And as the sun sets on British freedom of speech

The New Neo Posted on by

Britain never had an especially robust tradition of free speech; certainly nothing to compare with that of the US. So it doesn’t come as a complete shock that Britain has been cracking down on what it defines as “hate speech” and “incitement,” and has arrested a comedian for his tweets.

I confess: I’ve never before heard of Graham Linehan, a British comedian who was arrested yesterday over three anti-trans tweets. Here is his description of the event, plus the offending tweets:

I was arrested for messages on X when I haven’t even been banned from X. The tweets are not my best work but they are completely harmless. I’m furious about what is happening to women in the UK and I despise trans activists because I think they are homophobic and misogynist…. I was arrested at an airport like a terrorist, locked in a cell like a criminal, taken to hospital because the stress nearly killed me and banned from speaking online — all because I made jokes that upset some psychotic crossdressers. To me, this proves one thing beyond doubt: the UK has become a country that is hostile to freedom of speech, hostile to women and far too accommodating to the demands of violent, entitled, abusive men who have turned the police into their personal goon squad.” …

[The tweets]
1. “If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and, if all else fails, punch him in the balls.”

2. (about a photo of a trans rally) “A photo you can smell.”

3. (again about the photo) “I hate them. Misogynists and homophobes. F*** em.

I assume Linehan is correct that this is not his best comedy work. But then again, bad comedy is neither a felony nor even a misdemeanor. It seems to me that it’s that first tweet that got the authorities going, and indeed I see that he was arrested for inciting violence rather than “mere” hate speech.

Linehan said in an online article on Substack that his bail condition stipulates he is “not to go on Twitter” …

… [D]uring his police interview following the arrest, “I explained that the ‘punch’ tweet was a serious point made with a joke”, and that it was about “the height difference between men and women… and certainly not a call to violence”.

In the US, the crime of incitement has several elements that Linehan’s tweet lacks: “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.” Neither element is present; there is no “imminence” and his speech is not likely to produce such action. But he wasn’t arrested in the US, and Britain is different. Plus, in the US:

Mere advocacy of lawbreaking or violence remains protected speech as long as it is not intended to and likely to provoke immediate unlawful action.

Britain has some very twisted priorities about whom to arrest and for what reason. I’m in agreement with this statement:

Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch was critical of the arrest, saying: “Sending five officers to arrest a man for a tweet isn’t policing, it’s politics. Under Labour, we routinely see burglary, knife crime and assaults go unsolved, while resources are wasted on thought-policing.

“It’s time this government told the police their job is to protect the public, not monitor social media for hurty words. The Conservatives would stop this nonsense on day one and make public safety the first duty of policing, instead of pandering to fringe ideologies.

Ah, but the left believes speech is violence (if directed against one of their favored groups), and violence is mere speech (if committed by one of their favored groups).

Today is the 86th anniversary of the invasion of Poland

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve been thinking about September 1, 1939 quite a bit lately. The reason is that I’ve been watching YouTube videos in which Holocaust survivors describe their experiences. I plan to write more about those videos – I have a lot to say. But at this point I’ll just mention that many of them were Polish Jews, and they almost universally describe that day, mentioning that it was frightening but they believed – as did most Christian Poles – that the Polish army would handily defeat Germany (Polish propaganda had been saying this).

On the other hand, there had been Jewish German refugees fleeing to Poland after the Nazis took power in Germany but prior to September 1, 1939, and they had told a frightening story (although not one of genocide – yet). So the German invasion filled most of the Jews of Poland with dread, despite the sanguine predictions of the Polish government and press.

