a re-think. I would call on the authors of the letter who I believe are Simon Edge and Darren Johnson to withdraw this insulting piece of garbage.
All thoughts gratefully encouraged 😊
The Mess
Hopefully most of you have caught up with the new regular episodes of The Mess every Sunday at 5pm. The next one is tomorrow.
https://www.youtube.com/@GrahamLinehan/streams
Free Speech
Continuing our recent theme about free speech, on his substack Andrew Doyle looks at attacks on Elon Musk which, of course, are really also attacks on free speech.
The enemies of free speech had counted on powerful friends to censor their opponents. Then the CEO of Tesla entered the fray…
Aug 16, 2024
We might describe it as MDS, or “Musk Derangement Syndrome”. It has reached new heights in recent days, with Musk taking on the UK Prime Minister - aka “two-tier Keir” - for his determination to crack down on online speech. That the CEO of X refuses to kowtow to demands from politicians to heighten censorship on his platform is a source of great dismay for those of an authoritarian mindset.
Earlier this week, the EU’s social media guru Thierry Breton published a letter in which he warned Musk against the “amplification of potentially harmful content”. True to form, Musk replied with a provocative meme:
Musk Derangement Syndrome really began in earnest when he first acquired the platform in October 2022. We can all remember the chorus of flouncing celebrities who announced their departure on the grounds that Musk’s influence would transform Twitter into a hateful cesspit. Because of course we all that know that before his takeover Twitter was some kind of idyllic digital picnic site for only the fluffiest of teddy bears.
But this was nothing compared to the media response. In The Atlantic, Charlie Warzel wrote that “there is, both inside and outside the company, an apocalyptic feel to the ordeal”. And then there was this from Washington Post columnist Taylor Lorenz:
But the award for the most histrionic response has to go to The Independent, that publication that used to be a newspaper and has since turned into an adolescent online blog for soft-witted conformists…
In this article, the author describes Elon Musk as a “right-wing radical” and claims that his takeover of Twitter “will bring nothing but the demise of democracy”. One must have a heart of stone to read it without laughing.
Many of Musk’s critics have claimed that it is hugely problematic for billionaires to have too much power over public discourse. And yet they didn’t complain when Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, which would suggest that their concern is more ideological than principled.
Musk himself has made clear why he wanted to buy the platform, in terms that explain fully the hostile reaction:
“The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future of civilisation to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence.”
And there you have it. For many years previously, Twitter had been enacting policies that censor points of view which deviated from those of its executives. It had deliberately vague “terms of service” that meant it could delete accounts without having to give a reason. It had a chillingly named “Trust and Safety Council” that could decide which opinions were acceptable and which were not. This is why feminists who believe that acknowledging the reality of biological sex is crucial for women’s rights often found themselves thrown off the platform. Sometimes, users were punished without even being told what their crimes were, like in Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial.
Twitter had also purged satirical accounts that mocked the ideological worldview of its staff. The hugely popular account The Babylon Bee was locked out for a satirical tweet in which the US Assistant Secretary of Health Rachel Levine was named “Man of the Year”….
The Babylon Bee was one of many satirical accounts reinstated when Musk bought the platform. Within hours of his arrival at Twitter, Musk had fired a number of the top executives, including Vijaya Gadde, who was head of legal, policy and trust. It was Gadde who made the decision to delete the account of the then sitting president Donald Trump. Little wonder that Musk has been transformed into a folk devil by those who don’t like to see their precious pseudo-religion held up to criticism or ridicule.
I wrote previously on my Substack about how mainstream media commentators are now calling on the UK government to ban X entirely. In one of his more unhinged articles, the Guardian’s reliably illiberal columnist Jonathan Freedland has explicitly said that Musk ought to be prosecuted.
And yet far from being a threat to democracy, Musk’s takeover of Twitter has been a godsend for those of us who still believe in free speech. It was Musk who released the “Twitter Files” – via a select group of journalists and writers including Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss and Michael Shellenberger – which exposed collusion between Twitter and politicians to see certain viewpoints censored. It also revealed the details of how the company had suppressed an article by the New York Post in the run up to the last election.
