Measures to avoid offense or disadvantage

Political correctness (adjectivally: politically correct; commonly abbreviated PC) is a term used to describe language,[1][2][3] policies,[4] or measures that are intended to avoid offense or disadvantage to members of particular groups in society.[5][6][7] Since the late 1980s, the term has been used to describe a preference for inclusive language and avoidance of language or behavior that can be seen as excluding, marginalizing, or insulting to groups of people disadvantaged or discriminated against, particularly groups defined by ethnicity, sex, gender, or sexual orientation. In public discourse and the media,[4][8][9] the term is generally used as a pejorative with an implication that these policies are excessive or unwarranted.[10][11][12]

The phrase politically correct first appeared in the 1930s, when was used to describe dogmatic adherence to ideology in authoritarian regimes, such as Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.[5] Early usage of the term politically correct by leftists in the 1970s and 1980s was as self-critical satire;[8] usage was ironic, rather than a name for a serious political movement.[13][14][15] It was considered an in-joke among leftists used to satirise those who were too rigid in their adherence to political orthodoxy.[16] The modern pejorative usage of the term emerged from conservative criticism of the New Left in the late 20th century, with many describing it as a form of censorship.[17]

Commentators on the political left in the United States contend that conservatives use the concept of political correctness to downplay and divert attention from substantively discriminatory behavior against disadvantaged groups.[18][19][20] They also argue that the political right enforces its own forms of political correctness to suppress criticism of its favored constituencies and ideologies.[21][22][23] In the United States, the term has played a major role in the culture war between liberals and conservatives.[24]

In the early-to-mid 20th century, the phrase politically correct was used to describe strict adherence to a range of ideological orthodoxies within politics. In 1934, The New York Times reported that Nazi Germany was granting reporting permits "only to pure 'Aryans' whose opinions are politically correct".[5]

The term political correctness first appeared in MarxistLeninist vocabulary following the Russian Revolution of 1917. At that time, it was used to describe strict adherence to the policies and principles of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, that is, the party line.[25] Later in the United States, the phrase came to be associated with accusations of dogmatism in debates between communists and socialists. According to American educator Herbert Kohl, writing about debates in New York in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

The term "politically correct" was used disparagingly, to refer to someone whose loyalty to the CP line overrode compassion, and led to bad politics. It was used by Socialists against Communists, and was meant to separate out Socialists who believed in egalitarian moral ideas from dogmatic Communists who would advocate and defend party positions regardless of their moral substance.

In the 1970s, the American New Left began using the term politically correct.[13] In the essay The Black Woman: An Anthology (1970), Toni Cade Bambara said that "a man cannot be politically correct and a [male] chauvinist, too." William Safire records this as the first use in the typical modern sense.[26] The term "political correctness" was believed to have been revived by the New Left through familiarity in the West with Mao's Little Red Book, in which Mao stressed holding to the correct party line. The term rapidly began to be used by the New Left in an ironic or self deprecating sense.[27]

Thereafter, the term was often used as self-critical satire. Debra L. Shultz said that "throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the New Left, feminists, and progressives... used their term 'politically correct' ironically, as a guard against their own orthodoxy in social change efforts."[8][13][14] PC is used in the comic book Merton of the Movement, by Bobby London, which was followed by the term ideologically sound, in the comic strips of Bart Dickon.[13][28] In her essay "Toward a feminist Revolution" (1992) Ellen Willis said: "In the early eighties, when feminists used the term 'political correctness', it was used to refer sarcastically to the anti-pornography movement's efforts to define a 'feminist sexuality'."[15]

Stuart Hall suggests one way in which the original use of the term may have developed into the modern one:

According to one version, political correctness actually began as an in-joke on the left: radical students on American campuses acting out an ironic replay of the Bad Old Days BS (Before the Sixties) when every revolutionary groupuscule had a party line about everything. They would address some glaring examples of sexist or racist behaviour by their fellow students in imitation of the tone of voice of the Red Guards or Cultural Revolution Commissar: "Not very 'politically correct', Comrade!"[16]

The term probably entered use in the modern sense in the United Kingdom around 1975.[12][clarification needed]

Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, a book first published in 1987,[29] heralded a debate about "political correctness" in American higher education in the 1980s and 1990s.[8][30][31] Professor of English literary and cultural studies at CMU Jeffrey J. Williams wrote that the "assault on ... political correctness that simmered through the Reagan years, gained bestsellerdom with Bloom's Closing of the American Mind."[32] According to Z.F. Gamson, Bloom's book "attacked the faculty for 'political correctness'".[33] Prof. of Social Work at CSU Tony Platt says the "campaign against 'political correctness'" was launched by Bloom's book in 1987.[34]

An October 1990 New York Times article by Richard Bernstein is credited with popularizing the term.[35][36][37][38][39] At this time, the term was mainly being used within academia: "Across the country the term p.c., as it is commonly abbreviated, is being heard more and more in debates over what should be taught at the universities".[40] Nexis citations in "arcnews/curnews" reveal only seventy total citations in articles to "political correctness" for 1990; but one year later, Nexis records 1,532 citations, with a steady increase to more than 7,000 citations by 1994.[38][41] In May 1991, The New York Times had a follow-up article, according to which the term was increasingly being used in a wider public arena:

What has come to be called "political correctness," a term that began to gain currency at the start of the academic year last fall, has spread in recent months and has become the focus of an angry national debate, mainly on campuses, but also in the larger arenas of American life.

The previously obscure far-left term became common currency in the lexicon of the conservative social and political challenges against progressive teaching methods and curriculum changes in the secondary schools and universities of the U.S.[10][43][44][45][46][47] Policies, behavior, and speech codes that the speaker or the writer regarded as being the imposition of a liberal orthodoxy, were described and criticized as "politically correct".[18] In May 1991, at a commencement ceremony for a graduating class of the University of Michigan, then U.S. President George H. W. Bush used the term in his speech: "The notion of political correctness has ignited controversy across the land. And although the movement arises from the laudable desire to sweep away the debris of racism and sexism and hatred, it replaces old prejudice with new ones. It declares certain topics off-limits, certain expression off-limits, even certain gestures off-limits."[48][49][50]

After 1991, its use as a pejorative phrase became widespread amongst conservatives in the US.[10] It became a key term encapsulating conservative concerns about the left in cultural and political debates extending beyond academia. Two articles on the topic in late 1990 in Forbes and Newsweek both used the term "thought police" in their headlines, exemplifying the tone of the new usage, but it was Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (1991) which "captured the press's imagination".[10] Similar critical terminology was used by D'Souza for a range of policies in academia around victimization, supporting multiculturalism through affirmative action, sanctions against anti-minority hate speech, and revising curricula (sometimes referred to as "canon busting").[10][a][failed verification] These trends were at least in part a response to multiculturalism and the rise of identity politics, with movements such as feminism, gay rights movements and ethnic minority movements. That response received funding from conservative foundations and think tanks such as the John M. Olin Foundation, which funded several books such as D'Souza's.[8][18]

Herbert Kohl, in 1992, commented that a number of neoconservatives who promoted the use of the term "politically correct" in the early 1990s were former Communist Party members, and, as a result, familiar with the Marxist use of the phrase. He argued that in doing so, they intended "to insinuate that egalitarian democratic ideas are actually authoritarian, orthodox, and Communist-influenced, when they oppose the right of people to be racist, sexist, and homophobic".[4]

During the 1990s, conservative and right-wing politicians, think tanks, and speakers adopted the phrase as a pejorative descriptor of their ideological enemies, especially in the context of the culture wars about language and the content of public-school curricula. Roger Kimball, in Tenured Radicals, endorsed Frederick Crews's view that PC is best described as "Left Eclecticism", a term defined by Kimball as "any of a wide variety of anti-establishment modes of thought from structuralism and poststructuralism, deconstruction, and Lacanian analyst to feminist, homosexual, black, and other patently political forms of criticism".[53][32]

Liberal commentators have argued that the conservatives and reactionaries who used the term did so in an effort to divert political discussion away from the substantive matters of resolving societal discrimination,[54][55][56] such as racial, social class, gender, and legal inequality, against people whom conservatives do not consider part of the social mainstream.[8][19][57] Jan Narveson wrote that "that phrase was born to live between scare-quotes: it suggests that the operative considerations in the area so called are merely political, steamrolling the genuine reasons of principle for which we ought to be acting..."[9] Commenting in 2001, one such British journalist,[58][59] Polly Toynbee, said "the phrase is an empty, right-wing smear, designed only to elevate its user",[60] and in 2010 she wrote "the phrase 'political correctness' was born as a coded cover for all who still want to say Paki, spastic, or queer".[61] Another British journalist, Will Hutton,[62][63][64][65] wrote in 2001:[66]

Political correctness is one of the brilliant tools that the American Right developed in the mid1980s, as part of its demolition of American liberalism.... What the sharpest thinkers on the American Right saw quickly was that by declaring war on the cultural manifestations of liberalism by levelling the charge of "political correctness" against its exponents they could discredit the whole political project.

Glenn Loury wrote in 1994 that to address the subject of "political correctness" when power and authority within the academic community is being contested by parties on either side of that issue, is to invite scrutiny of one's arguments by would-be "friends" and "enemies". Combatants from the left and the right will try to assess whether a writer is "for them" or "against them".[67] Geoffrey Hughes suggested that debate over political correctness concerns whether changing language actually solves political and social problems, with critics viewing it less about solving problems than imposing censorship, intellectual intimidation and demonstrating the moral purity of those who practice it. Hughes also argues that political correctness tends to be pushed by a minority rather than an organic form of language change.[68]

The modern pejorative usage of the term emerged from conservative criticism of the New Left in the late 20th century. This usage was popularized by a number of articles in The New York Times and other media throughout the 1990s,[35][36][37][40][42][69] and was widely used in the debate surrounding Allan Bloom's 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind.[8][29][30] The term gained further currency in response to Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals (1990),[8][18][53] and conservative author Dinesh D'Souza's 1991 book Illiberal Education.[8][10][18][70] Supporters of politically correct language have been pejoratively referred to as the "language police".[71]

Modern debate on the term was sparked by conservative critiques of perceived liberal bias in academia and education,[8] and conservatives have since used it as a major line of attack.[10] Similarly, a common conservative criticism of higher education in the United States is that the political views of teaching staff are more liberal than those of the general population, and that this contributes to an atmosphere of political correctness.[72][non-primary source needed] William Deresiewicz defines political correctness as an attempt to silence "unwelcome beliefs and ideas", arguing that it is largely the result of for-profit education, as campus faculty and staff are wary of angering students upon whose fees they depend.[73][non-primary source needed]

Preliminary research published in 2020 indicated that students at a large U.S. public university generally felt instructors were open-minded and encouraged free expression of diverse viewpoints; nonetheless, most students worried about the consequences of voicing their political opinions, with "[a]nxieties about expressing political views and self-censorship ... more prevalent among students who identify as conservative".[74][75]

Some conservative commentators in the West argue that "political correctness" and multiculturalism are part of a conspiracy with the ultimate goal of undermining Judeo-Christian values. This theory, which holds that political correctness originates from the critical theory of the Frankfurt School as part of a conspiracy that its proponents call "Cultural Marxism".[76][77] The theory originated with Michael Minnicino's 1992 essay "New Dark Age: Frankfurt School and 'Political Correctness'", published in a Lyndon LaRouche movement journal.[78] In 2001, conservative commentator Patrick Buchanan wrote in The Death of the West that "political correctness is cultural Marxism", and that "its trademark is intolerance".[79]

In the US, the term has been widely used in books and journals, but in Britain the usage has been confined mainly to the popular press.[80] Many such authors and popular-media figures, particularly on the right, have used the term to criticize what they see as bias in the media.[9][18] William McGowan argues that journalists get stories wrong or ignore stories worthy of coverage, because of what McGowan perceives to be their liberal ideologies and their fear of offending minority groups.[81] Robert Novak, in his essay "Political Correctness Has No Place in the Newsroom", used the term to blame newspapers for adopting language use policies that he thinks tend to excessively avoid the appearance of bias. He argued that political correctness in language not only destroys meaning but also demeans the people who are meant to be protected.[82][83][84]

Authors David Sloan and Emily Hoff claim that in the US, journalists shrug off concerns about political correctness in the newsroom, equating the political correctness criticisms with the old "liberal media bias" label.[85] According to author John Wilson, left-wing forces of "political correctness" have been blamed for unrelated censorship, with Time citing campaigns against violence on network television in the US as contributing to a "mainstream culture [that] has become cautious, sanitized, scared of its own shadow" because of "the watchful eye of the p.c. police", protests and advertiser boycotts targeting TV shows are generally organized by right-wing religious groups campaigning against violence, sex, and depictions of homosexuality on television.[86]

Political correctness is often satirized, for example in The PC Manifesto (1992) by Saul Jerushalmy and Rens Zbignieuw X,[87] and Politically Correct Bedtime Stories (1994) by James Finn Garner, which presents fairy tales re-written from an exaggerated politically correct perspective. In 1994, the comedy film PCU took a look at political correctness on a college campus. Other examples include the television program Politically Incorrect, George Carlin's "Euphemisms" routine,[citation needed] and The Politically Correct Scrapbook.[88] The popularity of the South Park cartoon program led to the creation of the term "South Park Republican" by Andrew Sullivan, and later the book South Park Conservatives by Brian C. Anderson.[89] In its Season 19 (2015), South Park introduced the character PC Principal, who embodies the principle, to poke fun at the principle of political correctness.[90][91]

The Colbert Report's host Stephen Colbert often talked, satirically, about the "PC Police".[92][93]

Groups who oppose certain generally accepted scientific views about evolution, second-hand tobacco smoke, AIDS, global warming, race and other politically contentious scientific matters have used the term "political correctness" to describe what they view as unwarranted rejection of their perspective on these issues by a scientific community that they believe has been corrupted by liberal politics.[94]

"Political correctness" is a label typically used to describe liberal or left-wing terms and actions but rarely used for analogous attempts to mold language and behavior on the right.[95] In 2012, economist Paul Krugman wrote that "the big threat to our discourse is right-wing political correctness, which unlike the liberal version has lots of power and money behind it. And the goal is very much the kind of thing Orwell tried to convey with his notion of Newspeak: to make it impossible to talk, and possibly even think, about ideas that challenge the established order."[23][96] Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute referred to the right's own version of political correctness as "patriotic correctness".[97]

The term "politically correct", with its suggestion of Stalinist orthodoxy, is spoken more with irony and disapproval than with reverence. But, across the country the term "P.C.", as it is commonly abbreviated, is being heard more and more in debates over what should be taught at the universities.