In fact, it was a nightmare for the Poles themselves, in addition to a nightmare for Polish Jewry. This was by design [emphasis mine]:

The result was the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 23, hastily signed so that Hitler could have his pact before his planned invasion of Poland. In the official agreement the Soviets promised not to aid Britain or France in the event of a war with Poland. However, the crucial part of the agreement was a secret protocol that reshaped the map of central Europe. According to this, Bessarabia, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and eastern Poland would become part of Stalin’s sphere of influence while Hitler would get all of western Poland. As Timothy Snyder put it, “the two regimes immediately found common ground in their mutual aspiration to destroy Poland.…Hitler saw Poland as the ‘unreal creation’ of the Treaty of Versailles, Molotov as its ‘ugly offspring.’” …

On August 22, just before the invasion, Hitler delivered a speech to his military commanders at Obersalzberg. In the speech, he said that the object of the war was to physically destroy the enemy. Men, women, and children of Polish descent or language were to be killed without pity. The campaign was to be carried out “with the greatest brutality and without mercy.” To that end, the Einsatzgruppen—SS death squads—and police battalions were formed to exterminate Poles who might oppose German rule. Lists were drawn up of prominent men and women who were to be tracked down and killed as soon as possible. Cities like Warsaw were eventually to be “cleansed” of their Jewish populations and the ethnic Polish population reduced to a small group of slave laborers. Hitler devised a monstrous plan of colonization based on extreme violence and murder; tragically, those plans would evolve into unimaginable crimes that would culminate in the creation of a new kind of industrial-scale killing: the extermination camp.

And on September 17, Stalin gobbled up the Eastern part of Poland – although in 1941 Germany took it all (Stalin got the last laugh on Poland after the war).

There’s much more to be said, but right now I also want to emphasize that although Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939, it wasn’t until Churchill became PM in May o 1940 that the true war against Germany began. However, tragically:

After World War II, it was discovered that Nazi Germany’s armed forces were vulnerable throughout the September Campaign. They had not yet reached full fighting strength and might have succumbed to a determined opponent, or at least suffered serious damage. At the Nuremberg trials, German military commander Alfred Jodl said that “if we did not collapse already in the year 1939 that was due only to the fact that during the Polish campaign, the approximately 110 French and British divisions in the West were held completely inactive against the 23 German divisions.” General Wilhelm Keitel stated: “We soldiers had always expected an attack by France during the Polish campaign, and were very surprised that nothing happened…. A French attack would have encountered only a German military screen, not a real defense.” According to General Siegfried Westphal, if the French had attacked in force in September 1939, the German army “could only have held out for one or two weeks.”

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) CBS does what it does best – deceptive editing.

CBS has a response that is 100% predictable:

“Secretary Noem’s ‘Face The Nation’ interview was edited for time and met all CBS News standards. The entire interview is publicly available on YouTube, and the full transcript was posted earlier this morning on CBSNews.com,” a CBS News spokesperson told Fox News Digital.

And the part you cut was completely random and arbitrary, right? And of course everybody watches or reads entire interviews.

(2) Scott Pressler warns that the 2025 elections will go poorly for Republicans if voters on the right fail to embrace and use early voting and mail-in voting. Off-year elections go to the motivated, and although I can’t imagine why the right wouldn’t be extremely motivated, the danger is that the left is far more motivated.

(3) Greta Thunberg’s latest pro-Palestinian publicity stunt is turned back by bad weather. Pity.

(4) The shootings in Chicago continue over the weekend as the mayor and governor take the bizarre anti-Trump stance of failing to support controlling crime and the apprehension of criminal illegal aliens.

(5) Ilhan Omar’s assests:

Rep. Ilhan Omar’s personal fortune exploded to upwards of $30 million in 2024, the Minnesota Democrat disclosed just months after telling the press it is “ridiculous” and “categorically false” to say she is worth millions of dollars.

Omar reported in her latest financial disclosure that she and her husband, former political consultant Tim Mynett, accumulated a net worth at the end of 2024 ranging from at least $6 million to $30 million. Their wealth is derived almost entirely from the value of Mynett’s ownership stake in his two companies that, together, were worth no more than $51,000 at the end of 2023. The exact value of Omar’s personal fortune at the end of 2024 is unclear—lawmakers disclose the value of their holdings and debts in ranges. Still, the figures in Omar’s latest disclosures show that her and her husband’s net worth skyrocketed by at least 3,500 percent in just one year.