We all know the story by now. Hunter Biden’s laptop had been left at a computer shop and its owner had never returned to collect it. The contents were leaked to the New York Post, and it was found to contain materials which suggested that Joe Biden may have been involved in his son Hunter’s various dealings with foreign businessmen. This was potentially catastrophic for Biden’s presidential campaign, and so Twitter locked the New York Post out of its account and prevented any user from sharing the article, even in private messages. They claimed they were doing this because the story might have been using “hacked material”, but that was pure speculation and turned out to be false.
The “Twitter Files” released by Elon Musk were significant because they revealed that not only did senior staff at Twitter understand that they had no grounds to censor the story, but that they were routinely suppressing tweets on the instructions of the Democratic party. Here’s an example of a leaked email, in which one Twitter executive lists tweets that have been flagged by the Democrats.
That last response from one executive – “handled these” – is especially chilling. Apparently both the Trump and Biden campaign teams were contacting Twitter to have tweets erased at their behest, but as the staff at Twitter were overwhelmingly in support of the Democrats, it meant that posts critical of Biden were the most commonly deleted.
The importance of freedom of speech on Twitter has become increasingly obvious over the past few weeks. When it comes to the civil unrest in the UK, the mainstream media has once again taken a partisan approach, omitting details that complicate the narrative. The reason for this was best summed up by the journalist Bari Weiss in her resignation letter from the New York Times:
“A new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.” Dusty - hmmm sounds like the writers of ‘that letter’ 😊
With the media in thrall to the tenets of “wokeness”, they have become more interested in promoting their own narratives. If the truth contradicts those narratives, then it is either misrepresented or ignored.
And so of course the mainstream media despises Elon Musk. He is attempting to recreate what Twitter was originally meant to be: a marketplace of ideas. When you see celebrities and commentators bleating on about how Twitter has become a far right quagmire, what they really mean is that their political opponents aren’t being censored anymore. They preferred the old Twitter, where conversations about sensitive issues were stifled, where feminists were censored for pointing out that there are differences between men and women, where satirical accounts were suspended if they mocked the wrong targets, and where politicians could send a few emails and get the tweets they didn’t like deleted.
Twitter once saw itself as the “the free speech wing of the free speech party”. But for years it was run by authoritarians who believed that their values should be imposed on everyone else. Such attitudes now predominate in our print and broadcast media, and so we can expect plenty more of these hit pieces against Musk in the coming months. They will continue to lie and smear and ignore inconvenient facts. But while Musk remains in charge of X, at least there’s a chance that the truth will out.
https://substack.com/@andrewdoyle/p-147783075
DEI
The previous UK Government had told government departments to stop making diversity, equity and inclusion appointments and wanted to scrap DEI ( sometimes known as EDI) departments. We all know that DEI departments have been central in embedding gender ideology within organisations. I suppose we should not be surprised at this report!
Matt Oliver in The Telegraph ( Ban on civil service diversity jobs could be reversed 16 August) reports:
The initiative has been handed to the Cabinet Office, led by Pat McFadden, the former Labour election campaign chief - Geoff Pugh for the Telegraph
Labour ministers are considering reversing a ban on hiring civil service roles dedicated to equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) following pressure from unions.
A crackdown was launched under the Conservatives last autumn amid concerns taxpayer cash was being wasted on promoting “woke hobby horse” issues. It affected some 400 roles that ex-ministers claimed were now dedicated full-time to EDI.
But on Friday, the Cabinet Office suggested the initiative was under review after a spokesman refused to confirm whether it would continue under Labour. It is understood that no final decision has been taken.
Civil Service unions have been highly critical of the crackdown on EDI, with the rank-and-file Public and Commercial Services Union and the managers-focused FDA both accusing Tory ministers of “playing politics” and waging a “culture war” on staff.
Under the Tory initiative, Esther McVey announced some civil service roles would effectively be scrapped - Anadolu
In May, Esther McVey, the former ‘common sense’ minister, announced that EDI-dedicated civil service roles would effectively be scrapped, with staff instead merged into human resources departments and given other tasks.
Only work on equality matters that were mandated by law would continue, she said.