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Political correctness - Wikipedia

Organised child sexual abuse scandal in Rotherham, England between the 1980s and 2013

Rotherham town centre, March 2010

The Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal consisted of the organised child sexual abuse that occurred in the town of Rotherham, South Yorkshire, Northern England from the late 1980s until the 2010s and the failure of local authorities to act on reports of the abuse throughout most of that period.[8] Researcher Angie Heal, who was hired by local officials and warned them about child exploitation occurring between 2002 and 2007, has since described it as the "biggest child protection scandal in UK history". Evidence of the abuse was first noted in the early 1990s, when care home managers investigated reports that children in their care were being picked up by taxi drivers. From at least 2001, multiple reports passed names of alleged perpetrators, several from one family, to the police and Rotherham Council. The first group conviction took place in 2010, when five British-Pakistani men were convicted of sexual offences against girls aged 1216. From January 2011 Andrew Norfolk of The Times pressed the issue, reporting in 2012 that the abuse in the town was widespread and that the police and council had known about it for over ten years.[a]

The Times articles, along with the 2012 trial of the Rochdale child sex abuse ring, prompted the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee to conduct hearings. Following this and further articles from Norfolk, Rotherham Council commissioned an independent inquiry led by Professor Alexis Jay. In August 2014 the Jay report concluded that an estimated 1,400 children[15] had been sexually abused in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013, predominantly by British-Pakistani men.[13] British Asian girls in Rotherham also suffered abuse, but a fear of shame and dishonour made them reluctant to report the abuse to authorities. A "common thread" was that taxi drivers had been picking the children up for sex from care homes and schools.[b] The abuse included gang rape, forcing children to watch rape, dousing them with petrol and threatening to set them on fire, threatening to rape their mothers and younger sisters, as well as trafficking them to other towns. There were pregnancies (one at age 12), pregnancy terminations, miscarriages, babies raised by their mothers, in addition to babies removed, causing further trauma.[22][23]

The failure to address the abuse was attributed to a combination of factors revolving around race, class, religion and gendercontemptuous and sexist attitudes toward the mostly working-class victims; lack of a child-centred focus; a desire to protect the town's reputation; and lack of training and resources.[8]

Rotherham Council's chief executive, its director of children's services, as well as the Police and Crime Commissioner for South Yorkshire Police all resigned.[26] The Independent Police Complaints Commission and the National Crime Agency both opened inquiries, the latter expected to last eight years.[27][28] The government appointed Louise Casey to conduct an inspection of Rotherham Council. Published in January 2015, the Casey report concluded that the council had a bullying, sexist culture of covering up information and silencing whistleblowers; it was "not fit for purpose". In February 2015 the government replaced the council's elected officers with a team of five commissioners.[31] As a result of new police inquiries, 19 men and two women were convicted in 2016 and 2017 of sexual offences in the town dating back to the late 1980s; one of the ringleaders was jailed for 35 years.[32]

With a population of 109,691, according to the 2011 census55,751 female and 24,783 aged 017Rotherham is the largest town within the South Yorkshire Metropolitan Borough of Rotherham.[33][c] Around 11.9per cent of the town belonged to black and minority ethnic groups,[33] compared to eight per cent of the borough (population 258,400). Three percent of the borough belonged to the Pakistani-heritage community. There were 68,574 Christians in the town in 2011, 23,909 with no religion, 8,682 Muslims, 7,527 not stated, and a small number of Hindus, Sikhs, Jews and Buddhists.[33] Unemployment in the borough was above the national average, and 23 per cent of homes consisted of social housing.

The area has traditionally been a Labour stronghold, and until Sarah Champion was elected in 2012 it had never had a female MP.[36] The council was similarly male-dominated; one Labour insider told The Guardian in 2012: "The Rotherham political class is male, male, male."[37] In May 2014 there were 63 elected members on Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council: 57 Labour, four Conservatives, one UKIP and one Independent. The elections in August that year saw a swing to UKIP: 49 Labour, 10 UKIP, 2 Conservatives and 2 Independents. The government disbanded the council in 2015 after the Casey report and replaced it with a team of five commissioners.[38]

The term child sexual exploitation (CSE) was first used in 2009 in a Department for Education document.[39] Intended to replace the term child prostitution, which implied a level of consent, CSE is a form of child sexual abuse in which children are offered somethingmoney, drugs, alcohol, food, a place to stay, or even just affectionin exchange for sexual activity. Violence and intimidation are common. Adele Gladman and Angie Heal, authors of early reports on the Rotherham abuse, argue that describing vaginal, oral and anal rape, murder and attempted murder as "exploitation" does not help people understand the seriousness of the crimes.

CSE includes online grooming and localised grooming, formerly known as on-street grooming. Localised grooming involves a group of abusers targeting vulnerable children in a public place, offering them sweets, alcohol, drugs and takeaway food in exchange for sex. The targets can include children in the care of the local authority; in Rotherham, one third of the targeted children were previously known to social services.

According to the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee in 2013, the first contact might be made by other children, who hand the target over to an older man. One of the adult perpetrators becomes the "boyfriend", but the girl is used for sex by the larger group and comes to view this as the norm. The abuse can involve being gang raped by dozens of men during one event. Victims are often trafficked to other towns, where sexual access to the child might be "sold" to other groups.[d] According to one victim, the perpetrators prefer children aged 1214. As they get older, the group loses interest and may expect the child to supply younger children in exchange for continued access to the group, on which the child has come to rely for drugs, alcohol, a social life, "affection" or even a home.

The earliest reports of localised grooming in Rotherham date to the early 1990s, when several managers of local children's homes set up the "taxi driver group" to investigate reports that taxis driven by Pakistani men[46] were arriving at care homes to take the children away. The police apparently declined to act.

In 1997 Rotherham Council created a local youth project, Risky Business, to work with girls and women aged 1125 thought to be at risk of sexual exploitation on the streets.[48] Jayne Senior, awarded an MBE in the 2016 Birthday Honours for her role in uncovering the abuse, began working for Risky Business as a coordinator around July 1999.[50] The users were overwhelmingly white girls: of the 268 who used the project from March 2001 to March 2002, 244 were white, 22 were British-Asian, and 2 were black.

Senior began to find evidence around 2001 of what appeared to be a localised-grooming network. Most Risky Business clients had previously come from Sheffield, which had a red-light district. Now the girls were younger and came from Rotherham. Girls as young as 10 were being befriended, perhaps by children their own age, before being passed to older men who would rape them and become their "boyfriends". Many of the girls were from troubled families, but not all. The children were given alcohol and drugs, then told they had to repay the "debt" by having sex with other men. The perpetrators set about obtaining personal information about the girls and their familieswhere their parents worked, for exampledetails that were used to threaten the girls if they tried to withdraw. Windows at family homes were smashed; threats were made to rape mothers and younger sisters. The children came to believe that the only way to keep their families safe was to cooperate.[e][53]

One girl who came to the attention of Risky Business was repeatedly raped from age 1315, and believed her mother would be the next victim: "They used to follow my mum because they used to know when she went shopping, what time she had been shopping, where she had gone."[54] A 15-year-old was told she was "one bullet" away from death. Girls were doused in petrol and told they were about to die. When she told her "pimp" that she was pregnant and did not know who the father was, one 15-year-old was beaten unconscious with a clawhammer. A 12-year-old with a 24-year-old "boyfriend" had a mother who invited the perpetrators into the family home, where the girl would give the men oral sex for 10 cigarettes.

According to Senior, Risky Business ended up with so much information about the perpetrators that the police suggested she start forwarding it to an electronic dropbox, "Box Five", on the South Yorkshire Police computer network. They reportedly told her this would protect the identity of Risky Business's sources. She learned later that the police had not read the reports she had left there, and it apparently could not be accessed by other forces.[53]

Risky Business was seen as a "nuisance"[60][61] and shut down by the council[62][63] in 2011.[64]

The Jay inquiry estimated that there may be 1,400 victims of diverse ethnic backgrounds.[f]

The report stated that "there is no simple link between race and child sexual exploitation", and cited a 2013 report by Muslim Women's Network UK of British Asian girls being abused across the country in situations that mirrored the abuse in Rotherham.[g][67] According to the group, Asian victims may be particularly vulnerable to threats of bringing shame and dishonour on their families,[68] and may have believed that reporting the abuse would be an admission that they had violated their Islamic beliefs.[69][70] The Jay report also noted that one of the local Pakistani women's groups had described Pakistani girls being targeted by Pakistani taxi drivers and landlords, but they feared reporting to the police out of concerns for their marriage prospects. The report stated that "the under-reporting of exploitation and abuse in minority ethnic communities" should be addressed.[h]

The Jay report "found no evidence of children's social care staff being influenced by concerns about the ethnic origins of suspected perpetrators when dealing with individual child protection cases, including CSE.

In 2000 Adele Weir (later Gladman), a Yorkshire solicitor, was hired by Rotherham Council as a research and development officer on a Home Office Crime Reduction Programme pilot study, "Tackling Prostitution: What Works".[73] A section of the study was devoted to "young people and prostitution", and three townsBristol, Sheffield and Rotherhamwere to be highlighted in that section. Weir was employed to write the report on Rotherham. Part of her project's aim was: "Collection of information and evidence about men allegedly involved in coercing young women into prostitution with which it might be possible for the police to pursue investigations and/or prosecutions."[76]

Researchers at the University of Bedfordshire, including the social scientist Margaret Melrose, were involved as Home Office evaluators.[77] Weir's line manager was the manager of Risky Business, and she was placed in the Risky Business offices in Rotherham's International Centre, where she worked with Jayne Senior. According to Weir, she encountered "poor professional practice from an early stage" from the council and police; child protection issues were, in her view, "disregarded, dismissed or minimized".

In response to a complaint from police that evidence of child abuse in Rotherham was anecdotal, Weir compiled a 10-page mapping exercise in 2001 showing what appeared to be a local abuse network. In evidence to the Home Affairs Committee in 2014, she wrote that she had found "a small number of suspected abusers who were well known to all significant services in Rotherham." Using material obtained by Risky Business, and from health services, social services, police records, a homelessness project, and substance-misuse services, Weir's report included names of suspects, the registration numbers of cars used to transport the girls, the suspects' links to local businesses and to people outside the area, and the relationships between the suspects and the girls. The suspects included members of the Hussain family, thought to be among the network's ringleaders, who were jailed in 2016. Weir estimated at that point that there were 270 victims.[85]

Weir's report for the Home Office evaluators linked 54 abused children to the Hussain family, as of October 2001. Eighteen children had named one of those men, Arshid Hussain (then around 25), as their "boyfriend", and several had become pregnant.[87] One of the 18 girls14 years old at the timegot pregnant twice. In 2014 she told Panorama that social workers had expressed concern about Hussain being around a baby because of his history of violence, but had not, according to the victim, expressed the same concern for her; she told Panorama that they maintained her relationship with him was consensual.[88] (In February 2016 Arshid Hussain was convicted of multiple rapes and jailed for 35 years.)[32]

The Weir report continued that members of the family were "alleged to be responsible for much of the violent crime and drug dealing in the town". They used untraceable mobile phones, the report said, had access to expensive cars, were linked to a taxi firm, and may have been involved in bed-and-breakfast hotels that were used by social services for emergency accommodation. Several girls sent to those hotels had complained of being offered money, as soon as they arrived, if they would have sex with several men. Other girls were targeted at train and bus stations.

Weir handed her report to a South Yorkshire Police inspector; the only feedback was that it was "unhelpful". According to the Jay report, one incident was, for Weir, the "final straw". A victim decided to file a complaint with the police. The perpetrators had smashed her parents' windows and broken her brothers' legs to stop her from reporting the rapes. Weir took her to the police station, but while there the victim received a text from the perpetrator to say he had her 11-year-old sister with him, and it was "your choice". This led the victim to believe someone had told the perpetrator she was at the police station, and she decided not to proceed with the complaint. Following this, with the consent of her manager, Weir wrote in October 2001 to Mike Hedges, the Chief Constable of South Yorkshire Police, and to Christine Burbeary, the District Commander. The letter said:

I have been visiting agencies, encouraging them to relay information to the police. Their responses have been identicalthey have ceased passing on information as they perceive this to be a waste of time. Parents also have ceased to make missing person reports, a precursor to any child abduction investigation, as the police response is often so inappropriate.... Children are being left at risk and their abusers unapprehended.

The letter was not well received by the council or police.[95] During a meeting at Rotherham police station with senior police and council officials, they seemed incensed that Weir had written to the Chief Constable. Jayne Senior, who was present, said Weir was subjected to a "tirade that lasted I don't know how long". According to Weir, at some point after this an official warned her against mentioning Asian men:

She said you must never refer to that again. You must never refer to Asian men. And her other response was to book me on a two-day ethnicity and diversity course to raise my awareness of ethnic issues.[85]

At their request, Weir sent her data to the Home Office evaluators in Bedfordshire in April 2002. That Weir did this apparently upset the Risky Business manager. On or around Monday, 18 April 2002, when she arrived at work, Weir discovered that over the weekend her Home Office pilot data had been removed from the filing cabinets in the Risky Business office.[i]

Weir said that the password-protected office computer had also been accessed. According to Weir's evidence to the Home Affairs Committee, documents had been deleted, and someone had created, on the computer, the minutes of meetings that Weir had purportedly attended, which showed her agreeing to certain conditions, such as not submitting data to Home Office evaluators without her line manager's consent. Weir told the committee that she had not agreed to those conditions or attended any such meeting; one of the meetings had taken place while she was on holiday overseas.

Weir was told that social services, the police and education staff had met over the weekend, and had decided that Risky Business staff were "exceeding [their] roles". Weir was suspended for having included in her report data from confidential minutes, an "act of gross misconduct"; she managed to negotiate a return to work by demonstrating that it was her manager who had passed those minutes to the Home Office evaluators. She was told she would no longer have access to Risky Business data, meetings, or the girls, and in June 2002 she was asked to amend her report to "anonymise individuals and institutions and only include facts and evidence that you are able to substantiate". The Jay report found the secrecy surrounding the report and the treatment of Weir "deeply troubling": "If the senior people concerned had paid more attention to the content of the report, more might have been done to help children who were being violently exploited and abused."[109]

In 20022007 South Yorkshire Police hired Angie Heal, a strategic drugs analyst, to carry out research on drug use and supply in the area. Located in the drug strategy unit with two police officers, Heal wrote several reports during this period. During her research in 2002 into the local supply of crack cocaine, she first encountered examples of organised child sexual abuse, and consulted Jayne Senior of Risky Business and Anne Lucas, the child exploitation service officer in Sheffield. Lucas explained that part of the grooming process was to give the children drugs.

Heal's first report in 2002 recommended dealing with the child-abuse rings; if the evidence needed to prosecute the men for sex offences was lacking, they could be prosecuted for drugs offences instead, thereby keeping the children safe and getting the drugs off the street. Heal wrote in 2017 that her report was widely read, but she "could not believe the complete lack of interest" in the links she had provided between the local drug trade and child abuse.

Heal decided to continue researching the issue and included CSE in her bi-annual intelligence briefings. While Heal was preparing her second report, Sexual Exploitation, Drug Use and Drug Dealing: Current Situation in South Yorkshire (2003), Jayne Senior secretly shared with her Adele Weir's Home Office report from 2002. Heal wrote that she actually felt scared after she had read it, given the level of detail, the lack of interest, and the sidelining of Weir.

Heal's 2003 report noted that Rotherham had a "significant number of girls and some boys who are being sexually exploited"; that the victims were being gang raped, kidnapped and subjected to other violence; that a significant number had become pregnant, and were depressed, angry and self-harming; and that Risky Business had identified four of the perpetrators as brothers. Heal created two versions of her report. One was for wider distribution among officials. The second, for the police alone, contained the names of the perpetrators, obtained from Risky Business.[117]

In 2005 a new department of children and young people's services was created, with Councillor Shaun Wright appointed cabinet member for the department,[118] and in March 2006 a conference was held in Rotherham, "Every Child Matters, But Do They Know it?", to discuss children's sexual exploitation. Heal's third report, Violence and Gun Crime: Links with Sexual Exploitation, Prostitution and Drug Markets in South Yorkshire (2006), noted that the situation was continuing and involved "systematic physical and sexual violence against young women". The victims were being trafficked to other towns, and the violence used was "very severe". If the girls protested, the perpetrators threatened to involve the girls' younger sisters, friends and family. There had also been an increase in reports of the perpetrators being seen with guns.

Heal wrote that white girls were the main victims, targeted from age 11; the average age was 1213. British-Asian girls were also targeted, but their abuse was hidden, not part of the localised-grooming scene. The most significant group of perpetrators of localised grooming were British-Asian men. Several employees dealing with the issue believed that the perpetrators' ethnicity was preventing the abuse from being addressed, Heal wrote. One worker said that British-Asian taxi drivers in Rotherham had been involved for 30 years, but in the 1970s the crimes had not been organised. Heal added that a high-profile publicity campaign was underway about the trafficking of women from Eastern Europe, with posters in Doncaster Sheffield Airport, while the issue of local trafficking "appears to be largely ignored". The report recommended: "More emphasis should be placed on tackling the abusers, rather than the abused."