Omar’s extraordinary accumulation of wealth in 2024 could raise uncomfortable questions for the Minnesota Democrat, who in February told Business Insider that she has been the subject of a “coordinated right-wing disinformation campaign” that falsely claims she’s worth millions of dollars. Omar said any insinuation that she’s worth more than a few thousand dollars was “ridiculous” and “categorically false.” She also took to X in February, challenging her followers to “maybe try checking my public financial statements and you will see I barely have thousands let alone millions.”

Happy Labor Day!

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a slightly edited version of a previous post.]

Labor Day is the bookend standing at the opposite end of summer from its holiday beginning, Memorial Day.

July Fourth is summer’s early peak, with the promise of long light-filled days ahead. But Labor Day is summer’s last gasp, the moment I dreaded as a child because it marked the end of vacation and the start of the school year. Spiffy new clothes, a shiny bookbag, freshly sharpened pencils, and the promise of the beautiful autumn leaves’ arrival were nice. But they couldn’t make up for the fact that a new school year was beginning. Where oh where had the summer gone?

And it goes even more quickly these days.

Here’s wishing you all a Happy Labor Day. Barbecues, picnics, the beach, just hanging out in your yard, whatever you desire and whatever you decide. And for the historically-minded among you, here’s some information on the origins of the holiday.

Songs with dance as metaphor

The New Neo Posted on by

There are tons of songs about dancing, for obvious reasons. But that’s not the subject matter of this post – songs about dance for the sake of dance. This is about songs that use dance as a larger metaphor for life or love.

Here are just a few:

Could I Have This Dance for the Rest of My Life
For a Dancer
Dance Me to the End of Love
Don’t Forget to Dance
I Hope You Dance
Dance With Me
Oh Very Young

One of the very very best dance-as-metaphor song is “The Dance” by Garth Brooks. Here he is at the beginning of his career. It’s very intense, especially the expression in his eyes:

The song’s lyrics have different meanings to the listeners. Some relate it to the pain of illness and death ending a happy relationship. Others (and I’m in this latter group) see it as describing a once-promising love gone sadly wrong, with all the pain and heartache that entails.

Brooks says it’s his favorite of all his songs, but you may be surprised that he didn’t write it. Here’s songwriter Tony Arata, who tells the story of writing the song here:

The theme – of deep appreciation for even a relationship that has an unhappy ending – is not uncommon in poetry and song. For an example of the latter, we have Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” which celebrates what Cohen called the broken Hallelujah:

There’s a blaze of light in every word
It doesn’t matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah …

… And even though it all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah.

Europeans aren’t happy about the “migrants” – plus they have other troubles

The New Neo Posted on by

From Victor Davis Hanson:

Mass protests are now common in Britain against the Labour Party’s open borders policies and generous welfare entitlements for immigrants who arrive illegally and without authentic “political refugee” status.

Greek officials, also swamped by illegal immigration, now cite President Donald Trump’s secure border policies as new models for their own.

The majority of European immigrants now come from majority-Muslim countries in the Middle East and North Africa. Yet many arrivals seem angrier at their newfound liberal hosts than at the dictatorships they fled back home.

Europe’s immigration policies will not work in a multi-ethnic democracy.

Hanson points out that Europe’s welfare states can no longer sustain benefits, their energy policies are damaging, they need to pay more for defense, and their “migrants” are not being forced to assimilate. A really toxic brew.

And yet – what will happen? Are many European countries reaching the point of active rebellion and revolt by what we might call the natives, plus those who emigrated there in order to be free of the constraints of their native third-world countries rather than to export them to Europe? Who will win, the elite internationalists or the proles?

On Candace Owens, Israel, and the Jews

The New Neo Posted on by

Although these days the majority of Jew-haters and Israel-haters are on the left, the left has no monopoly on it and there are some very vocal people on the right (or supposedly on the right) who share the sentiments and seem obsessed with expressing them. Anti-Semitism is an old hatred that springs from many sources and is a shape-shifter extraordinaire.