The full article is here:
Women’s Sport
Great interview on Talk TV with Helen Joyce:
Alex Raskin in The Daily Mail ( 'Woke' ESPN accused of firing NFL anchor Sam Ponder for her stance on trans athletes - including controversial Olympics boxer Imane Khelif 16 August) reports:
ESPN is accused of firing NFL Countdown host Sam Ponder over her criticism of trans women in sports.
'So ESPN fires @samponder, the only woman at the network who [has] publicly said men don't belong in women's sports 3 weeks before football season?' former University of Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines wrote on X, echoing comments from many others.
'Pathetic… The woke media just got woker,' one person responded. 'It's why ESPN is failing.'
The 38-year-old Ponder is being released two years into her three-year, $3 million deal, but will receive her full salary, DailyMail.com has learned. Furthermore, the timing of the decision was dictated by the approaching end of the fiscal year on September 30, a source told DailyMail.com.
Ponder recently posted a comment on X about the gender controversy surrounding women's Olympic boxer Imane Khelif, who is accused of having XY chromosomes.
'XY= male XX= female,' Ponder wrote.
ESPN is accused of firing Sam Ponder over her criticism of trans women in sports.
The full article is here:
Kara Dansky reports on her substack:
WDI USA Files Amicus Brief Before U.S. Supreme Court
August 15, 2024
On August 14, the US chapter of Women’s Declaration International (WDI USA) filed its first Supreme Court friend-of-the-court brief. The case is Little, et al. v. Hecox, et al.
Bradley Little is the governor of Idaho and in 2020, he signed a law mandating that schools within the state maintain single-sex sports. A male athlete, Lindsay Hecox, complained that the law violated his rights under Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment because he claims to be a woman and the law said that as a man, he may only compete on his school’s men’s team. The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit eventually ruled in favor of the male athlete and Little has asked the Supreme Court to take up the case. WDI USA’s brief urges the Court to do so and explains why the Ninth Circuit’s decision is in conflict with Articles VII and VIII of the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights.
Information about the brief and the brief itself can be found on the website of WDI USA. From the brief:
“WDI USA is interested in this appeal first because, as an organization, we cannot protect women and girls from sex discrimination, invasions of their sexual privacy, and violence against women and girls, if sex is redefined to mean an amorphous continuum of subjectively felt “genders” that may not be related to sex at all. Second, the ruling below is in direct conflict with two Articles of the Declaration—the primary tool we use to advocate on behalf of women and girls as a sex class. Third, the linguistic destabilization caused by the uncritical use of words like “transgender” (including in this Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, 590 U.S. 644 (2020)) is producing massive confusion throughout society as well as in law, about what basic words like “women,” “girls,” “lesbians,” “men,” “boys,” “sex,” and “gender” mean, and WDI USA has expertise in how the Court can avoid such damaging and unnecessary confusion. In view of its work on these issues, WDI USA has a meaningful perspective to offer the Court.
…
There are at least three reasons for granting certiorari in this case: (1) The nation’s district and circuit courts are bitterly split on how those questions should be answered, causing confusion and chaos across the country; (2) At least seven district courts have ruled that recent administrative rule changes amending the Title IX regulations, see 34 C.F.R. Part 36, exceed the Department of Education’s statutory authority or are otherwise unlawful (and one has gone in the other direction), and lower courts would benefit from this Court’s guidance on the questions presented here; and (3) The ruling below cements in the law the idea that sex either is not real or does not matter, in a manner that concretely harms women and girls as a sex class, using language that is inconsistent with material reality. Amicus urges this Court to grant petitioners’ petition for certiorari and to reverse the Ninth Circuit’s decision affirming the district court’s grant of a preliminary injunction.”
Especially given recent controversies concerning the participation of male athletes in women’s sports at the Olympics and Paralympics, the brief could not be more timely.
The full piece is here and is behind a paywall:
Georgia O’Keefe
Georgia O’Keefe writes a substack called Woman: Adult Human Female. She does excellent updates about gender issues. I am flagging up the first two updates in her most recent post.