Heal sent her 2006 report to everyone involved in the Rotherham Drugs Partnership, and to the South Yorkshire Police district commander and chief superintendents.[118][48] Shortly after this, according to the Jay report, Risky Business's funding was increased, and the council's Safeguarding Children Board approved an "Action Plan for responding to the sexual exploitation of children and young people in Rotherham".

It became clear to Heal around this time that she was being sidelined. The drug strategy unit was disbanded, and she was told that several officers in her department were not supportive of her or her work. Given that she was reporting the rape of children, she writes that the lack of support "will never fail to astonish and sadden" her. She decided to leave the South Yorkshire Police in March 2007. Her 2003 and 2006 reports were released by South Yorkshire Police in May 2015 following a Freedom of Information Act request.

In 2008 South Yorkshire Police set up Operation Central to investigate the allegations.[95] As a result, eight men were tried at Sheffield Crown Court in October 2010 for sexual offences against girls aged 1216. Four of the victims testified. Five men were convicted, including two brothers and a cousin.[128][129] One of the brothers, Razwan Razaq, had a previous conviction for indecently assaulting a young girl in his car, and had breached a previous sexual offences prevention order.[129] His brother Umar appealed against his sentence and was released after nine months.[130] All five were placed on the sex offenders' register.[129]

Andrew Norfolk of The Times first wrote about localised grooming in 2003, after moving from London to Leeds, when he wrote a brief story about the Keighley child sex abuse ring. Ann Cryer, MP for Keighley, had complained that "Asian men" were targeting teenage girls outside schools, while parents alleged that police and social services were declining to act. From then until 2010, Norfolk heard of court cases in northern England and the Midlands reporting a similar pattern.[46]

Court records showed 17 cases of localised grooming in 13 northern towns since 199714 since 2008in which 56 men were convicted of sexual offences against girls aged 1116.[131][132] Norfolk interviewed two of the affected families, and in January 2011 the first of a series of stories appeared over four pages in The Times, accompanied by an editorial, "Revealed: conspiracy of silence on UK sex gangs".[12] Norfolk told the Home Affairs Committee in 2013 that council staff and senior police officers called him to thank him; one director of children's services told him: "My staff are jumping for joy in the office today because finally somebody has said what we have not felt able to say."

In 2012 Rotherham Council applied to the High Court for an injunction to stop Norfolk publishing an unredacted version of a serious case review written after the murder of a local girl, Laura Wilson.[134]

Known in the review as "Child S", Wilson was 17 in October 2010 when she was stabbed 40 times and thrown in the canal by her 17-year-old ex-boyfriend, Ashtiaq Asghar, an act the police called an "honour killing".[136][j] She had had a baby four months earlier by a 21-year-old married man. The families of the men, both Pakistani heritage, had apparently been unaware of the relationships and the existence of the child. Tired of being a secret, Wilson decided to tell them. Days later, the ex-boyfriend murdered her. Both men stood trial; the older man was acquitted, and Asghar was jailed for 17 years and six months.[136][138]

Assessed as having an IQ of 56 and a reading and spelling age of 6, Wilson had been the target of localised grooming from at least age 11. The council had referred her to Risky Business three months after her 11th birthday,[134][140] and when she was 13, Wilson and her family had appeared on The Jeremy Kyle Show to discuss children who were out of control. She had also been mentioned in the 2009 criminal inquiry that led to the first five convictions arising out of localised grooming in Rotherham.[142]

The government ordered that the council publish its serious case review. It was published with passages blacked out on 61 of its 144 pages. Norfolk obtained an unredacted version, and found that the council had hidden the men's ethnicity, as well as Wilson's mention during the 2009 criminal inquiry, and the extent of the council's involvement in her care. Michael Gove, then education secretary, accused the council in June 2012 of withholding "relevant and important material".[142] After Gove's intervention, the council withdrew its legal action, and Norfolk published the story under the headline "Officials hid vital facts about men suspected of grooming girl for sex".[134][46]

On 24 September 2012 Norfolk wrote that the abuse in Rotherham was much more widespread than acknowledged, and that the police had been aware of it for over a decade. His story, "Police files reveal vast child protection scandal", was based on 200 leaked documents, some from Jayne Senior, such as case files and letters from police and social services. The documents included Adele Weir's 2001 report for the Home Office, which linked 54 abused children to the Hussain family; 18 of the children had called Arshid Hussain their "boyfriend".[13]

Cases highlighted by Norfolk included that of a 15-year-old having a broken bottle inserted into her; a 14-year-old being held in a flat and forced to have sex with five men; and a 13-year-old girl, "with disrupted clothing", found by police in a house at 3am with a group of men who had given her vodka. A neighbour had called the police after hearing the girl scream. The girl was arrested for being drunk and disorderly, but the men were not questioned.[13][143]

The newspaper cited a 2010 report by the police intelligence bureau that said, locally and nationally, and particularly in Sheffield and Rotherham, "there appears to be a significant problem with networks of Asian males exploiting young white females". South Yorkshire children were being trafficked to Birmingham, Bradford, Bristol, Dover, Manchester, and elsewhere, according to the police report.[13][144] A document from Rotherham's Safeguarding Children Board reporting that the "crimes had 'cultural characteristics... which are locally sensitive in terms of diversity'":

There are sensitivities of ethnicity with potential to endanger the harmony of community relationships. Great care will be taken in drafting...this report to ensure that its findings embrace Rotherham's qualities of diversity. It is imperative that suggestions of a wider cultural phenomenon are avoided."[13]

In August 2013 Norfolk published the story of a 15-year-old Rotherham girl, later revealed to be Sammy Woodhouse,[145] who had been described in Adele Weir's report in 2001, and who was allowed by social services to maintain contact with Arshid Hussain, despite having been placed in care by her parents to protect her from him. (Hussain was jailed in 2016 for 35 years.) The girl had been made pregnant twice. One of those "aware of the relationship", according to the Times, was Jahangir Akhtar, then Rotherham Council's deputy leader, reportedly a relative of Hussain's.[146] He resigned but denied the claims.[147] Akhtar was one of the officials later described in the Casey report as wielding considerable influence on the council and reportedly known for shutting down discussion about the sexual abuse. Shortly after publication of the Times story, Rotherham Council commissioned the Jay inquiry.[146]

The House of Commons Home Affairs Committee began hearing evidence about localised grooming in June 2012, as a result of the Rotherham convictions in 2010 (Operation Central), Andrew Norfolk's articles in the Times, and the Rochdale child sex abuse ring (Operation Span), which saw 12 men convicted in May 2012. The committee published its report, Child sexual exploitation and the response to localised grooming, in June 2013, with a follow-up in October 2014 in response to the Jay report.

In October 2012 the committee criticised South Yorkshire's chief constable, David Crompton, and one of its senior officers, Philip Etheridge.[144] The committee heard evidence that three members of a family connected with the abuse of 61 girls had not been charged, and no action was taken when a 22-year-old man was found in a car with a 12-year-old girl, with indecent images of her on his phone. Crompton said that "ethnic origin" was not a factor in deciding whether to charge suspects. The committee said that they were very concerned, as was the public.[144]

During a hearing in September 2014 to discuss Rotherham, the committee chair, Keith Vaz, told Crompton that the committee was shocked by the evidence, and that it held South Yorkshire Police responsible. Asked about an incident in which a 13-year-old found in a flat with a group of men was arrested for being drunk and disorderly, Crompton said it would be referred to the Independent Police Complaints Commission.[150]

In January 2013 the committee summoned the head of Rotherham Council, Martin Kimber, to explain the lack of arrests, despite South Yorkshire Police saying it was conducting investigations and the council having identified 58 young girls at risk.[151] Vaz questioned why, after five Asian men were jailed in 2010, more was not done: "In Lancashire there were 100 prosecutions the year before last, in South Yorkshire there were no prosecutions." The council apologised for the "systemic failure" that had "let down" the victims.[151]

The committee's follow-up report on 18 October 2014 detailed the disappearance of Adele Weir's files containing data on the abuse from the Risky Business office in 2002.[101] The allegations were made in private hearings. Keith Vaz said: "The proliferation of revelations about files which can no longer be located gives rise to public suspicion of a deliberate cover-up. The only way to address these concerns is with a full, transparent and urgent investigation." The report called for new legislation to allow the removal of elected Police and Crime Commissioners following a vote of no confidence.[101]

In October 2013 Rotherham Council commissioned Professor Alexis Jay, a former chief social work adviser to the Scottish government, to conduct an independent inquiry into its handling of child-sexual-exploitation reports since 1997.[152] Published on 26 August 2014, the Jay report revealed that an estimated 1,400 children, by a "conservative estimate", had been sexually exploited in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013.[k] According to the report, children as young as 11 were "raped by multiple perpetrators, abducted, trafficked to other cities in England, beaten and intimidated".[155]

Taxi drivers were a "common thread", picking up children for sex from schools and care homes.[157] The inquiry team found examples where "a child was doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, children who were threatened with guns, children who witnessed brutally violent rapes and were threatened that they would be the next victim if they told anyone. Girls as young as 11 were raped by large numbers of male perpetrators, one after the other."[159] According to the report:

One child who was being prepared to give evidence received a text saying the perpetrator had her younger sister and the choice of what happened next was up to her. She withdrew her statements. At least two other families were terrorised by groups of perpetrators, sitting in cars outside the family home, smashing windows, making abusive and threatening phone calls. On some occasions child victims went back to perpetrators in the belief that this was the only way their parents and other children in the family would be safe. In the most extreme cases, no one in the family believed that the authorities could protect them.

The report noted that babies were born as a result of the abuse. There were also miscarriages and terminations. Several girls were able to look after their babies with help from social services, but in other cases babies were permanently removed, causing further trauma to the mother and mother's family. Sarah Champion, who in 2012 succeeded Denis MacShane as Labour MP for Rotherham, said this "spoke volumes about the way these children weren't seen as victims at all".[23]

The police had shown a lack of respect for the victims in the early 2000s, according to the report, deeming them "undesirables" unworthy of police protection. The concerns of Jayne Senior, the former youth worker, were met with "indifference and scorn".[161][162] Because most of the perpetrators were of Pakistani heritage, several council staff described themselves as being nervous about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist; others, the report noted, "remembered clear direction from their managers" not to make such identification.[163] The report noted the experience of Adele Weir, the Home Office researcher, who attempted to raise concerns about the abuse with senior police officers in 2002; she was told not to do so again, and was subsequently sidelined.[155]

Staff described Rotherham Council as macho, sexist and bullying, according to the report. There were sexist comments to female employees, particularly during the period 19972009. One woman reported being told to wear shorter skirts to "get on better"; another was asked if she wore a mask while having sex. The Jay report noted that "[t]he existence of such a culture... is likely to have impeded the Council from providing an effective, corporate response to such a highly sensitive social problem as child sexual exploitation." Several people who spoke to the Jay inquiry were concerned that Rotherham Council officials were connected to the perpetrators through business interests such as the taxi firm; the police assured the inquiry that there was no evidence of this.

The Jay report prompted the resignations of Roger Stone, Labour leader of Rotherham Council, and Martin Kimber, its chief executive.[166] Despite being strongly criticized during appearances before the House Affairs Committee, Joyce Thacker, the council's director of children's services, and Shaun Wright, the Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) for South Yorkshire Police from 2012and Labour councillor in charge of child safety at the council from 2005 to 2010would not step down. They did eventually, in September, under pressure; Wright was asked to step down by Theresa May, then Home Secretary; members of his own party; and Rotherham's Labour MP Sarah Champion.[167] He also resigned from the Labour Party, on 27 August 2014, after an ultimatum by the party to do so or face suspension.[168]

Roger Stone was suspended from the Labour Party, as were councillors Gwendoline Russell and Shaukat Ali, and former deputy council leader Jahangir Akhtar, who had lost his council seat in 2014.[169] Malcolm Newsam was appointed as Children's Social Care Commissioner in October 2014, and subsequently Ian Thomas was appointed as interim director of children's services.[170][171]

There was worldwide astonishment at the Jay report's findings, and extensive news coverage. Ten of the UK's most popular newspapers featured the report on their front pages, including the Times, Guardian, Daily Telegraph and Independent.

David Crompton, Chief Constable of South Yorkshire Police from 2012 to 2016, invited the National Crime Agency to conduct an independent inquiry.[27] Keith Vaz, then chair of the Home Affairs Committee, told Meredydd Hughes, Chief Constable from 2004 to 2011, that Hughes had failed abuse victims.[173]

Theresa May, then Home Secretary, accused the authorities of a "dereliction of duty". She blamed several factors, including Rotherham Council's "institutionalised political correctness", inadequate scrutiny and culture of covering things up, combined with a fear of being seen as racist and a "disdainful attitude" toward the children.[l] Denis MacShane, MP for Rotherham from 1994 until his resignation in 2012 for claiming false expenses, blamed a culture of "not wanting to rock the multicultural community boat".[175] Simon Danczuk, Labour MP for Rochdale, where similar cases were prosecuted, argued that ethnicity, class and the night-time economy were all factors, adding that "a very small minority" in the Asian community have an unhealthy view of women, and that an "unhealthy brand of politics 'imported' from Pakistan", which involved "looking after your own", was partly to blame.[176][177]

British Muslims and members of the British-Pakistani community condemned both the abuse and that it had been covered up.[178] Nazir Afzal, Chief Crown Prosecutor of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) for North West England from 20112015, himself a Muslim, made the decision in 2011 to prosecute the Rochdale child sex abuse ring after the CPS had turned the case down.[179] Responding to the Jay report, he argued that the abuse had no basis in Islam: "Islam says that alcohol, drugs, rape and abuse are all forbidden, yet these men were surrounded by all of these things."[180]

Afzal argued that the cases were about male power: "It is not the abusers' race that defines them. It is their attitude to women that defines them." The handling of the cases was a matter of incompetence rather than political correctness. He agreed with Danczuk that the nature of the night-time economy skewed the picturemore Pakistani-heritage men work at night and might therefore be more involved in that kind of activity.[180] The incoming director of children's services in Rotherham, Ian Thomas, disagreed, arguing that the "night-time economy is full of white blokes. Ninety-two per cent of the people in Rotherham are white."[171] Alexis Jay also disagreed; she told The Guardian in 2015 that working in the night-time economy "presents an opportunity but it doesn't present a motive".[8]

The UK Hindu Council and the Sikh Federation asked that the perpetrators be described as Pakistani Muslims, rather than Asian.[181] Britain First and the English Defence League staged protests in Rotherham, as did Unite Against Fascism.[182]

Following the Jay report, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, Eric Pickles, commissioned an independent inspection of Rotherham Council. Led by Louise Casey, director-general of the government's Troubled Families programme, the inspection examined the council's governance, services for children and young people, and taxi and private-hire licensing.[183]

Published in February 2015, the Casey report concluded that Rotherham Council was "not fit for purpose". Casey identified a culture of "bullying, sexism... and misplaced 'political correctness'", along with a history of covering up information and silencing whistleblowers. The child-sexual-exploitation team was poorly directed, suffered from excessive case loads, and did not share information. The council had a history of failing to deal with issues around race: "Staff perceived that there was only a small step between mentioning the ethnicity of perpetrators and being labelled a racist." The Pakistani-heritage councillors were left to deal with all issues pertaining to that community, which left them able to exert disproportionate influence, while white councillors ignored their responsibilities. Councillor Jahangir Akhtar, in particular, was named as too influential, including regarding police matters.