For example, there are the “influencers”:

Simon Plosker, editorial director at the HonestReporting media watchdog group, said that “when you look at the anti-Israel social media content of supposedly right-wing influencers like Jackson Hinkle or Candace Owens, there is barely any difference between them and the far left. And their antisemitism has become legitimized under the cover of hatred towards Israel.”

Candace Owens is one of the most flagrant of these, and I believe that she really does influence many people. Certainly on social media she has a large following. Owens is a convert to Catholicism, but it seems to be some strange sort variant that isn’t typical of the faith. European Christianity – Catholicism and some Protestant denominations such as Lutherans – has a lengthy and terrible history of Jew-hating and even violence against Jews, with the blood libel (Jews killing Christian children for ritual purposes) prominent in the propaganda. For many years, however, things have changed and Christians have become, for the most part, very supportive of Jews and Israel. Owens (and to a lesser extent, Tucker Carlson) goes against that trend and is one of the most virulent of online Jew-haters. She is also a conspiracy theorist extraordinaire.

It’s easy to find examples if you go to Owens’ X account, and although her statements have their own flavor some of them are indeed indistinguishable from those of the haters on the left. For example:

Gaza is a concentration camp where an open genocide is taking place. It has taken Goebbels levels of propaganda to try to convince the world it isn’t happening but it is. Just like Adolf Hitler, Bibi Netanyahu is an ethnocentric imperialist monster and we will make sure the world remembers what all of you supported when God has his vengeance.

Note the prediction of coming retribution by the deity towards Israel, combined with aspects of leftism (“imperialist monster”). Owens is – or was – a changer who started out on the left, but at the moment she seems to be in a world of her own, although she shares some of the “woke right’s” positions such as being anti-Ukraine.

In the same tweet I just quoted above, Owens goes on to add:

With enough time, I’m sure Hitler would have been very open to similarly running a sophisticated global blackmail ring with Jeffrey Epstein and perhaps would have even orchestrated the assasination [sic] of a sitting U.S. President or conducted a false flag or 2 to demand our allegiance.

Let me know how horrified you are by this comparison, and I’ll let you know how little we care. I will never stand with genocidal maniacs, who are committing an open holocaust and trying to usher in WW3, all while purporting to be eternal victims.

This is especially interesting in that it echoes Hitler’s political will, written shortly before his suicide. I’m referring in particular to this Jew-blaming from Hitler:

It is untrue that I or anyone else in Germany wanted war in 1939. It was wanted and provoked solely by international statesmen either of Jewish origin or working for Jewish interests. …

Centuries will go by but from the ruins of our towns and monuments, the hatred of those ultimately responsible will always grow anew against the people whom we have to thank for all this: international Jewry and its henchmen. …

I have left no one in doubt that if the people of Europe are once more treated as mere blocks of shares in the hands of these international money and finance conspirators, then the sole responsibility for the massacre must be borne by the true culprits: the Jews.

We also have this sort of thing from Owens:

What’s going on? Aside from the age-old attraction of anti-Semitism? Well, Owens has her finger on something when in another tweet she says “victim fatigue” about Jews. Never mind that they have been victims for longer and worse than any other group on earth; the Candace Owens of the world are tired of hearing it. It’s “blame the victim” on steroids. In addition, there’s abysmal ignorance of history, which is rampant, plus a good dose of Holocaust denial.

But most of all it’s the thrill of belonging to a group that thinks it has the real scoop. Everyone else is lying, it is they who have sussed out the truth. The media lies. Teachers lie. Politicians lie. For Owens it also has a large dose of ancient Christian Jew-hatred which fortunately has gone out of style for most Christians, as well as her tendency to try to shock by espousing non-mainstream ideas.

I think this comment is insightful:

… [S]he takes contrarianism to its radical extreme. She takes it to its radical extreme because she was unnecessarily attacked when she had sensible positions. She’s rebelling. Keep in mind she was an Occupy Wall Street Socialist at one point.