August 9-15: American Society of Plastic Surgeons renounces gender-affirming care. Thousands of US girls had their breasts removed between 2017-2013
Plus, Cancel Culture win and losses this week
Aug 16, 2024
Call to Action
Two UK civil servants sued for truthful statements on biological sex made at work need your help.
Elspeth Duemmer Wrigley, Chair of SEEN sued for saying 'only women menstruate'
British lawyer Elspeth Duemmer Wrigley is being sued for saying at her workplace that only women menstruate and other comments critical of gender ideology. Elspeth is the chair of SEEN (the Sex Equality and Equity Network), the only civil service network for cross-governmental staff in the UK that clearly treats sex and sexual orientation as concepts defined in the Equality Act. You can help her defend her case by donating to her Crowdjustice page.
Andreas Mueller, another civil servant, is also being sued in the same case for stating sex is binary. You can help by donating to his Crowdjustice page.
Top News:
The American Society of Plastic Surgeons breaks with medical establishment and rebukes gender-affirming care for minors
August 12, 2024 - A Consensus No Longer
August 13, 2024 - Plastic surgeon group renounces gender surgery for minors
The ASPS becomes the first major U.S. medical association to call into question gender-affirming medical care for minors, stating it “has not endorsed any organization’s practice recommendations for the treatment of adolescents with gender dysphoria.” The 11,000 members association of medical professionals further acknowledges that there is “considerable uncertainty as to the long-term efficacy for the use of chest and genital surgical interventions” and that “the existing evidence base is viewed as low quality/low certainty.”
The full piece is here:
https://wahf.substack.com/p/august-9-15-american-society-of-plastic?r=7ogxh&triedRedirect=true
Title IX
Extremely important Supreme Court judgment from the States.
I first reported on this saga here:
Antonio Pequeño IV in Forbes ( Supreme Court Blocks Enforcement Of Sex Discrimination Rule Protecting Some States’ Transgender Students 17 August) reports:
The Supreme Court blocked new sex discrimination regulations from taking effect in multiple states in a narrow vote Friday, according to multiple outlets, denying a request from the Biden administration that sought to expand protections for transgender students at the federal level.
The court's decision was in response to an emergency order. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images) Getty Images
Key Facts
The Supreme Court voted 5-4, as conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch voted alongside justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson in dissent, arguing the Education Department should be allowed to enforce portions of the sex discrimination rule in 10 states, Bloomberg reported.
The decision allowed rulings in lower courts blocking the new rules to remain in effect across a broader number of states, effectively keeping in place a hold on federal rules expanding protections to transgender students in those states.
The Biden administration requested the Supreme Court reinstate a provision protecting gender identity under a federal anti-discrimination law and providing bolstered legal protections for pregnant students.
All members of the court said parts of the new rule should not become effective until legal challenges at lower level courts are sorted.
The full article is here:
New Zealand Gender Madness
Katrina Biggs reports on her substack A B’Old Woman:
“Don’t put ‘gender’ into law - it’s terrible idea”, the Women’s Rights Party & Mana Wāhine Kōrero tell NZ’s Law Commission.
Aug 17, 2024
Thursday this week saw me once more winging my way to Wellington, this time to meet with NZ’s Law Commission to make an oral submission to them in person. It could have been done online, of course, as others did, but I wanted to meet them face-to-face, so I jumped on a big silver bird and went there instead.
I was part of a combined delegation from the Women’s Rights Party and Mana Wāhine Kōrero to tell the Law Commission that putting the word ‘gender’ into the Human Rights Act was a terrible idea. As it turned out, some misunderstanding and miscommunication saw us presenting our oral submissions to them via Teams from an external meeting room, anyway. However, I still got the pleasure of an infrequent get-together with six other women in the delegation.
The Law Commission has put together what they call an ‘issues paper’ to review a proposal to put the ‘word’ gender’ into legislation. It’s a nightmare of blood-boiling bollox to any sensible-thinking person, and a wet dream for transgender lobbyists. Submissions from our delegation on this issues paper will be published on the Women’s Rights Party website on Monday 19th August, with Mana Wāhine Kōrero’s submission published on their own website. The submission I made is also published at the bottom of this blog-piece.