In February 2015 the government replaced its elected officers with a team of five commissioners, including one tasked specifically with looking at children's services.[31] Files relating to one current and one former councillor identifying "a number of potentially criminal matters" were passed to the National Crime Agency. The leader of the council, Paul Lakin, resigned, and members of the council cabinet also stood down.[31]

South Yorkshire police set up Operation Clover in August 2013 to investigate historic cases of child sexual abuse in the town.[188]

As a result, six men and two women went on trial before Judge Sarah Wright on 10 December 2015 at Sheffield Crown Court, with Michelle Colborne QC prosecuting. Four were members of the Hussain familythree brothers and their uncle, Qurban Alinamed in Adele Weir's 2001 report.[189][190] The Hussain family were said to have "owned" Rotherham.[189] Ali owned a local minicab company, Speedline Taxis; one of the accused women had worked for Speedline as a radio operator.[191][192] A fourth Hussain brother, Sageer Hussain, was convicted in November 2016.[193] It was alleged in late 2018 that Arshid Hussain was contacted by Rotherham council whilst in prison in relation to care proceedings for his child which was conceived during a rape. The child's mother and victim of Hussain Sammy Woodhouse accused the council of putting her child at risk and an online petition calling for a change in the law reached more than 200,000 signatures.[194]

On 24 February 2016, Ali was convicted of conspiracy to rape and sentenced to 10 years.[195] Arshid "Mad Ash" Hussain, apparently the ringleader, was jailed for 35 years.[195] He appeared in court by video link and seemed to be asleep in bed when the verdict was announced. His lawyer said he had been left paraplegic by a shooting accident; the prosecution alleged that his claim to be too ill to attend was simply a ploy.[189] Arshid's brother Bannaras "Bono" Hussain was jailed for 19 years, and Basharat "Bash" Hussain for 25 years.[195] Two other men were acquitted, one of seven charges, including four rapes, and the second of one charge of indecent assault.[195]

The court heard that the police had once caught Basharat Hussain in the act, but failed to do anything. He was with a victim in a car park next to Rotherham police station, when a police car approached and asked what he was doing. He replied: "She's just sucking my cock, mate", and the police car left.[196]

Karen MacGregor and Shelley Davies were convicted of false imprisonment and conspiracy to procure prostitutes.[195] MacGregor had worked for Qurban Ali as a radio operator at Speedline Taxis.[191] She was sentenced to 13 years and Davies was given an 18-month suspended sentence.[195] MacGregor and Davies would befriend girls and take them back to MacGregor's home. Acting as surrogate parents, the women bought them food and clothes, and listened to their problems. The girls were then given alcohol and told to earn their keep by having sex with male visitors. MacGregor had even applied for charitable status for a local group she had set up, Kin Kids, to help the carers of troubled teenagers. She had been supported in this by John Healey, MP for Wentworth and Dearne (who did not know that children were being procured for sex),[197] and had attended a meeting at Westminster to speak about it.[198][199]

Eight men went on trial in September 2016 and were convicted on 17 October that year.[200] A fourth Hussain brother, Sageer Hussain, was jailed for 19 years for four counts of raping a 13-year-old girl and one indecent assault.[193] The girl's family, then owners of a local post office and shop, had reported the rapes at the time to police, their MP, and David Blunkett, the home secretary, to no avail.[201]

First groomed when she was 12, the girl told the court she had been raped multiple times from the age of 13, on the first occasion in November 2002 by nine men who took photographs. On another occasion she was locked in a room while men lined up outside. She was threatened with a gun, and told they would gang-rape her mother, kill her brother and burn her home down. Every time it happened, she hid the clothes she had been wearing. In April 2003, when she was 13, she told her mother, who alerted the police;[202] the court was shown video of an interview police conducted with her that month.[203] The police collected the bags of clothes, then called two days later to say they had lost them. The family was sent 140 compensation for the clothes and advised to drop the case. Unable to find anyone to help them, they sold their business in 2005 and moved in fear to Spain for 18 months.[204][202][205]

Sageer Hussain gave an interview to Channel 4 News in 2014, after his brother, Arshid Hussain, was named in the media as a ringleader. Sageer attributed the abuse to girls wearing miniskirts: "The biggest part of the problem you have these days is these young girls, that are dressed up, i.e. miniskirts, stuff like that, they're going into the clubs, and they're ending up going with blokes, and stuff like that, and they're waking up next morning, and they scream rape. Or groomed." Asked about the allegation that his brother had assaulted 12-year-olds, he compared having sex with 12-year-olds to "like going and eating that dog crap; they wouldn't do it", and blamed social services for having let the girls out in the first place.[202]

Sageer's brother Basharat Hussain, already sentenced to 25 years in February 2016, was convicted of indecent assault and given an additional seven-year sentence, to run concurrently. Two cousins of the Hussains, Asif Ali and Mohammed Whied, were convicted of rape and aiding and abetting rape, respectively. Four other men were jailed for rape or indecent assault.[202][206]

Six men, including three brothers, went on trial in January 2017 before Judge Sarah Wright, with Sophie Drake prosecuting. All were convicted of 21 offences in relation to assaults between 1999 and 2001 on two girls, aged 11 and 13 when the abuse began. The girls were assaulted in a fireworks shop and in a flat above a row of shops, both owned by the brothers' father. One girl, aged 12 at the time, was locked in the "extremely dirty" flat overnight with no electricity or running water. A rape by Basharat Hussain was reported to the police in 2001; he was questioned but released without charge.[207] One of the girls became pregnant at age 12, but she had been raped by five men and did not know who the father was; DNA tests established that it was one of the defendants.[22] After sentencing, two of the men shouted "Allahu Akbar" as they were led out of the court.[208]

A 21st person was found guilty of sexual offences in May 2017.[209]

The National Crime Agency (NCA) set up Operation Stovewood in December 2014 to conduct a criminal inquiry and to review South Yorkshire Police investigations. The NCA inquiry was led by the NCA director, Trevor Pearce, before being led by Deputy Director Roy McComb.[27][210] As of 2016 the inquiry was expected to last eight years and cost over 30 million.[28] By June 2015 Operation Stovewood had identified 300 suspects.[211]

Three men were arrested in July 2016 and charged in December 2016 with the indecent assault of a girl under the age of 14 between June 1994 and June 1995.[212] They were convicted following a trial in November 2017 at Sheffield Crown Court. The men befriended the 13-year-old in Rotherham before plying her with alcohol and raping her. Judge David Dixon told the three they had 'groomed, coerced and intimidated' their victim and treated her 'like a thing'. The girl went on to suffer from eating disorders, anxiety and depression as a result of her ordeal, the court heard.[213]

A fourth man was convicted as part of Operation Stovewood in February 2018.[215]

A fifth man was convicted in early May 2018 and a sixth on the 31 May.[216][217] Tony Chapman admitted 12 charges of indecently assaulting a girl under the age of 16 between February 1998 and January 1999 when he appeared at court on 17 April. He was also found guilty of five offences against two separate girls including rape, assault occasioning actual bodily harm and threatening to kill following a nine-day trial at Sheffield Crown Court yesterday. The offences took place between October 2013 and May 2015, when the girls were under the age of 16.

Khurram Javed was found guilty of one count of sexual assault of a 16-year-old girl when he was 31 years old. He was sentenced to two years imprisonment.[217]

Five men were charged with a total of 21 offences, including rape and indecent assault against two girls under the age of sixteen between 2001 and 2004.[218] The court heard how the girls were groomed in and around the Meadowhall shopping centre when they were twelve or thirteen and one of the accused had sex with a girl within the shopping complex.[219] Three of the men were found not guilty on all counts, whilst a fourth man failed to appear at court and is believed to have left the country. A warrant has been issued for his arrest.[220][221]

A man was sentenced to nine years in prison for sexual activity with a child in October. Darren Hyett took the 15-year-old girl out in his taxi and showered her with gifts when he was 41.[222]

In late October 2018, seven men, the largest number prosecuted under the National Crime Agency's Operation Stovewood investigation so far, were also convicted of sexual offences against five girls committed between 1998 and 2005.[223] They were first prosecuted in September as a group of 8 men charged with various child sexual offences, 2 of which were said to have raped a young girl in Sherwood Forest between August 2002 and 2003, giving her drugs and alcohol and threatening to abandon her if she did not comply with their demands. The girl later had to have an abortion after falling pregnant.[224] One said she had slept with 100 Asian men by the time she was 16.[225][226]

In August 2019, seven men became the latest to be convicted under Operation Stovewood relating to the sexual exploitation of seven teenage girls more than a decade previously, at least four were already in prison at the time of sentencing.[227][228] Aftab Hussain was sentenced to 24 years for indecent assault after being jailed for 3 years and 4 months in a separate investigation back in April 2016 after he admitted two counts of sexual activity with a child and attempted witness intimidation.[229] Hussain, who worked as a takeaway delivery driver, contacted the then 15-year-old girl via social media in 2015 and took her out in his car whilst making deliveries and then made threats to hurt her if she told anyone. Masaued Malik was sentenced to 5 years after being previously sentenced to 15 years in September 2016 under Operation Clover for similar offences. Mohammed Ashen pleaded guilty to three counts of indecent assault. Ashen was already in prison serving a 17-year sentence (reduced from 19 years) for murder after an incident in a Rotherham nightclub in 2005 where he stabbed Kimberley Fuller nine times after she confronted him for touching her inappropriately. Prior to this, he was jailed for threatening a former partner with a knife. Waseem Khaliq was sentenced to 10 years in prison. He was then sentenced for a further 45 months after admitting three counts of witness intimidation after posting allegations against his victims on fake Facebook and Twitter accounts. He also made a phone call from prison to the National Crime Agency control centre threatening two of the investigating officers saying that he knew where one of them lived and that he hoped they died of cancer or AIDS.[230][231][232][233]

David Hunter, a 63-year-old man was charged with two sexual offences against a 13-year-old girl as part of Operation Stovewood.[234]

The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) began an investigation into allegations of police wrongdoing following the Jay report. It was the second-largest inquiry the IPCC has undertaken after the inquiry into the 1989 Hillsborough football disaster in Sheffield; that game was policed by South Yorkshire Police. As of March 2017 nine inquiries were complete, with no case to answer regarding officer conduct, but recommendations were made to the force about the recording of information. Another 53 investigations were underway.[235]

According to Andrew Norfolk in The Times, one Rotherham police officer had been in regular contact with one of the perpetrators. In one incident in March 2000, he and a local taxi driverwho later became a Rotherham councillorare alleged to have arranged for Arshid Hussain, arguably the gang's ringleader, to hand a girl over to police at a petrol station "in exchange for immunity".[236][237] Another complaint concerned the same officer, who reportedly asked two of the victims out on a date. One victim reported this to police in August 2013, but no action was taken. The IPCC was also investigating the officer who failed to act on the report.[238][239] The first officer died in January 2015 after being hit by a car in Sheffield, in an unrelated accident.[238]

A five-year investigation by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) found that the Rotherham police ignored the sexual abuse of children for decades for fear of increasing racial tensions. The IOPC upheld a complaint from the father of one of the victims that police took "insufficient action". The complainant claims he was told by a police officer the town "would erupt" if it became known that Asian men were regularly sexually abusing underage girls.[240][241][242]

The Rotherham case was one of several cases which prompted investigations looking into the claim that the majority of perpetrators from grooming gangs were British Pakistani; the first was by Quilliam in December 2017, which released a report entitled Group Based Child Sexual Exploitation Dissecting Grooming Gangs, which claimed 84% of offenders were of South Asian heritage.[243] However this report was "fiercely" criticised for its unscientific nature and poor methodology by child sexual exploitation experts Ella Cockbain and Waqas Tufail, in their paper Failing Victims, Fuelling Hate: Challenging the Harms of the 'Muslim grooming gangs' Narrative which was published in January 2020.[244][245]

A further investigation was carried out by the British government in December 2020, when the Home Office published their findings, showing that the majority of child sexual exploitation gangs were, in fact, composed of white men and not British Pakistani men.[246][247]

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Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal - Wikipedia

The following is an excerpt from the authors new book, The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Terror of Isolation to Silence, Divide, and Conquer. (Bombardier Books, Post Hill Press.)

Feminists have long urged women to promote the politically correct viewpoint that they are oppressed victims. Champions of second-wave feminism such as Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem emphasized valid grievances of women, such as feeling like a sex object or being passed over for career advancement. However, the media-tech complex has gone well beyond promoting any constructive awareness of these concerns. Instead, it cultivates the resentments such women have felt for past humiliations.

Two cases in point are the confirmation hearings of Justice Clarence Thomas in 1991 and Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018. In both, the Democrats playbook to derail the confirmation process was exactly the same. At the eleventh hour, a woman appears with stories of sexual harassment from decades past. There is virtually no corroboration.

Kavanaugh was a teenager when his accuser Christine Blasey Ford said he tried to take her clothes off at a party, though none present at said party could corroborate anything. Anita Hill accused Thomas of making some off-color comments while she worked in his office. Again, uncorroborated.

But Democrats trying to disrupt the confirmations were not concerned about the flimsiness of the charges. The stories hyped big in the media served a far greater purpose. The unspoken goal was to emotionally manipulate American women who may have been humiliated in the past. They stirred up old resentments and traumas and then projected responsibility for those traumas onto the nominees. And it worked. It dredged up old memories of mistreatment among many women across America. They then became emotionally certain that the nominees were guilty.

Hence, the nominees could be framed in the public eye as Me Too perps, members of Wifebeaters Inc., and so on. The Senate Judiciary Committee and halls of Congress during the Kavanaugh hearings became a circus of angst-filled women, just as planned. They screamed in the hearing room. They screamed at swing-vote senators in hallways and elevators. On Capitol Hill, there were parades of women posing in handmaid costumes. The slogan of the day was Believe all women! no matter who they are or what they say about you.

Which leads to another question: What is a woman anyway? When Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson was asked to define the word woman, she refused to do so and even added: Im not a biologist. Given the propaganda of gender ideology which seems to deny that males and females exist in biology or reality why did its recent propaganda continue to speak out of both sides of the mouth as though two sexes really do exist? More specifically, why do traditional feminists like Steinem and company accept that narrative while deploring their erstwhile sisters known as radical feminists who object to it?

And since any man can claim to be a woman simply by saying so, we end up having to ask the central question posed by British novelist Dorothy Sayers in her 1938 lecture: Are Women Human? It is the spark of individuality, along with the biological reality of humanity as a dimorphic species, that makes us human. And were losing both in the morass of identity politics enforced by political correctness.

This review of women in the clutches of identity politics seems to point to two broad outcomes. First, social pressures from all corners schools, media, popular culture appear to be taking their toll on young women in particular. Hence, trying to navigate political correctness has been so exhausting that it added to the mental health crisis of women, especially during the Covid-19 era.

This should come as no surprise assuming they have internalized the guilt foisted on them for racism, for poverty, for environmental disaster, to properly mask up, and more. An Evie Magazine article noted that progressivism is an ideology that keeps score to an exhausting degree. [I]ts understandable that anxiety and depression thrive in these kinds of environments.

Second, all this slicing and dicing leads to an isolation and exhaustion that probably causes many struggling women to hope just to be taken care of. With so many relationships broken and real conversations off-limits, what is left but the new patriarchy, the Daddy State?

In 2012, the reelection campaign of President Obama hoped to lure young women voters with just that message by presenting an infographic called The Life of Julia. It offered up a utopian story about an atomized woman and showed how the government would take care of her and her child from the cradle to the grave. In 2021, the Biden administration released a similar infographic called The Life of Linda, another isolated Stepford wife to the state.

Both infographics provide a perfect illustration of sociologist Robert Nisbets point that the State grows on what it gives to the individual as it does on what it takes from competing social relationships. The governments showcasing of Julia and Linda represent the push for a new social order that replaces our intimate relationships with a mass relationship with the state. The biggest losers of all are children and their childhoods. But the propaganda is meant also to destroy motherhood, fatherhood, and the whole family.

