The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
Update 404 Speak Truth To Power Edition #BeMorePorcupine
I am coming off the blocks early since I already have a backlog plus I may have to do paid work on Sunday 😥
Thanks to a reader for suggesting today’s film in The Western Season. Ransome ‘Ranse’ Stoddard shoots the notorious local outlaw, Liberty Valance who has been protected by the corrupt local sheriff. But what was the role of local man, Tom Doniphon (John Wayne)?
In the clip below James Stewart is Ransome Stoddard and Lee Marvin is Liberty Valance. The plot is very convoluted so you’ll either have to watch it ( if you haven’t already) or Google it 😊
“Nothing’s too good for the man who shot Liberty Valance.”
Please keep the suggestions for Westerns coming 😊
Thanks this time around to three wonderful readers for suggested pieces.
The Party of Women
Kellie-Jay Keen discusses the way forward for PoW and Let Women Speak ( and replays two cracking speeches, one of which I featured recently):
The Culture Wars
Brilliant discussion by Malcolm Clark on his substack about Lisa Nandy as the new Culture Minister - all thoughts, as ever, gratefully received. The woman who asks the questions of Ms Nandy in the video is Julia Long who stood for PoW in the general election. 😊
Lisa Nandy's First Rule of Culture War
Nandy claims the Culture War is over while simultaneously doing all she can to advance the capture of our institutions by the likes of the LGBTQ+ mafia. It's the oldest trick in the Culture War book.
JUL 12, 2024
The First Rule of Fight Club, you may remember, was “You do not talk about Fight Club”. Lisa Nandy, Britain’s new Minister for Culture, Media and Sport has a new version of this for today’s cultural equivalent of Fight Club….. the Culture War. Her newly-minted instruction reads, “You can talk about Fight Club, as long as you say it’s over”.
In the movie the Second Rule was “You DO NOT talk about Fight Club”. Nandy’s is “When you talk about Culture War, deny you were ever involved.” Not quite so catchy. Or funny.
The truth is the Minister’s argument has all the fake innocence of a teenager protesting to her parents she’d nothing to do with that nasty scuffle outside school where Betty Boring was set upon; despite the fact she’d been dragged from the scuffle by her own mum.
Like this bemused mother you begin to wonder if you’d imagined young Lisa screaming blue murder and encouraging her friends to make Betty Boring’s life hell.
Here’s Lisa speaking for herself at her first press briefing as the new panjandrum of a Ministry the Soviets liked to call the State Committee on the Arts.
“In recent years we’ve found multiple ways to divide ourselves from one another. And lost that sense of a self-confident, outward-looking country which values its own people in every part of the UK.”
Translated: Betty Boring has been causing trouble and riling up a lot of the other girls.
She went on
“Changing that is the mission of this department. The era of culture wars is over.”
Translated: I have been trying to calm things down and now that Betty has a had a good slap….I think we can all agree we’ll be hearing less from her from now on.
Dusty - Is this a woman?
Her officials expanded on her message, briefing the press that whereas Conservative Ministers had picked fights with institutions like the National Trust or the BBC, Nandy’s plan
“was to prioritise celebrating British culture and stories rather than battling with institutions.”
In other words Labour’s strategy will be studiously to ignore the fact wild-eyed activists are trying to normalise increasingly bizarre notions in cultural institutions, just as they are in our universities, schools and political parties, not least Nandy’s own.
There is, of course, another way to sum up this strategy. It’s called surrender.
That would be worrying from any senior politician. It’s an extraordinary one given how immersed Lisa Nandy has herself been in the Culture War before now. Indeed, she has been such a resolute crusader for all types of cultural wokery we are surely justified in assuming surrender is the last thing on her mind.
Just four years ago, during the Labour leadership campaign Nandy argued that child rapists should be housed in women’s prisons.
Asked whether men who identify as women should be able to stand in all-women shortlists, Nandy responded,
“Yeah, I think that you have to walk the walk in the Labour party and that means that we have to do two things – one is that we have to accept that people are who they say they are.”
Perhaps the next time Joe Biden claims to be the first black woman President, Nandy will post some celebratory tweets, and get her officials to try and wangle an invite to the White House.
The full piece is here ( behind a paywall):
The British Woocasting Corporation
Andrew Doyle on his substack takes aim at the Woo Woo BBC.
The extreme ideological bias of the BBC
The state broadcaster has failed in its obligation to remain impartial.
JUL 12, 2024
Complaints about BBC impartiality are nothing new. The state broadcaster has a kind of constitution in the form of its Royal Charter, by which it is required to maintain due impartiality in its news reporting and when it comes to controversial subjects. But does it succeed?
In holding politicians from the left and the right to account in its reporting, accusations of bias are always likely to occur. Some people claim the BBC is inherently left-leaning, others claim it is inherently right-leaning. It really depends on your perspective. For my part, I believe that BBC does a generally good job – with a few notable lapses - when it comes to political impartiality.