And this one, which is why I pay attention to her:

As the article demonstrates, she’s been consumed by a whole variety of conspiracy theories, especially the anti-Semitic ones, but she hasn’t lost the charisma that made her eminently watchable. She has five million followers and over two million subscribers, who are, as one can see from the comments they leave, are completely on board with her beliefs.

Here’s her reaction to the church shooting in Minneapolis, which demonstrates some of her conspiracy theories:

Lots of commenters there call her insane. I doubt it bothers her in the least. She’s found a niche, and for the moment she’s staying there and unfortunately has many followers. You may think I’m paying too much attention to her, but social media amplifies this sort of message immeasurably, and it is poisonous.

Robert Frost on justice and mercy

The New Neo Posted on by

Recently commenter “Selfy” linked to this article and offered the following quote from it:

Mr. Rigney echoes this critique of systemic racism but reserves most of his ire for feminism, which he blames for many of empathy’s ills. Because women are the more empathetic sex, he argues, they often take empathy too far.

He found an encapsulation of this theory at Mr. Trump’s inaugural prayer service, where a woman preached from the pulpit. During a sermon that went viral, Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde pleaded with the Republican president to “have mercy” on immigrants and LGBTQ+ people, prompting a conservative backlash.

“Budde’s attempt to ‘speak truth to power’ is a reminder that feminism is a cancer that enables the politics of empathetic manipulation,” Mr. Rigney wrote for the evangelical World magazine.

Which immediately reminded me of a post I wrote back in 2019. The following is a repeat of that post.

Anyone who’s read this blog for a while is well aware of how much I admire both the poetry and the thought of Robert Frost.

For example, there’s this [in the excerpt that follows, Frost uses “justice” in the traditional sense rather than in the leftist “social justice” sense]:

Frost was convinced that the conflict between justice and mercy in human affairs is an eternal and universal moral problem of humanity, and not merely a contemporary political partisan concern…

With these facts in mind Frost’s criticism of the New Deal as “nothing but an outbreak of mass mercy,” is clearly more than mere partisan politics. In 1936, in the midst of attacks on [his collection of poetry] A Further Range by the political Left, Frost wrote to Ferner Nuhn, a young New Deal acquaintance and friend of Henry Wallace, that “strict justice is basic” for a free society, and freedom implied that some people succeeded and others failed. The winners reaped the rewards of their talents and efforts, but what about the losers? Frost acknowledged that government “must do something for the losers. It must show them mercy. Justice first and mercy second. The trouble with some of your crowd is that it would have mercy first. The struggle to win is still the best tonic. . . . Mercy . . . is another word for socialism.” Frost believed that what was commonly called “distributive justice,” the attempt to spread the wealth of society to the masses, through graduated in-come taxes and other such devices, was really distributive mercy misnamed. Frost drew out for Ferner Nuhn the logical consequences of a system of socialistic mercy:

“The question of the moment in politics will always be one of proportion between mercy and justice. You have to remember the people who accept mercy have to pay for it. Mercy means protection. And there is no protection without direction. A person completely protected would have to be completely directed. And he would be a slave. That’s where socialism pure brings you out.”

The Ruthless podcast: Mamdani on how to deal with escalating altercations

The New Neo Posted on by

This is astounding (the clip I’ve selected is about three minutes long):

Those instructions read something like the advice a therapist might give to deal with a verbal spat between friends or acquaintances. They would be absurd to use in a violent situation. Anyone recommending such a thing is either divorced from reality or malevolent, or both.

Were these recommendations really meant to deal with criminals or others threatening violence? Finding a legible copy of the instructions wasn’t easy, but I found this. The recommendations discussed in the video are under a heading that reads, “Are you encountering a conflict that appears to be escalating?” And “call the police” is certainly not one of the choices for a response. The document is put out by Mamdani’s Public Safety Team, and is addressed to small businesses.