That leads us to wonder about the role of men in all this. I would say it all depends on the strength of women to reject the dystopia being foisted on us by a totalitarian force. We should reject the narrative that men are the bad guys and women are always the victims. In general, men take a lot of their cues from women. I would guess that elitist men take their cues from men who are higher in the pecking order.

But the de-masculinization of men and the bullying of women and girls by men who inject themselves into female sports by claiming a female identity are of a piece. Obedience to political correctness out of fear of being socially rejected drives much of it.

This psychological chaos is brought on by utopian power elites of both sexes. Divisiveness between the sexes is key to family and relationship breakdown across society. That division proved critical to the breakdown of the black family in America and, increasingly, to the American family across the board.

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Why Women Are So Susceptible To Political Correctness

Advertisers are fleeing Twitter in droves now that Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has taken over control.

Ever since officially closing the $44 billion deal, Musk has been busy gutting the company's executive suite and dissolving its board. Senior executives, as well as Twitter's advertising chief Sarah Personette, have departed as well.

After all, Musk has been very clear about his disdain for advertising for years now.

The resulting uncertainty has advertisers spooked — major advertising holding company IPG has already advised clients to pull out temporarily — and the billionaire CEO is in serious damage mode.

Now, Reuters reports, Musk is spending most of this week meeting with advertisers in New York, trying to reassure them that Twitter won't turn into a "free-for-all hellscape."

According to one of Reuters' sources, the meetings have been "very productive" — but plenty of other marketers are far from satisfied.

Advertisers are reportedly grilling Musk over his plans to address the rampant misinformation being spread on the platform, a trend that Musk himself has been actively contributing to since the acquisition.

And if he's succeeding in ameliorating advertisers in private, he's antagonizing them publicly. On Wednesday, Musk posted a poll asking users whether advertisers should support either "freedom of speech," or "political 'correctness'" — a type of false dichotomy that echoes the rhetoric of far-right conspiracy theorists and conservative pundits.

"Those type of provocations are not helping to calm the waters," an unnamed media buyer told Reuters.

Some are going public with the same sentiment.

"Unless Elon hires new leaders committed to keeping this 'free' platform safe from hate speech, it's not a platform brands can/should advertise on," Allie Wassum, global media director for the Nike-owned shoe brand Jordan, wrote in a LinkedIn post.

So far, Musk's plans for the social media platform remain strikingly muddy. In addition to the behind-the-scenes advertising plays, he's also announced that users will have to pay to retain their verification badge, though he's engaged in a comically public negotiation as to what the cost might be.

He's also hinted that previously banned users — former US president Donald Trump chief among them — might eventually get a chance to return, but only once "we have a clear process for doing so, which will take at least a few more weeks."

The move was seen by many as a way to wait out the impending midterm elections. After all, Twitter has played a huge role in disseminating misinformation and swaying elections in the past.

While advertisers are running for the hills, to Musk advertising is clearly only a small part of the picture — even though historically, social giants like Twitter have struggled to diversify their revenue sources much beyond display ads.

Musk nodded to that reality in a vague open letter posted last week.

"Low relevancy ads are spam, but highly relevant ads are actually content!" he wrote in the note, addressed to "Twitter advertisers."

Big picture, Twitter's operations are in free fall right now and Musk has yet to provide advertisers with a cohesive plan to pick up the pieces.

While he's hinted at the creation of a new content moderation council made up of both "people from all viewpoints" and "wildly divergent views," advertisers are clearly going to be thinking twice about continuing their business with Twitter.

With or without advertising, Twitter's finances are reportedly in a very deep hole. The billions of dollars Musk had to borrow to finance his mega acquisition will cost Twitter around $1 billion a year in interest alone.

The company also wasn't anywhere near profitable before Musk took over, losing hundreds of millions of dollars in a single quarter.

Whether that picture will change any time soon is as unclear as ever, especially in the face of a wintry economy.

But, of course, Musk has proved his critics wrong before. So anything's possible.

READ MORE: Advertisers begin to grill Elon Musk over Twitter 'free-for-all' [Reuters]

More on the saga: Elon Musk Pulling Engineers From Tesla Autopilot to Work on Twitter

The post Elon Musk Meeting With Advertisers, Begging Them Not to Leave Twitter appeared first on Futurism.

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Elon Musk Meeting With Advertisers, Begging Them Not to Leave Twitter

This essay is the winner of The Economists Open Future essay competition in the category of Open Society, responding to the question: Has political correctness gone too far? The winner is Julia Symons, 25 years old, from Australia.

* * *

Drunk on virtue. Thus did Lionel Shriver, an American author, damn a commitment made by the British arm of Penguin Random House, a publisher, that its new hires and the books it acquires reflect UK society by 2025. A conscious effort to ensure diversity is, says Ms Shriver, wholly incompatible with the publishers raison dtre of acquiring and publishing good works of literature. If an agent were to receive a manuscript from a gay transgender Caribbean who dropped out of school at seven and powers around town on a mobility scooter it would be published, even if its quality were execrable, warned Ms Shriver.

Her screed suggests that the unthinking application of political correctness (PC), in this case in the form of a diversity target, will threaten liberal, Western culture and produce small-minded individuals. Like some of Ms Shrivers previous interventions on this topic, this one was met with outrage online, with thousands of tweets and column-inches devoted to criticising the author.

Welcome to the culture wars. Welcome to political correctness gone too far.

The notion that political correctness has gone mad is familiar to anyone who follows even vaguely any aspect of modern political or cultural life. The phrase, ostensibly referring to language or action that is designed to avoid offence or harm to protected groups, has become a sharp criticism. It is synonymous with a sort of cultural McCarthyism, usually committed by the left.

In its modern iteration, it pops up in a couple of different forms. First, there is the use of the word snowflake to criticise younger generationsthose more likely to be in favour of affirmative action and gender-neutral bathrooms, for instance, who are perceived as thin-skinned and less resilient than their forebears. The second invocation of PC gone mad is freedom of speech: specifically the idea that the use and enforcement of politically correct language will endanger it and by extension freedom of thought.

Regardless of how it is labelled, its underlying idea is the same: that measures to increase tolerance threaten the liberal, Enlightenment values that have forged the West. Self-styled opponents of political correctness and proponents of free speech may find themselves (mis)quoting Voltaire: I disapprove what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

When framed like this, it seems utterly reasonable to think that political correctness has the potential to be a menace. Moreover, some aspects of tolerance culture, particularly the actions of studentswho frequently draw the ire of such culture warriorsare, in many cases, cloying and precious.

Britains National Union of Students, and campus politics generally, is rife with such examples: at one conference, it urged its delegates to use the jazz hands motion to express their appreciation, lest the noises made by clapping trigger other delegates. Meanwhile Facebook, in its own efforts at tolerance, has made a list of 71 genders from which its users may choose to identify, including genderqueer neutrois and bi-gender. This is farcical and arguably trivialises the very real struggles that transgender individuals face.

However, some easily-dismissed examples aside, the notion that political correctness has gone too far is absurd. That a man who boasts gleefully about grabbing women by their genitals, mocks disabled reporters and stereotypes Muslims as terrorists and Mexicans as rapists was able to become the leader of the free world should disabuse anyone of that notion. Indeed those who invoke political correctness often use it for more cynical means. It is a smoke screen for regressivism.

Let us return to Ms Shrivers argument. It is untethered from reality. If a gay transgender Caribbean primary school dropout were able to gain a book deal with such ease, then where are all of the books by such people? Worse yet, the dichotomy she draws between demographic diversity on the one hand and worthwhile literature on the other implies that writers who are not white and heterosexual produce inferior literature. Moreover, Ms Shriver seems not to have considered that drawing upon the full spectrum of the human experience, particularly by seeking out voices and stories that have been hitherto silenced or under-represented, can only enrich our literature.

It is an illiberal argument masquerading as the opposite. This is common whenever the term political correctness is bandied about. Another example comes from Australias pugilistic former prime minister, Tony Abbott. During that countrys 2017 plebiscite on marriage equality, Mr Abbotta devout Catholic, social conservative and ardent No campaignerurged the Australian public: If you're worried about...freedom of speech, vote no [to single-sex marriage.] If you don't like political correctness, vote no because voting no will help to stop political correctness in its tracks.

By wilfully conflating several unrelated issues, Abbott managed to frame depriving same-sex couples of the right to marry (and of the rights that accompany it) as a bold and defiant declaration of freedom. That stopping political correctness was, for him, not only synonymous with but contingent upon the continued subjugation of certain minorities, indicates the illiberalism in which anti-PC reactionaries are steeped.

Not only is political correctness invoked to reinforce prejudices, it is often simplistic and reductive. A 22% increase in knife-crime in England and Wales, largely concentrated in London, has seen alarmist headlines about Londons murder rate eclipsing that of New Yorks (true only if one squints hard enough at very particular statistics.) The reasons for this are complicated, but largely to do with significant cuts to the police (whose numbers have fallen by nearly 20% since 2010) and also other social services: in the absence of youth services and clubs, for example, children are more vulnerable to recruitment from gangs. Many experts, including Metropolitan Police chief Cressida Dick, see this through the lens of public health, in which strategies for prevention are needed, not just enforcement.

For opponents of political correctness this is another consequence of political correctness run amokand another convenient excuse to attack the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan. During her tenure as Home Secretary, Theresa May (hardly a bleeding heart) rightfully placed significant restrictions on the use of the policing tactic known as stop and search, which disproportionately targeted ethnic minorities. There was no evidence that it reduced crime in any statistically significant way. However, the reactionaries ploughed on, impervious to facts, with right-wing media outlets such as the Sun and the Daily Telegraph calling for the return of stop-and-search to restore order on London streets.

These phenomenainvoking political correctness as a fig-leaf for naked prejudice, and in spite of evidence to the contraryfind their most troubling embodiment in political figures like Donald Trump and Nigel Farage. Mr Trump once stated that the problem [America] has is being politically correct, and sees himself as a corrective to that. Mr Farage, too, sees himself as a crusader against political correctness.

Both consider themselves to be taking back their respective countries from a varied cast of bogeymen: among them elitists, social justice warriors, Muslims and immigrants. Both seem to want to undermine the very institutions that preserve our rights and liberties.

At best, the notion of political correctness having gone too far is intellectually dishonest; a fallacy similar to a straw-man argument or an ad hominem attack. At worst, it serves as a rallying cry to cover up the excesses of the most illiberal in our society.

__________

Julia Symons is an MSc candidate in Global Health at the London School of Economics.

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Has political correctness gone too far? | The Economist

In an interview with the far-left Daily Beast, director David Cronenberg blamed political correctness for the lack of sex scenes in modern movies.

Given that theres so little adult sex in contemporary mainstream North American cinema, the Daily Beast asked, has it become more difficult to make an intensely eroticized film likeCrimes of the Future?

Of course, Im aware of how things have cycled, because I feel like Ive been here before with political correctness, and now its something else, Cronenberg replied. But it really is the same thing, which amounts to people trying to censor what other people say and think and do. It seems to be a common thing with us human beings that we do that periodically. I have to ignore it.

Crimes of the Future is the latest from the 79-year-old director of The Fly (1986), Scanners (1981), Dead Ringers (1988),Eastern Promises (2007), The Brood (1979), and The Dead Zone (1983), among others.

Cronenberg is primarily known as a creator of body horror, where we witness terrible things happen to a persons body. The Fly is a pretty extraordinary example of that and one of the best remakes ever made.

Keep in mind that it is not just sex missing from movies. It is also sexiness. Now that the humorless puritan harpies in the Woke Gestapo are in charge, any attempt at sexiness is attacked as something akin to rape. Oh, that awful male gaze. Oh, that awful objectification.

I havent seen Crimes of the Future, but if the past is prologue, whatever sex might be in will not violate the Woke Production Code prohibiting sexiness. Sex that degrades and disgusts is fine with the Woke Gestapo. Ugliness is the new beauty the more disgusting, the better.

Im not criticizing Cronenberg. He is what he is, a terrific and original filmmaker. But its not his style thats verboten. Whats verboten is beauty, erotica, titillation, wish-fulfillment, the forbidden joys of T&A you know, those things that make life worth living. That has never been Cronenbergs style.

The same oh-so progressive Hollywood that has spent decades ridiculing the Eisenhower 1950s as stuffy and puritan is now a hundred times more stuffy and puritan. The awful fifties gave us Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Jane Russell, Gina Lollobrigida, Sophia Loren, and the bullet bra. The Woke 2020s are like living in a convent. Never in the history of movies has sexiness been censored and outlawed. Its disgraceful and a violation of human nature.

Anyway, as someone who is pro-objectification and T&A, lets hope this era of Woke McCarthyism ends soon.

The seventies and eighties really were awesome, and I have the Blurays to prove it.

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.

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Nolte: David Cronenberg Blames Political Correctness for Sexless Movies

San Francisco mayor London Breed has promised a crackdown on the bullshit that has destroyed our city. Photo: Gabrielle Lurie/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images

Its been seven or eight years since a wave of illiberal norms around the discussion of race and gender began to hit an expanding array of progressive institutions. The name for this phenomenon kept changing, from political correctness to call-out culture to cancel culture to wokeness, because every time a new label came along, Republicans would slap it on literally anything that wasnt right wing. (Mitt Romney recently blamed President Bidens economic policies on his woke advisers.) What remained of the liberal left would have to clarify that, no, what they were critiquing was stuff that was really far out there: impenetrable jargon, irrational mobs, struggle sessions, creepy forced apologies, absurd firings.

In certain quarters, a deep fatalism set in about the survival of liberal values, articulated by critics including Andrew Sullivan and Wesley Yang, who has described the lefts new thinking as successor ideology a term that presumes it is destined to displace the old liberal ideology. Michael Lind, a co-founder of New America, claimed that, within the center left, debate has been replaced by compulsory assent and ideas have been replaced by slogans that can be recited but not questioned: Black Lives Matter, Green Transition, Trans Women Are Women, 1619, Defund the Police.

But I dont take the success of the illiberal left for granted. I think it can be halted. In fact, I suspect that the floodwaters are already receding.

The way the illiberal left has been dealing with race and gender is of a piece with the way it has approached a range of debates in the social-media era. Activists reduce nearly every issue to a moralistic binary and cast any dissent as a personal failing. Disagree with the policy activism of the Sunrise Movement? Youre a boomer happy to let the planet fry after you enjoy your remaining time on it. Not sure single-payer health care is the best strategy? You must want people to die on the street.

It is on identity-related issues that this style of thinking has made the most headway. Academia has produced left-wing philosophical challenges to liberalism that treat speech as tantamount to violence and regard political disputes as a zero-sum conflict between oppressor and oppressed. And while these illiberal norms often originated on campus, they have expanded into progressive communities like primary schools (mostly private ones), media, publishing, and political and social-activist organizations.

What has made this all feel so unstoppable is that critics had reasons to be afraid of speaking out against it. When the New York Times forced science writer Donald G. McNeil Jr. to resign for quoting (not using) a racial slur, Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan suggested that anybody who disagreed with his termination was also racist. Its not hard to believe, she wrote, that any White person who would freely utter or defend the most offensive racial slur in English may well be someone with a history of other problems. This is a pure distillation of witch-hunt logic: Anybody who objects to the fairness of the proceedings is presumptively implicated in the crime of the accused.

But a system based on frightening dissenters into submission is a brittle foundation for social change. What appeared to be broad assent within elite institutions was actually enforced silence. It is beginning to give way to careful but firm pushback on campus, in media, and in politics.