However, where I think it clearly fails is in regard to its ideological impartiality. When it comes to the ideology of Critical Social Justice, what has become known colloquially as the “woke” movement, the BBC in my view clearly suffers from an extreme bias. This explains why so many people no longer trust its reporting.
I know from personal anecdotes from employees at the BBC that there is a kind of internal struggle going on to overcome the problem, but nobody I have yet spoken to denies that the organisation is ideologically captured. And we can all see it for ourselves. You might have seen the educational film by the BBC called Identity – Understanding Sexual and Gender Identities, aimed at 9 to 12 year-olds, which claimed that there are “over 100 gender identities”.
Where is the balance there? Why is the BBC making pseudo-religious proclamations to children as though they were uncontested fact?
The BBC news website also routinely publishes items about male rapists, murderers and sex offenders, but misreports them as being female. You might recall a news story last December on the BBC with the headline “Predatory woman who incited man to abuse child, 4, jailed.’
At no point in the article does the writer tell you that the predator in question is a man; you have to rely on the evidence of your own eyes to get to the truth. The very notion of transgender identity isn’t even mentioned. This is not journalism, it’s propaganda.
But perhaps most damning of all is the question of the WPATH Files. In March of this year, a series of internal documents and videos from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health were leaked to journalist Michael Shellenberger. As Mia Hughes’s report for the Environmental Progress think tank revealed, these leaks showed that members of the world’s leading global authority in gender treatment were engaging in medical malpractice.
There are messages proving that surgeons and therapists are aware that a significant proportion of young people referred to gender clinicians suffer from mental health problems. They reveal that some specialists associated with WPATH are proceeding with treatment in the knowledge that no consent has been secured from either the children or those directly responsible for their wellbeing. They have also withheld from patients details of potential lifelong complications, or continued down this path knowing that the children do not understand the implications. And the WPATH Standards of Care are the go-to policies for gender treatment throughout the world, and have been influential in our own NHS.
A huge story, you would think. It’s probably the biggest medical scandal of the century. This is why I covered this in a two-hour special of Free Speech Nation, which you can watch in full here:
And yet if you search for the WPATH Files on the BBC News website, what do you find? Precisely nothing.
The full piece is here:
Challenge to the Private Clinics Puberty Blockers Ban
Tribunal Tweets reports on today’s judicial review challenge. I presume that judgment is reserved. Given that the private clinics’ ban only lasts until the end of September, I would also presume that this is intended as a warning shot to the new Minister of Health, Wes Streeting…let’s hope it fails . You will notice the involvement of the famous fox killer (who also famously loses most of the cases he takes on)!
Jolyon Maugham. A fox.
Group seeks Judicial Review of Ban on Private Puberty Blocker Prescriptions
JUL 10, 2024
Implementation of the Cass Review resulted in gonadatrophin releasing hormone (GnRH) analogues (puberty blockers) no longer being available to patients under the age of 18 in England and Wales via the National Health Service (NHS). The former health secretary, Victoria Atkins, also banned provision of puberty blockers by private prescription either domestically or via overseas providers to under 18s via an emergency order that expires on 2 September 2024.
TransActual, an advocacy group for trans people and an anonymous claimant, YY, described as a trans young person are supported by the Good Law Project in seeking a judicial review to overturn the ban on overseas provision.
Anonymity order YY & Litigation Friend ZZ
Dr Eithan Haim
Brilliant interview with brave Dr Haim who blew the whistle on the largest children’s hospital in the world carrying out so called ‘gender affirming care’ on children when they said they were not doing it. Now he is being prosecuted! I previously reported on Dr Haim’s case here:
https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/the-end-of-the-rainbow?utm_source=publication-search
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
A reader has requested the famous speech by Solzhenitsyn when being awarded an honorary degree at Harvard University in 1978. However this speech is extremely long and has a simultaneous English interpretation which actually makes it difficult to follow. So I have settled for Jordan Peterson discussing why Solzhenitsyn was so important.
What is the relevance of this to us? The west is getting increasingly authoritarian - see the interview above with Dr Haim - that is the relevance!
Sall Grover
I have reported on wonderful Sall’s case on numerous occasions. The most recent mention was here 😊
https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/you-aint-me?utm_source=publication-search
Katrina Biggs on her substack reports on Sall’s tour of New Zealand.
How the Sall Grover event went in Christchurch NZ, and how the audience that questions gender ideology has changed in three years.
JUL 11, 2024
Sall Grover is a star. That mid-winter night in Christchurch where she spoke to an attentive audience on the last leg of her speaking tour in NZ may have chilled her star extremities a little, but she still shone. The story of how her creation of an app for women went sideways due to a litigious man who says he’s a woman, Roxy Tickle, is now very relevant to us here in New Zealand.