The Law Commission’s hearing panel was made up of Professor Claudia Geiringer (she/her in email signatures), two young women who were there to take notes from the meeting, and an older bloke who jokingly told us how the only Boomer in the group – i.e. he - had been given the job of looking after the technical side of things. Yes, it was kinda amusing on one level, but the realisation that the group was made up mainly of those not long out of university and a university professor, and therefore potentially indoctrinated with gender ideology, was disconcerting on another.
Claudia was professionally suave, and opened the meeting by having us all introduce ourselves before we started reading our submissions. Sall Grover from Australia also made an online appearance, as did Christine who has filed a personal grievance against her employer, the Inland Revenue Department NZ, about being taken to task for a quip she made on the women’s intranet regarding free menstrual products in the men’s bathrooms. In recent times, Christine has become aware of another Inland Revenue branch where the female employees give each other a secret hand signal whenever the male employee who says he’s a woman uses the female bathroom. In this way, they know not to go in there when he’s using it. We weren’t told what the secret hand signal was, but two of the women in our delegation immediately made the male wanking movement as a guess. Dear Reader, I’m afraid all we delegates sniggered.
There wasn’t a lot of time for questions and dialogue with the Law Commission hearing panel after we finished making our submissions, and Claudia wound up the meeting with gracious words to us. Battle-hardened ol’ terfs that we are, we received this with our usual ‘cautious distrust’, knowing that a smile today and a decision tomorrow may have nothing in common. Claudia also gave a summary of what their intentions were in creating the issues paper. To me, it came across as saying they were only exploring the idea of putting the word ‘gender’ into the Human Rights Act at this point in time, yet in the issues paper they state that -
Section 21 is the ‘Prohibited Grounds of Discrimination’ in the Human Rights Act. It certainly appears that the Law Commission is favourable to the idea of adding the word ‘gender’ to this section. We can only wait and see now what their final recommendation is.
Afterwards, we were invited back to a Wellingtonian woman’s house for a shared meal. She wasn’t part of the delegation, but opened her home to us. I’m always awed by the generosity of those who do that for people they barely know, and provide food and drink for them. There’s nothing quite like sitting around a table sharing a meal and a wine after an event. It solidifies the camaraderie, as well as just being fun. I won’t name that woman, but you and the friend who helped know who you are, and your warm hospitality was wonderful.
The full piece is here:
Endpiece by Liz
What is a woman? The International Olympic Committee had trouble with this. Maybe the Maasai Tribe should have been in charge of the Olympics?
#BeMorePorcupine
#XX
#SaveWomensSport
Why on Earth would anyone, especially intelligent people who usually make so much sense, sign a letter that has an unknown author, undefined important terms, and a complete lack of awareness? Usually, the name at the top of the list of signatories is the writer or commissioner of a group letter, so it is with sadness that I have to put Simon Edge in the frame for responsibility, pending further information. However - having read all his books and a lot of his other output - it his not his style, though anything written by committee (which this so evidently is) loses individual fingerprints. However (again), if it is by committee (presumably this "GC Anti Far Right" group), why isn't their name at the top? There is something undeniably odd about the thing.
I know that questioning "racism" is very difficult - it is the one aspect of "critical theory" I have the biggest throwing off. BLM was the event that shook my unthinking acceptance of the narrative. I went to look for evidence of what was being claimed, and found the opposite. The "take the knee" was fatal - I bow to no one unless I choose to. I then started looking at the situation over here, and found the narrative similarly skewed and being used to cover up a troubling situation about which public debate was needed, and had been for a long time. Despite that, I have found it difficult to shake off the shackles on my speech ingrained over so many years. This is the insidiousness of wokeism - it piggybacks on good intentions until it produces witlessness. I wouldn't be surprised to see some - not many - of those signatories rowing back over the next few weeks once they realise just what they signed. Others, of course, will dig in.
Thanks as ever, for a range of great pieces Dusty.
I don’t think I want to add anything to what I said on the last update apart from saying that my opinion of Rosie Duffield had already plummeted when she helped to get Labour elected, knowing what the Party has become and what it intended to do. If our speech is further eroded by this govt, she will have been instrumental in making it more difficult for sex realists to fight gender ideology and the erosion of womens rights.