After a Chinese-born professor had to give up teaching his class at the University of Michigan in October for showing students a dated film in which Laurence Olivier appeared in blackface, nearly 700 faculty members signed a letter calling for his reinstatement. The dean of Yale Law School, a staging ground for some of the most notorious abuses of this era, publicly expressed regret after school administrators last year tried to make a student recite a humiliating apology script following a trumped-up outrage (he had sent a jocular party invitation referring to his apartment as a trap house). This spring, after protesters shouted down a Federalist Society event on campus, the dean called this unacceptable and said at a minimum it violated the norms of this Law School. Meanwhile, a growing list of colleges is following the University of Chicagos 2015 establishment of the principle that a campus should be a place for free debate.

The recent Times editorial defending free speech against threats on both sides represents a turning point. The articles rather anodyne free-speech-is-good argument masked its larger significance: Americas most important newspaper was implicitly promising not to let social-media outrage campaigns dictate its decisions. The Philadelphia Inquirer in February published a history of its own blinkered racial past by Wesley Lowery that revealed how angry readers forced its well-regarded executive editor to resign over a column by the papers architecture critic* lamenting the burning of buildings during the George Floyd protests. While Lowery told the story in a neutral, just-the-facts way, it was impossible to interpret its publication as anything but a confession of error.

After Democrats lost seats in Congress in 2020, and nearly lost the presidency, they began to say out loud things they only whispered privately before. Former Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter blamed white wokeness for denying the crime wave in his city. Congressman Ruben Gallego seethed over the lefts use of the word Latinx: When Latino politicos use the term, it is largely to appease white rich progressives who think that is the term we use. San Francisco mayor London Breed, whose city is also facing a spike in crime, lashed out at the bullshit that has destroyed our city.

I can think of three reasons why the PC wave may be ebbing. The first is that many liberals who were uncertain how to respond to these norms have seen enough of them to decide they dont like them, having gone from positive or indifferent to critical. Writers like Matthew Yglesias and Jeffrey Sachs, who a few years ago were dismissing the notion of any rising trend of illiberalism on the left as a myth, have since conceded the trend is very real. Left-wing publications like Jacobin and commentators like Briahna Joy Gray have increasingly criticized the lefts rigid approach to gender and identity.

Second, the cultural changes brought about by these ideas quickly exposed their inherent impracticality. One response to the Floyd murder was a massive surge in demand for workplace racial-sensitivity training, some of which was clumsy and some of which was simply ludicrous. Some anti-racism trainings defined white supremacy to include written communication, a sense of urgency, scientific, linear thinking, planning for the future, and other habits of any viable organization.

The third, and largest, factor curtailing political correctness was the 2020 elections. The defeat of Donald Trump removed an accelerant in the discourse. By rubbing the countrys face in his unapologetic racism, and posing as a transparently disingenuous critic of cancel culture (who was, in reality, trying to cancel his critics all the time), Trump did more to encourage PC excess than a thousand Robin DiAngelos could have.

The Democrats middling performances in 2020 and the 2021 off-year elections, and the lessons they might contain for the upcoming midterms, have brought elected Democrats face-to-face with the consequences of allowing the most militant members of the progressive movement to bully their party into adopting maximalist stances on issues like school closings, immigration enforcement, and crime. Its now much harder for progressives to depict, say, support for enforcing immigration law or opposition to defunding the police as inherently racist when its clear the communities supposedly offended by those positions support them. There is an old saying that politics is downstream from culture, but in this case, culture is downstream from politics. When Democratic elected officials openly blamed their troubles on purity tests imposed by social activists, it gave permission for liberals elsewhere to resist tactics to which they had previously submitted.

It turns out that democracy itself has been the corrective factor. The passions of the past half-decade have shown that, for all its faults, the Democratic Party, with its multiracial coalition that is accountable to the public, is the institution in American life that is best equipped to beat back illiberalism. The Republican Party succumbed completely to fanaticism long ago.

*Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that the Philadelphia Inquirers architecture critic resigned over a column published during the George Floyd protests.

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Political Correctness Is Losing - New York

Ive always loved Barstool Sports, but the companys freakout after Roe fell has been telling. Theyre willing to challenge elite politics when it comes to just about everything except sexual ethics.

In one of his Emergency Press Conferences last weekend, Portnoy reacted to Dobbs v. Jackson by saying the nation is going back in time. Portnoys employees at Barstool got busy retweeting his video and posting their own pro-abortion content as well. This includes the second biggest personality at Barstool and Portnoys right hand, Dan Big Cat Katz. Katz reacted differently when Portnoy interviewed former President Donald Trump two years ago, lambasting him for politicizing the company.

The CEOs support for abortion, then, is all the more revealing about where the left draws the line on what matters to them. If Portnoy wasnt kicked out of his social standing for his take on Covid restrictions or for speaking with Trump, his brazen appeal to the left on abortion shows how strongly they value men and womens ability to have sex without consequences.

Barstool has raked in immense profits from podcasts like Call Her Daddy which provide women step-by-step guides to encourage new sexual experiences. While CHD Host Alex Cooper promoted female empowerment through performing raunchy sexual acts, men like Portnoy benefit from an increasingly loose culture surrounding sex. And his freedom to sleep around and enjoy womens bodies for carnal pleasure partially hinges on easy access to abortion.

In lock-step with most on the left, Portnoys arguments in the video concerning a womans geographical abortion access and disrespect for conservatives regard for the Second Amendment hold no substantive constitutional ground. This makes sense considering he then ushered in one of the most consistent narratives of the leftist elite: the Constitution is no longer useful or worthy of respect.

At what point do you look at the Constitution and say hey, this was written by people who had slaves. Maybe not everything is exactly to a tee in the Constitution? Like a million years from now, youre going to use a document written Portnoy said. The world evolves, people evolve, technology evolves, youve got to evolve. You cant stick with this document and look at that and be like thats the end all, be all.

The obvious fallacies in that argument aside, Portnoy isnt a full-fledged progressive by any means. In fact, he has a reputation for riling up the left. As the leader of what can only be described as a media and pop culture behemoth, Portnoys staunch views on individual liberty have generated a lot of negative attention from corporate media.

They groan when Portnoy appears on Tucker Carlson Tonight, they roll their eyes as he champions private enterprise through his pro small business charity, The Barstool Fund, and they threw a fit when he met with President Donald Trump for an interview at the White House. Barstool Sports as a company is known for its outright rejection of political correctness.

Much of what makes Portnoy so iconic and Barstool so appealing to young people are these acts displaying such indifference for what causes corporate America seems to heed. According to a poll in Morning Consult, Gen Z-ers are far less likely than millennials to hold a favorable view toward cancel culture. Portnoys recent comments and his companys actions, however, fail to provide the kind of independent thought unabridged by special interests that they crave. His arguments from the press conference are uniform to that of other woke corporations.

Later in the video, Portnoy called the left crazy and President Joe Biden a moron. But he defended his voting for them due to what he sees as the rights involvement in Supreme Court failures, and he used the opportunity to insert one more plug of support for another leftist cause: same-sex marriage:

I end up having to vote for a moron like Biden because the right is going to put Supreme Court people in who are just ruining this country by taking basic rights away You look at what theyre doing and its like, youre taking away basic rights. Whats next? Same-sex marriage? Like what is next? Its insane. Thats why we have to vote for the moron like Biden whos borderline incompetent because its too dangerous to vote Republican.

Barstool also now has an LGBT podcast entitled Out and About, for which the company allocated $100,000 toward a rainbow flag truck. Many of the companys most famous personalities were at the gay pride parades in Chicago and New York City in June, which they made sure no one missed on social media.

Further publicizing his recent elite opinion, a former critic of his at the liberal Business Insider published an article highlighting Portnoys pro-abortion viewpoint the same day Portnoy posted the video.

This level of pandering on sexual ethics helps someone like Portnoy eliminate some of his own bad press hes amassed and makes him more appealing to those within the elite social spheres he runs, such as the Hamptons where he bought a nearly $10 million beach house earlier this year. Even though Portnoy has garnered so much of his following from young people eager to cling to a figure who doesnt subscribe to the accepted mainstream narrative, hes no rebel when it comes to toeing the line on what the left values most highly.

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Barstool Subverts Elites On Everything Except Sexual Ethics - The Federalist

AN ARCHBISHOP AND SISTER FROM THE MIDDLE EAST ISSUED A STARK warning to UK Parliamentarians that Christians in the region are still suffering persecution.

At a July 5th event organized yesterday by Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) for the 2022 International Ministerial Conference on Freedom of Religion and Belief, Archbishop Bashar Warda of Erbil, Iraq, and Sister Annie Demerjian of Aleppo, Syria, described the precarious position of Christians in the region.

Archbishop Warda said: There are still people being persecuted because of their faith and thankfully ACN didnt accept the political correctness and said, Yes, Christians are being persecuted.

The Chaldean Catholic Archbishop went on to thank ACN for the schools the organization has helped build, saying that investment in education for Iraqi Christians has helped fight the genocide undertaken by ISIS. If our children lose their schools, thats the genocide, wiping out the past, the present and the future. So, we hold to the future. Thank you to ACN for being the voice for the persecuted Christians, he said.

Sister Annie, who has ministered to suffering Christians in Syria since the start of the civil war in 2011, said that the faithful are now struggling more than during the war.

She said: Now the situation is worse than during the time of war and as our nuncio Cardinal Zenari said, 90 percent of the population is under the poverty line. We are headed for a humanitarian disaster and yet the world is not listening and is not hearing. The media is not hearing about Syria, it is not interested anymore.

Sister Annie went on to describe a traumatic incident that affected her family: One day a bomb fell near the house of my brother. After a while, my niece went to see what was happening and was shocked to see her father without his head. From the shock she couldnt talk anymore. My niece later said to her mum, Mum, will they put an artificial head on like they do for legs and hands? For me this is a persecution, when we take the childhood of our children.

Also speaking was Bishop William Kenney, Auxiliary Bishop Emeritus of Birmingham, who placed the persecution of Christians in a wider context of violence. Pope Francis thinks World War Three has already happened, but it has been happening in lots of different places. There are over 40 major conflicts in the world, he said.

Fionn Shiner

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'Christian persecution never ended in Middle East - Aid to the Church in Need

Bette Midler recently made a political statement that kind of made sense.

The liberal actress posted a tweet on Independence Day complaining about the erasure of women that got more than 100,000 likes.

WOMEN OF THE WORLD! she wrote. We are being stripped of our rights over our bodies, our lives and even of our name! They dont call us women anymore; they call us birthing people or menstruators, and even people with vaginas! Dont let them erase you! Every human on earth owes you!

While Midler is wrong about abortion, which kills an innocent human being, the second half of her tweet makes more sense.

Midler is correct that these woke terms people use to describe women are terrible, and liberals should stop using them.

Nowadays, liberals, including politicians, use terms such as birthing people and menstruators (or people who menstruate). Notably, U.S. Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) and U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) have referred to women as "birthing people." Meanwhile, terms such as humans with vaginas, people with vaginas, and bodies with vaginas have appeared in the liberal sphere.

These are terms used to describe those whom normal people would refer to as women. Liberals who use these terms see them as inclusive because they include women who say they're men and women who identify as made-up Tumblr genders.

While the liberals who use these terms may feel like theyre being inclusive, theyre not. Its not hard to call women women. Instead, they opt for dehumanizing, and frankly gross, alternatives.

A few years ago, just about everyone would have agreed that calling people by the name of their genitals or a reference to their genitalia is not only an insulting and gross reduction of people but also perverted. The facts remain the same: It's still gross and dehumanizing.

This also correctly feeds into the perception that liberals are too woke and politically correct. That approach is off-putting to normal people, who dislike the PC police: 80% of Americans view excessive political correctness as a problem, according to a 2018 poll conducted by More in Common.

Along with using terms such as Latinx and womxn, these weird terms to describe women are not a good look for the Democratic Party; notice we dont see any Republicans using these terms. If the Democratic Party wants to win elections, it should want people to think its candidates are normal people. Needlessly weird behavior like this will not help that perception, even if it has little to do with policy.

Here is the solution to this issue: Call people what they are men and women. Its not hard.

Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a political reporter for the New Boston Post in Massachusetts.

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Bette Midler is right about the erasure of women - Washington Examiner

The date 1619 does not appear in the introduction to African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals, Pulitzer-Prize-winning historian David Hackett Fischers encyclopaedic, magisterial new book. But the controversial project that takes that date as its name launched first as a special issue of The New York Times magazine in 2019 to mark 400 years since the first slaves arrived at Jamestown, fronted by the journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones and now adapted into a bestselling book and nationwide classroom curricula is the elephant in the room as he ambitiously documents the contributions to the Republic of African Americans in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.

Hackett Fischer, a professor of History at Brandeis University, notes that with many important exceptions, the tone of much American historical writing turned deeply negative during the early 21st century. It remained so as these words were written, in 2021. He complains of demands for political correctness on campus and laments a public discourse in which we have seen a growing disregard for truth, and a cultivated carelessness of fact and evidence. He argues that ancient ideas of open inquiry and empirical truth have gained a new importance, in part because of hostile assaults upon them from many directions.

African Founders has been years in the making. My substantive work on this project had its beginning in 1955, writes Hackett Fischer, 86, in the books acknowledgments. But, with the history wars raging, it arrives in the nick of time.

To set the scene, briefly, the 1619 Project aims to reframe the countrys history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very centre of our national narrative. Since it was launched, 1619 has been rebutted and debunked by American historians of comparable or even higher standing than Hackett Fischer (a very select group). Among those who have pointed out its many distortions, lies and inaccuracies is Gordon S. Wood, perhaps Americas greatest living historian, who has said he was surprised the project could be so wrong in so many ways. When another esteemed historian, Leslie M. Harris, expressed her reservations about one of 1619s core claims that the American Revolution was fought in large part to preserve slavery in North America to a New York Times fact-checker, she was ignored.

Since publication, The New York Times has stealthily edited contentious passages while Hannah-Jones seems to spend most of her time arguing on Twitter, accusing her critics of being old white dudes who Just Dont Get It. In one swiftly deleted tweet, she appeared to revel in the idea that the violent eruptions of the summer of 2020 be called the 1619 riots. None of these problems with the 1619 Project as a work have dampened its impact on American public life.

This is the fraught landscape into which African Founders arrives. A few asides in the introduction notwithstanding, Hackett Fischers rebuttal to the vogue for deeply pessimistic history is quieter and less direct than that of many of his colleagues. But that makes it all the more persuasive. African Founders is a devastating counter-example: a thorough, compelling work free from the didacticism of both 1619 and conservative attempts to set the record straight, such as the 1776 commission launched by Donald Trump in 2020.

African Founders is a successor to Hackett Fischers most lauded work, Albions Seed. Published in 1989, it described how settlers from different parts of the British Isles imported a range of enduring folkways culture, religion, language, ethics and so on to different parts of what would become the United States: East Anglican puritans in New England, southern gentry in Virginia, Quakers from Wales and the Midlands in Pennsylvania, and Scots-Irish border folk in Appalachia. (The enthusiasm of the descendants of that final group for Donald Trump caused many pundits to dust off their copies of Albions Seed after 2016.) Taking the same regional approach, African Founders charts the migrations, cultures and political and social contributions of slaves, freed slaves and their descendants throughout America.

It is hard to overstate the scope of this 900-page work. Open it at random and you will find subheadings such as How African School Children In Philadelphia taught Benjamin Franklin A Lesson About Race and Diversity of African Traditions Among Afro-Texan Cowhands. Breaking up the demographic, social and political big picture are stories of many African Americans whose tireless work didnt just win freedom for themselves but helped to expand the very notion of American liberty.

Many of the most pre-eminent such heroes came from Chesapeake Virginia and Maryland, foremost among them Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. Hackett Fischer argues that this was no coincidence. The prominence of men from the region in the founding of the United States George Washington and Thomas Jefferson being the two most obvious examples left a lasting impression on a later generation of slaves-turned-leaders: These former Chesapeake built on a regional tradition of leadership, and reached beyond it in creative ways. They learned from its strengths, corrected its weaknesses, and invented other new ways of leading from their own heritage and experience.