This Tickle bloke claims his self-declared ‘woman’ gender identity trumps the fact that he’s not actually a woman. He has sued Sall for discrimination in federal court in Australia for not letting him onto her app. The verdict is due anytime. The law around sex and gender here in New Zealand is different to Australia’s, but our Law Commission has now released a proposal to put the word ‘gender’ into our Human Rights Act against discrimination. If it goes ahead, it may put us into the same awkward situation that Sall has experienced, and we’ll be required to contest whether or not gender – whatever that means - trumps sex in a court of law.
The other speakers in the line-up of Christchurch’s Sall Grover event – Helen Houghton, an ex-teacher and defender of children against the harms of gender-identity ideology; Nicole, a mother whose daughter now says she’s a man; and Jill Ovens, co-leader of the Women’s Rights Party – also relayed profound experiences of the ways gender ideology had impacted on, or affected, them. They all weaved a story which painted a disturbing picture of how it can spread into various aspects of our lives. None of us can guarantee it won’t touch us in some way, somewhere.
From left to right - Helen, Nicole, Sall, and Jill.
As interesting as the panel of speakers were, it was also interesting to feel how the tenor of the audience on that winter’s night in Christchurch had changed from the tenor of a similar audience on another winter’s night in Christchurch three years ago.
In mid-2021, I was involved in organising a venue for a speaker to come and talk about the upcoming sex self-ID bill. The central library was the venue of choice, but they cancelled the booking I made after trans activists, one of whom was ‘Lucy puts bows on her dick’, made complaints about the topic of the talk and the woman’s group the visiting speaker belonged to.
(The above picture was copied from another publication, and I can’t make it any clearer, sorry. The letter from the library reads: “Dear Lucy, thank you for your email. After we received complaints from customers and staff, we decided to decline this venue hire request. We assessed the request against our code of conduct, particularly our commitment to providing a safe and welcoming environment for all. In summary, the SUFW event will not be held at Tūranga. Kind regards, Sean Rainey.”)
A co-organiser working with me made another booking at a club of the type we used to call a Working Men’s Club - the irony wasn’t lost on us – lol! However, what a fortuitous choice! The manager later relayed how he also got complaints after trans activists discovered our change of venue, but he decided to do a bit of online research for himself, and soon found out they were a hundred times (probably more like a thousand times) less desirable than we women were.
On the night, even though the club had a duty manager, the club manager also stayed behind to keep control of the premises. He stood in the foyer as we all entered, and when around a dozen protestors turned up with the intention of attending the event, he stopped them until he’d checked with us if it was okay to let them in. We agreed as long as they behaved, and only then did he let them in the doors out of the cold night. That wouldn’t happen now, as protestors try to gain entry to our events with the express purpose of making so much noise that speakers can’t be heard. However, three years ago were different times – and the manager knew how to manage. He maintained a watchful presence until the end.
The audience was about half the number on that night as attended the Sall Grover event, and for the most part they were confused and discombobulated about what the hell was going on. This thing called sex self-ID seemed to have popped up out of nowhere. It’s now known that neo-rainbow lobby groups and the Green Party had been surreptitiously working on it together for some time before we became aware of it. At the forefront of most of the audience’s minds back then seemed to be “wtf is sex self-ID and this thing called gender ideology?”
In contrast, the tenor of the audience at the Sall Grover event was that they were pissed off at sex self-ID and this thing called gender ideology, and they wanted to do something about it. A lot of water can go under the bridge in three years.
We may have small wins here and there against gender ideology, but we’re still up against the Public Service, government, councils, and mainstream media who continue to relentlessly push and entrench it. If we want to gain any real ground in defeating its promulgation, some differences must be put aside so we can focus on the immediate objectives of recovering women’s and girls’ single-sex spaces and sports for females only, protecting children from the harms of gender-identity ideology, and taking back our female language. Disparate groups are ready to work together on this, and park the things they don’t agree on until later. This kind of compromise is nothing new.
It was good to feel a new determination in the air at the Sall Grover event in Christchurch. How that manifests is yet to develop, but people’s appetite to do something more is increasing.
I’ll keep you updated :-)
Dear Parents
Great spoof letter from a PITT ( Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans) parent:
Welcome, Baby!
2024 Letter from the Hospital to Parents of a New Baby
JUL 11, 2024
Dear parents,
It’s 2024 and your child was born at just the right time! Before now, for hundreds and hundreds of years, we didn’t understand how many genders there were. We were living in the dark ages and thought there were only girls and boys. We have learned that our assignment of boy and girl at birth was just a guess and that we often guessed wrong. So, we have given your baby a temporary assignment of boy or girl until they can learn in school about the multitude of genders to pick from and make their own choice. Your child will let you know when they decide what gender they are.