Hackett Fischer spotlights less well-known figures too. Juan Rodriguez, for example, was an enterprising black mulatto who became the first documented non-native settler on Manhattan: he liked the look of the island and blagged his way off a Dutch merchant ship in 1613. Rodriguez fought for his freedom, fended off an attempted enslavement, married an Indian wife, became a successful trader and a translator and go-between for the Dutch and American Indians. Several scholars have called him Manhattans first merchant.

In New England, the enslaved poet Phillis Wheatly, named for the ship on which she was brought to Boston in 1761, confounded racist expectations and won praise for verse that Hackett Fischer calls a large-spirited celebration of a common spirit in all people everywhere. As well as the racism she encountered in her own time, Wheatly would later be criticised by black nationalists, who werent especially keen on her short poem On being Brought from Africa to America: Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land/Taught my benighted soul to understand. Hackett Fischer notes the irony in the similarities between the black nationalist critiques and the contemporary racist criticism, including from Thomas Jefferson.

Hackett Fischer is clear that none of this should detract from the cruelty of slavery or the racist violence that followed. His book is full of terrifying detail of the lives of slaves across America, including detailed accounts of how those experiences varied over time and geography. But he understands that lingering on the horrors of slavery only get you so far in understanding Americas past.

The story told by Hackett Fischer stands in stark contrast to the demotivating, almost paralysing lesson of the 1619 Project: slavery not as Americas original sin but something hardwired into its DNA, a past that cannot be escaped. It is a dispiritingly static view of the country. Rather than displaying a curiosity at the paradox that has animated so much American history How is it, asked Dr Johnson in 1775, that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes? the 1619 approach dogmatically sweeps aside everything other than the existence of slavery as minor details in the story of the United States.

African Founders, by contrast, demonstrates that there doesnt need to be a trade-off between centring the experience and stories of black Americans and an appreciation of the gift of American liberty. Indeed, the takeaway from Hackett Fischers work is that the latter cannot be achieved without the former.

What if we told a story that centred slavery and Black Americans and, well, no one read it, writes Nikole Hannah-Jones in the introduction to The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, remembering her fretting on the eve of The New York Times magazine special edition. She neednt have worried. It was an overnight sensation. Indeed, measured by impact on the public conversation, rather than merit, the 1619 Project is a more successful contemporary work of opinion journalism or pop history than any other in recent history.

African Founders, by contrast, feels like a book out of time. Inconveniently heavy and equivocal in the age of skinny provocations. Moderate in an era of extremes. But closer to the truth than the divisive works that hog the limelight.

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The antidote to America's race wars - UnHerd

As the Western world moves ever more from an industrial and service economy to a digital one. The leading figures in Big Tech gain ever greater riches, fame and influence over everyones lives. The titans of Big Tech can sometimes seem to be more interested with their pet projects than the real world. Elon Musk toys with buying Twitter, Jeff Bezos plays with his own personal rocket ships and Mark Zuckerberg plots to get the world to immerse itself in the Metaverse he is building. But there is one notable exception to all this, the grown-up in the Big Tech room, a serious man for serious times: Peter Thiel.

Peter Thiel first became a public figure as the co-founder of PayPal in the late 1990s, but his real story begins earlier. The key to understanding Thiel, and why he is a consequential figure, is his youth. He spent his entire university career, 1985-1992, at Stanford University. This exposed him to the ideas of political correctness and identity politics that were just beginning to be formed, but have since taken over the Western world mainstream: ideas that we now call woke. The other key fact from his youth is he was American school chess champion. As a serious chess player, he is always thinking many moves ahead. These youthful factors forged the adult Peter Thiel, who is the centre of a number of overlapping spheres of influence: technological, political and intellectual.

In the case of technology, Thiel is known as the Don of the Pay Pal Mafia. This mafia are the group of people (actually all men) who were involved in the founding of PayPal twenty years ago and have gone on to found or transform a remarkable number of other companies: LinkedIn, Tesla, SpaceX, You Tube, Yelp and Yammer. The most famous of these people is not Thiel, but Elon Musk, who is very much the front-of-house performer, with Thiel as the impresario. As well as those he worked with, Thiel himself was the first outside investor in Facebook (as was) and only quite recently February 2022 left the Meta (as it is now) board. Thiels most significant current tech company is undoubtedly Palantir. As I have written here for TheArticle, Britain will be hearing a lot more about Palantir in the future, especially in the context of the NHS. While the key executive at Palantir is Alex Karp, the CEO, it was Thiel who convinced Karp to join Palantir in the first place.

In relation to politics, the media always mention Thiels backing for Trump in 2016 as if there were not plenty of other American billionaires who did not support Trump as the Republican candidate. Thiels role is significant because he supported Trumpism, as much as Trump himself. He is helping to reshape the Republican Party from a pro-free trade, pro-foreign intervention party, into something very different. The emerging Republican Party, while continuing the social conservatism of the 1980s, is much more protectionist, favouring stronger border controls and scepticism about foreign interventions.

Typically of Thiel, his own associates are seeking to take front line elected positions. J D Vance, who worked for one of Thiels firms, has just secured the Republican nomination for a Senate seat in Ohio. His outside shot of winning the nomination would almost certainly not have succeeded, but for Thiels donations of over $10 million to a superPAC supporting Vance. In Arizona, one of the Republican candidates seeking the Senate nomination is Blake Masters, who not only worked for Thiel, but co-wrote a book with him. Thiel, again, boosted his campaign with an initial $10 million dollar donation to a supportive superPAC. If Masters wins the nomination and he and Vance win in November, there will be two young Senators who would not hold office without Thiels support.

His last but perhaps most important in the long run sphere is intellectual. When Jordan Peterson became a global intellectual superstar in 2018, on the back of his book 12 Rules for Life and the associated media appearances, he also became the leading figure in what became known as the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW). The IDW is a group of thinkers, YouTube personalities and journalists that challenged the increasingly Woke narrative of mainstream media and culture. It was not Peterson, however, who coined the term IDW, but Eric Weinstein. Eric Weinstein is a public intellectual, physicist, but also an employee of Peter Thiel. Thiels connection to Weinstein has led some of the dimmer parts of the left-wing media to denounce the IDW as a far right conspiracy. Anyone who has ever heard Eric Weinstein speak will know how ridiculous that is. The fact Weinstein is clearly a member of what used to be thought of as the mainstream Left shows Thiels embrace of different intellectual influences. The true impact of IDW will only be felt in the next twenty years, as those influenced by its podcasts, ideas and books filter into the wider culture.

The scale of the intersecting spheres of Thiels influence on American culture is difficult to overestimate. It is American culture that sets the tone for the rest of the Western world: just look at the international coverage of the overturning of Roe v Wade by the US Supreme Court. This why Peter Thiel, his ideas and his associates are going to be influencing the world for decades to come.

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Peter Thiel: the grown-up in the Big Tech room - TheArticle

DISTURBED singer David Draiman says that he "couldn't be more proud" of his bandmate Dan Donegan for taking on "cancel culture" with his new guitar.

Earlier today (Wednesday, July 6),Donegan, who frequently shares posts on his personal Facebook page that amplify Republican talking points and that are derogatory to Democrats, posted a couple of pictures of his new guitar from Schecter Guitars, featuring the words "Fuck Cancel Culture" incorporated into a design that replicates the iconic typography of the Coca-Cola logo.

"The new addition to my arsenal!" Dan captioned his post. "Thank you Marc LaCorte Matt Chewy Dezynski Schecter Guitars #FuckCancelCulture Disturbed".

A short time later, Draiman took to his Twitter to share a picture of the guitar, and he wrote in an accompanying message: "@DanDoneganGtr 's new guitar. I couldn't be more proud @Disturbed".

Cancel culture is the idea that someone, usually a celebrity or a public figure, whose ideas or comments are considered offensive should be boycotted. These people are ostracized and shunned by former friends, followers and supporters alike, leading to declines in any careers and fanbase the individual may have at any given time.

While "cancel culture" may be a recent phenomenon, public scapegoating, shaming and silencing tactics are not. Republicans have for a long time used the phrase "cancel culture" to criticize the left, even though there's a long list of supposedly left-leaning associates who have been targeted or boycotted by conservatives, including Colin Kaepernick, Disney, Nike, Campbell's Soup, THE DIXIE CHICKS and Kathy Griffin.

Draiman and Donegan are not the first rock musicians to speak out against cancel culture. Last month, KISS frontman Paul Stanley tweeted: "I find myself thinking 'Cancel Culture' is more dangerous than what it wants to cancel. Is censorship and silencing people okay if you believe you're right?? That is a slope we're already slipping down. You defeat lies with truth, not gags."

Stanley and his KISS bandmate Gene Simmons previously spoke out against cancel culture while answering questions from fans at a KISS VIP exclusive soundcheck event in September 2021 in Austin, Texas. At the time, they defended actress Gina Carano after she was ousted from "The Mandalorian" over controversial social media posts.

Carano a former MMA fighter who played Cara Dune in the hit Disney+ show was dropped in February 2021 over a post that likened being a conservative in modern America to being a Jew in Nazi Germany.

Simmons and Stanley, who are both Jewish, were asked if they were fans of the breakout series. Gene called "The Mandalorian" "one of the best shows on TV" and said in reference to Carano: "They should have kept the chick, even though she had different political [views]. It's not about politics; it's about whether you're a good actress."

A couple of minutes later, Paul also weighed in on the topic, saying: "Look, political views This whole cancel culture is so dangerous. The idea that people can't speak their mind. That's what freedom is all about. And to lose your job because you've got something to say even if I find it offensive that's... we've gotta look at that. Plus she can kick my ass."

In April 2021, TWISTED SISTER singer Dee Snider, who was famously called to testify before the U.S. Senate against the proposition to have warning labels be placed on albums deemed "offensive" to listeners, said that "censorship has changed quite a bit" over the last few decades. "Now censorship still exists, but it's gone from the right more to the left," he told NewsNation's "Banfield". "We're in this P.C. world where we have to be careful about what we say and who we offend, and it's a very odd thing."

That same month, Snider's TWISTED SISTER bandmate Jay Jay French addressed the fact that the current trend of canceling people and companies has gotten out of hand during an interview with Rocking With Jam Man. Speaking about the fact that Marilyn Manson was accused by several women of abuse and assault, including "Westworld" actress Evan Rachel Wood, who claimed in a social media post that Manson "groomed" and "horrifically" abused her for years, the guitarist said: "Michael Jackson got accused of some pretty bad stuff, but Michael Jackson music is still being played. So, obviously, somebody decided that that was okay; someone decided that's not gonna bother people. And yet other people's music has been taken off. [Former pop star] Gary Glitter played in all the arenas around the country baseball stadiums, football stadiums, everything. But then Gary Glitter got arrested for some weird stuff he did in Thailand with underage children and got banned everywhere. When I say 'banned,' I just mean the people said, 'We're not gonna play his music anywhere,' so they don't play his music. And I am in no way endorsing in any manner, way, shape or form his actions. What I'm saying is that that is a byproduct of what happens in life in general. And it's terrible."

He continued: "Cancel culture is not a healthy thing. Cancel culture is not healthy, because it just depends on who decides to do the canceling. So if they like TWISTED SISTER, we don't get canceled, we are okay, but if they hate TWISTED SISTER and they cancel us, it's not okay, so therefore it's not okay just to do it randomly. It's a personal choice. If you don't wanna buy something by somebody, don't buy it, but for the media to withhold it is opening up a can of worms that is almost impossible to put back in the jar."

Dee previously spoke about political correctness in 2020 when he told Canada's The Metal Voice that a movie like "Blazing Saddles", the 1974 American satirical Western black comedy film directed by Mel Brooks "could not be made today it literally could not be made, because it would offend too many people."

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DISTURBED Frontman 'Couldn't Be More Proud' Of His Bandmate For Taking On 'Cancel Culture' With New Guitar - BLABBERMOUTH.NET

The late Senator John McCains widow, Cindy McCain, claimed that her late husband wouldnt approve of the Republican Party as it is today.

Prior to Thursdays White House ceremony, when Senator John McCain will receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the countrys highest civilian honour, posthumously, she spoke with MSNBCs Andrea Mitchell.

Cindy McCain declared that her husband, a seasoned Republican senator from Arizona, will fight like the dickens to unify the party.

I dont think my spouse would be able to tell, she remarked. I do know one thing, he would be fighting like the dickens to pull it back together and restore it to what it was throughout past Republican administrations and earlier administrations as well, the speaker said.

Her remarks come amid a partisan debate among Republicans, much of which focused on what part Donald Trump ought to play.

As Joe Bidens ambassador to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture and someone who supported him in the 2020 presidential run, Cindy McCain declared herself to be a Republican.

I remain a Republican. I support the party and what we stand for, but at the moment we arent sure where we are going. And so, as the years pass, Im hoping that maybe we can turn things around and do what Republicans do best, which is strive for smaller government while working in a bipartisan way, she said.

John McCain, who passed away in 2018 from brain illness, was renowned for his maverick persona and frequent defiance of his party, including his decisive action to save Barack Obamas Affordable Care Act.

Joe Biden, who delivered one of the eulogies at his Arizona funeral, was a close friend of him.

He was also a frequent critic of Donald Trump, who was not given permission to attend his state funeral in Washington, D.C. McCains capture by the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War had drawn criticism from Trump. McCain spent five and a half years as a prisoner of war.

During the 2016 presidential race, Trump famously remarked about McCain, I admire guys who werent kidnapped.

On Thursday, Cindy McCain will attend the Medal of Freedom ceremony at the White House.

She also praised Republican Rep. Liz Cheney, who has been under fire from Trump for supporting his second amendment and serving on the committee looking into the January 6th uprising.

Cindy McCain described Cheney as wonderful and claimed to have spoken with her frequently.

She described the other individual as an amazing lady, adding, I have chatted with her both on the phone and over email, et cetera, during this time.

She commended Cheney for putting the needs of the nation before political correctness. Trump is actively campaigning against Cheney and supporting Harriet Hageman, who is Cheneys opponent in the GOP primary.

Cheneys actions, McCain acknowledged, might cost her her position in Congress. In polls, she is lagging behind Hagement.

I simply believe that her strength and her capacity to see beyond the here and now and consider what is best for the nation, and it may ultimately cost her, her political aspirations.

She remarked, But she can go to bed at night knowing that she made the correct decision.

On Thursday, President Joe Biden will present the Presidential Medal of Freedom to 17 individuals, including actor Denzel Washington and gymnast Simone Biles, in addition to John McCain.

According to the White House, the award is given to individuals who have made extraordinary contributions to the prosperity, values, or security of the United States, to international peace, or to other significant societal public or private undertakings.

Related

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The late Senator John McCains widow, Cindy McCain, claimed that her late husband wouldnt approve of the Republican Party as it is today - TDPel Media

This is an opinion editorial by Jimmy Song, a Bitcoin developer, educator and entrepreneur and programmer with over 20 years of experience.

Audio read of article here.

Nobody wants to do the hard work of verification.

Instead most people want to just trust somebody and not worry about seeking out the truth. I get it, verification is hard. Verification is time consuming, it requires effort and taxes your brain. This is because the truth does not give itself up easily, especially when obscured by the people that want to get away with something. The critical thinking, research skills and analytical ability required are not easy to obtain, either.

Unfortunately, the fewer people who verify, the more trusted third-parties become a problem. This is not just true in bitcoin custody, as we're all too familiar with in the light of 3 Arrows Capital, Voyager and BlockFi, but in all sorts of other fields. The metaphorical cookie jar is very tempting for the trusted third-parties.