Parents, you must follow the lead and directions of your child because only children know what gender they truly are. Now they can feel into their identity so much more easily with the guidance of progressive gender teachers and books available in school. If you and your child are lucky, they will decide on their gender early, before puberty has begun. That is why we begin teaching about gender identities in kindergarten. If we have made a mistake in the sex assignment at birth, it is fortunate that we can provide puberty blockers so your child will not be harmed by experiencing the wrong puberty. We will switch to hormonal therapy as soon as possible so that their bodies will evolve to look like the sex of their soul. We sincerely apologize if our sex assignment at birth was in error, as the child’s physical and biological body may not always match the gender they might “feel” when they get a little older.
If errors in gender identification fail to occur in the grade-school years, and your teen discovers they were designated as girl by mistake, teacher guides will arrange to provide breast binders for them if you resist their decision. We realize that at this late stage of their development, you may experience some attachment to their original sex assignment. You must let go of any questioning of your teen. Again, only they know what is right for them. Your teen must live more comfortably while awaiting their surgical date to remove their breasts. Don’t worry if your teen says breast binding hurts; their breasts can be removed. We are training more and more surgeons so kids will have shorter waiting times for their desired body modification procedures. And boys assigned in error can be taught to tuck their genitals until they can get those parts removed as well. Top and bottom surgeries are essential for your child’s well-being, so you must immediately comply with all their wishes. It is unkind to thwart their desire to fix their bodies to align with their gendered soul. It is cruel to your child to delay their transition in any way. We must move forward quickly to reduce suffering.
Parents, you can give your child a temporary name at birth, but don’t get attached to it because when your child chooses their gender later, the child will most likely pick a new name. Use your child’s newly chosen name immediately and do your best to remove the former name from all places where it is visible. Let the hospital know so we can amend the birth certificate to the correct gender and the child’s chosen name. Apologize immediately if you slip and use their deadname.
Parents, we know that sometimes you might experience anxiety or confusion about gender changes. Rest assured that breasts and genitals can easily be removed should your child decide to pick a different sex than the guessed gender that we gave them at birth. We are sorry to inform you that your child will not be able to procreate after these treatments. Although this might cause you a brief period of distress, you must refocus on your child’s happiness at the moment. Any resistance on your part will lead to the distinct possibility that your child will end their life. So, to prevent losing your child, you must agree to our treatment pathway.
Perhaps in the future, we will have a test that can better determine sex at birth. But today, we don’t know what sex kids are just by looking at their anatomy because we learned that it is all just a spectrum. We had it all wrong for hundreds of years. What a relief that we have built a successful gender industry to be at the ready for your child’s surgeries, and we can give your child hormonal therapy to help them be happy while they await their procedures to fix their wrong bodies. Thank goodness we live in progressive and enlightened times now!
Best wishes for your new baby as you take them home. You may not know for years whether your child is truly male, female, transgender, gender neutral, agender, nonbinary, pangender, or third gender—or all, none, or a combination of these or others. But just remember to go with the flow! Your child will tell you who they are and what they want. Be flexible and let them lead the way! Good luck!
Sincerely,
Your Hospital Birth Center
Wrong Bodies
Excellent documentary from Skirt Go Spinny. It features Jennifer Bilek, Genevieve Gluck, Vaishnavi Sundar, Helen Joyce and others. It does a good job, in my opinion, at showing how so called ‘transgenderism’ is a cult especially by using the analogy of ‘Jonestown’. I take it that the showing of many (what I shall call) trans rights activists repeating mantras is to emphasise the cult nature of this evil movement. Personally I could have done with a bit less of the TRAs talking b****cks and more from people on our side of the argument and also felt more detail was required in, for example, countering some of the TRA arguments such as the usual ‘suicide’ myth. However, all in all, a great film. Please do let us have your thoughts, of course.
It’s long, so set aside some time 😊
https://x.com/wrongbodies/status/1811125941541687316
Endpiece By Liz
#BeMorePorcupine
Thanks Dusty. That spoof letter from PITT is very powerful, showing the lunacy of allowing children to pick a gender (pick ‘n mix anyone?)
Westerns: Destry Rides Again - the actors have such a blast! Marlene Dietrich was covered in bruises from the “cat fight” - I can’t help thinking of Annaliese Dodds and Brigid Phillipson arguing over who gets to advocate for transwomen!
The subtitle to this update should be “Speak Truth to Power”. Thanks for some inspirational pieces, thanks Dusty.
👏 KJK as ever.
Excellent interview with Eithan Haim. What a brave man. And well paired with the Solzhenitsyn piece.
Your comment on the Wrong Bodies film exactly mirrors my own. I was hoping there’d be more information interspersed with the narcissistic twaddle which would have made it more relevant for someone new to the issue. The first half is very good and the whole thing really does highlight that what we are witnessing is an insane cult like belief system. What I find incredible, is how many people have been brainwashed by it.