There are two kinds of knowledge. The kind that you have verified yourself this bed is comfortable and the kind that you are told (unless you're an experimental physicist, E=mc2). The kind that we've verified ourselves should be the one that we're more willing to stick our necks out for, but sadly, this is not the case.

Conventional wisdom, political correctness and the general desire to fit in and not get made fun of hinder our willingness to "die on that hill." There are social pressures at play that throw verified knowledge out the window.

There's a famous experiment in psychology which demonstrates this effect called the Solomon-Ash Conformity Experiment. The participants were tested on whether they would give the answer that was obviously true or the false answer that would conform to the answers of everyone else. The experiment was a simple comparison about the length of a line. About 2/3 of people ended up conforming to a false answer rather than being the lone truth teller.

This tendency is what authorities exploit. Many people would rather conform to popular opinion than say what they believe. Thus, trusted third-parties know they can get away with lies as most people will conform to the perceived popular opinion. The authorities can essentially tell us what we should believe. This is what I call fiat knowledge, and it's a major vector of manipulation.

Rationally, knowledge that's given to us by someone else should be treated with more skepticism than knowledge we've gained directly. Yet when we are confronted by peers or authorities, we suddenly feel less confident in our knowledge unless it happens to jive with what others believe. It's much easier to defend something when you know you have the support of the crowd, than to defend something that doesn't.

This is especially true of specialized or technical knowledge. It's much easier to rely on an authority's conclusions than to come up with our own. It feels better to be wrong with the crowd than to be right alone. There's also the amount of time, money and effort to consider. Do you really want to dig through hundreds of pages, find all the flaws and analyze everything? Verification for most technical things just isn't worth the hassle.

As a result, the trusted third-parties can manipulate everyone who depends on them. By being the source of not just knowledge but also the actions that should be taken from that knowledge, the trusted few can get away with immoral behavior that hurts people.

The most obvious of cases is what the health authorities did during COVID-19. The trusted third parties demanded certain actions, which quickly became regulation. Anyone questioning the main narrative got canceled and called extremists. Rather than having to seek the truth and defend it, most people took the intellectually lazier route of defending whatever the authorities said. It's just a lot less hassle to do what we're told even if truth is sacrificed.

Verification is simply too costly. These costs include significant harassment, many enemies and denied opportunities. Getting along with the powers that be generally means trusting, not verifying.

Of course, trusting authorities is a Faustian bargain. Sacrificing the truth has some serious consequences.

First, trusting means that you will get manipulated by the people in authority. The demand for trust is a game of power. Giving in necessarily means that you've given up some power. These include the power to object or think for yourself. The authorities will demand crazier and crazier beliefs as a test of compliance. Stalin, for example, had meetings at 4:00 AM and put on music and demanded everyone dance except for himself. This may sound ridiculous, but is it really more ridiculous than masking outdoors during the summer?

Second, trusting means that your sense of reality will be seriously distorted. Whenever there's disagreement on an issue, there will always be arguments for both sides. Instead of verifying, the temptation will be to pick what you want to be true first and then adopt the arguments for that side. Not only is this seriously lazy, but it leaves you very vulnerable to believing a bunch of lies. This is a great way to disconnect from reality and suffer when your desired belief is found to be false. Think about all the people that lost a ton of money on Ponzi schemes. Most of them wanted to believe and didn't seek truth and suffered as a result.

Third, trusting means that you never learn responsibility. Going with the crowd is always much easier than learning to defend something unpopular. But it also makes you depend on others for your arguments. You never really learn the arguments the same way you would if you prioritized truth. Many people never learn to verify in the same way that many people never learn to custody their own keys. They don't want the headache of responsibility. They'd rather live life letting others do the work for them. This is the attitude of little children, not full grown adults. And sadly, immaturity and irresponsible behavior seem to be the norm, even for older adults.

In a sense, fiat money is a subset of the fiat knowledge as the whole system of central banking was set up to exploit the lack of verification by people. This gave free rein to authorities who wanted to get away with immoral behavior.

The current central bank backed fiat monetary system is obscure and difficult to understand. This is so that the mechanism of theft is hard to discover. The trust, don't verify mentality surrounds this system.

For example, why is it so difficult to audit the Fed? Gary North, in his book talks about being a staffer for Ron Paul. He tells of how he wanted to know who were the shareholders of the Federal Reserve. It was apparently taboo even to ask that question on The Hill. Why is that? Could it be that the people getting rich from the current system want to continue their grift?

The underlying dynamic at play is that the trust, don't verify mentality allows those in power to get away with unethical behavior. At some level, trust is broken so someone can do something they wouldn't do in full daylight.

Because so much money is printed through the current monetary system, there is an added emphasis on the dynamics of power. There are monetary rewards and rent-seeking positions available to those who will say what those in power want them to say, so the truth is further obscured. Trust flows to these designated experts and verification becomes even more costly.

As a result, fiat knowledge thrives because of fiat money. As more money flows toward designated experts, they have more means to obscure their findings and make it more difficult to verify, therefore ossifying their rent-seeking position.

The sad result is that almost all knowledge people have is now based on trust, not verification. Given the incentives of the experts, this knowledge is likely not reflecting reality. Instead of a market based on rational analysis by independent verifiers, we have a lot more centralization where trust in a particular group of experts is the norm. The distortions this produces are great as is the obscuring of truth.

The result is a phenomenon that I like to call fiat intellectuals. These are people that say enough buzzwords to sound like they know what they're talking about, but don't actually know very much. These gullible dupes know that most people won't verify what they say and they are confident enough in their obscuring abilities to cast doubt on the few people that do.

In our space, the most obvious of these are the business school types that talk about blockchain as if it's some magical device. This also goes for people that want to bring up quantum computing or proof-of-stake. They know enough to sound smart, but haven't verified anything. They trust some authority which usually means that they have been manipulated into believing they know something.

You can always tell these people have been manipulated by some of the ridiculous platitudes they spout.

"The truth is probably somewhere in between."

"So many people working on this thing probably means there's something useful there."

Fiat intellectuals are lazy and can't be bothered to actually learn the topic and instead rely on other people to tell them what's true. Sadly, most of the people in power, whether it be C-level executives, VCs or politicians are very much fiat intellectuals and are ripe for manipulation.

This is why so many altcoins have such high valuations. Almost every investor, even very big ones, do not verify, they trust. Think about what happened with LUNA and how many large players were involved in that complete disaster. Galaxy, 3AC and Celsius are just three names that were in the news recently due to this. They didn't verify and instead picked and chose what they wanted to believe. They wanted to believe their investments weren't scams and they all suffered as a result.

The pattern we're seeing in the "crypto" markets is the same as that of central banks. It seems there is a purposeful obscuring of everything that's going on. The Ethereum 2.0 platform is egregiously complex for that reason. White papers are difficult to read and are hundreds of pages for that reason. They imitate the complexity of central banks because they are exactly that private central banks. They obscure what's going on for the same reason, because they want to get away with immoral behavior.

Bitcoin has a radically different ethic of verify, don't trust. It's in that spirit that so many plebs have learned to run their own nodes, custodied their own keys and even learned to code. Verification at a deep level is what keeps everyone honest. We encourage verification in the community for that reason. We don't rely on central authorities and that means we don't get screwed by their immoral behavior.

This is in stark contrast to fiat monetary regimes and altcoins. They are all about relying on the trust of their designated experts and not about verifying anything yourself. They discourage running your own node because they don't want you to verify. The complexity of those systems is specifically geared toward making verification unrealistic and difficult.

This is why altcoiners become more like fiat intellectuals over time. They know lots of buzzwords but do little to really verify the truth of their respective systems. Hence, many of them are held down to the bottom because they really don't know anything about the systems they purport to understand. They believe what they want to believe and lose connection with reality. Such is the end for fiat intellectuals.

The truth is that fiat intellectuals are intellectual slaves of those in power. They are anything but self-sovereign and have convinced themselves that it's too much responsibility, too much work, too much effort. The only real path of self-sovereignty is to do the hard work of verification in all aspects. We cannot be free until we're free from the shackles of our intellectual chains. And that freedom is earned through verification. We must be relentless and seek truth.

Freedom isn't free.

This is a guest post by Jimmy Song. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

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Fiat Knowledge: Only Bitcoin Creates A Culture That Rewards Verification - Bitcoin Magazine

OVER the Independence Day weekend the Biden Administration shifted its blame for rising prices, and specifically rising prices of gasoline, from Vladimir Putin to gasoline retailers. On Saturday, July 2nd at noon, President Bidens Twitter account inveighed:

My message to the companies running gas stations and setting prices at the pump is simple: this is a time of war and global peril. Bring down the price you are charging at the pump to reflect the cost youre paying for the product. And do it now.

On July 1, 2022, the average price of gasoline in the United States was $5.34 per gallon. Thats down from the high of $5.47 per gallon hit two weeks ago, but still a historically elevated level. On the New York Mercantile Exchange, gasoline futures prices are up 57% in 2022. Diesel recently topped $5.75 per gallon and now sits at $5.73 per gallon, its highest price in decades.

The largest factor input for both gasoline and diesel is the price of oil, which has eased back some over the last month. The major reason for the price declines in both oil and products derived from oil are a mounting accumulation of economic data suggesting that an anticipated recession may already be here. (The first calculation of the second quarter U.S. GDP number will be released on July 28th.) But even despite the recent price declines, West Texas Intermediate remains up over 37% in 2022, Brent Crude up 38%.

Both misinformation and disinformation are essential skills in politics, but under the pressure of rising inflation and slowing economic growth the current administration has expanded the practice to new frontiers. The tweet, which was undoubtedly not written by the President but to which he has lent his name, begins with a salvo directed at the companies running gas stations.

In fact, of an estimated 145,000 fueling stations across the United States, less than 5% (7,250) are owned by refiners who would be, as the President says, setting prices. But even that small number of gas stations are not ultimately setting the price of gasoline. The prices first derived on world oil markets, a major contributor to which are decisions of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, are the major factor.

Further, more than 60% of retail stations are establishments singularly owned by a family or an individual. And while the number has undoubtedly changed over the last decade, 2013 Census data reported that 61% of those stations are owned by immigrants. Thus the Democratic administration that rails daily against billionaires and big companies has taken direct aim at mom & pop stores, in so doing assaulting the newest arrivals to the United States, upon whom it is clear the left and much of the Democratic Party stake their political future.

As for the present time being one of war and global peril, how tied the interests of the United States are to either of the combatants in southeastern Europe is a matter of opinion. If indeed peril is to be avoided, adopting a far more neutral stance than that which has tens of billions of taxpayer dollars and lethal weapons being sent 5,000 miles would be a wiser approach.

But it is by admonishing gas station owners to lower their prices that what is deep-seated ignorance, profound dishonesty, or both are exposed.

In fact, even at the current prices, most gas stations earn a pittance from, or actually lose money, selling gasoline alone. According to IBISWorld, whereas the average U.S. business has a profit margin of just under 8% (7.7%), the average gas station scrapes by at less than a quarter of that: 1.4%. At $5.34 per gallon, the average national price of gasoline over the Independence Day weekend, a 1.7% profit would come to $0.09 cents a gallon.

The Hustle estimates that after overhead (labor, utilities, insurance, credit card transaction fees, and so on), a gas station owner receives on the order of five to seven cents per gallon. Even selling a few thousand gallons of gasoline per day would only generate a few hundred dollars free and clear to the owner. Franchise City estimates that $50 spent at the gas pump goes:

$30.75 to the oil company, $7.00 to refineries, $4.00 to the delivery company, $1.25 on processing and transaction fees, and finally right at the end of the chain you get $1.00. And that number can and does change, sometimes even lower, most owners suggesting an average [profit] of 1 to 3 cents net per gallon.

Meanwhile the Federal gasoline tax of $0.18 cents per gallon yields a riskless, unearned fee to Washington of 3.4% per gallon. Thats twice what risk-bearing entrepreneurs, most of whom are small business owners and a sizable portion of whom are immigrants, are receiving. And this doesnt take into account state gasoline taxes, the highest five of which are found in Pennsylvania ($0.57 per gallon), California ($0.51 per gallon), Washington ($0.49 per gallon), New Jersey ($0.42 per gallon), and Illinois ($0.39 cents per gallon).

And none of this takes into account other costs and headaches which accompany gas retailing. Miniscule profits come with the costs and recordkeeping associated with environmental regulations at the local, state, and federal level. Competition tends to be fierce, with numerous locations clustering at high-volume transportation junctions. The price sensitivity of many drivers is active at differences of as little as one cent. Many stations operate 24/7 to maximize revenue. And for those which operate as franchises, in return for name recognition and some volume discounts the associated fees can be enormous. (Not only do franchisees have to pay fees to the parent company, they also have to price their product in accordance with national promotions, which can undercut profitability.)

The awful business economics of gas station ownership are, in fact, why large oil firms and refiners are not interested in it. And it is why theyve reduced their exposure to the consumer-facing end of the energy sector over several decades. Unsurprisingly it is lousy financial prospects that have pushed fueling stations into retailing food, drinks, cigarettes, toiletries, and a wide variety of other goods travelers may want or need. All of those goods have appreciably higher profit margins than retail gasoline sales, and for many independent, single owner-operated service stations are the key to their very survival.

So why do so many immigrants choose a business with seemingly dismal financial prospects? Trisha Gopal explored that question in Eater a bit over a year ago. Kindly remain mindful of Bidens July 2nd tweet while reading her explanation:

As I speak to each owner, I realize the choice of a gas station is always a utilitarian one. When I ask her why they chose a gas station, Angelina Rizo gives me two answers. The first is one I hear from every restaurant owner I speak to: People need gasoline, so as long as people are driving, the more likely they are to have customers, and the more likely those customers will need something to eat. Its an explanation rooted in the same immigrant mentality Ive seen and heard my entire life: Look for opportunities, stay on your toes, and always find a way to be useful. When we wonder why immigrants are so entrepreneurial, its because so many of us are taught to first look to see where we are needed, and then, once we are there, go beyond.

There is a darker component to Bidens redirection of blame as well. It is ironic that an administration built upon an ideological commitment to political correctness and the notion that words should be selected with surgical precision would message this clumsily. Gas station owners, a business community overrepresented by new immigrants to the United States, have frequently been targets of racist and xenophobic ire. Saddling them with blame for a particularly damaging aspect of the ongoing inflation increase is, beyond wildly inaccurate, irresponsible and morally unconscionable.

No one expects government officials, especially career politicians, to understand any of this. Neither have they any incentives to take real economic, financial, and business details into their static, oversimplified missives. The image of gas station proprietors as richly compensated corporate executives at the helm of multinational corporations is one the Biden Administration has a vested interest in promoting. And there is no better measure of a political body out of ideas than an increasingly frenzied leap from scapegoat to scapegoat.

Peter C. Earle holds an MA in Applied Economics from American University, an MBA (Finance), and a BS in Engineering from the United States Military Academy at West Point.

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OPINION | Leave the gas station owners out of it - Marianas Variety News & Views

Thank goodness the political psychodrama of the last few days is over. As the resignations from government sailed past 50 MPs, with Michael Goves sacking thrown in for good measure, a new British farce was in full flow. Carry On, Prime Minister was amusing enough. Yet beneath the comedy lie some deadly serious matters.

For all Boris Johnsons personal qualities - and faults - it is clear to me that he didnt ever really understand Brexit. Writing entertaining Eurosceptic columns in this newspaper, as he did for several years, and wanting to leave the European Union, are two very different things. He is the man who only joined the Leave campaign in 2016 at the eleventh hour, after wrestling with the issue.

The same can be said of the Conservative Party. By the time of the referendum, it had been a party of Europe for half a century.

The key question in my mind now is whether or not it is too late for the Tories to learn the lessons of the past six years and save themselves.

When the Brexit Party stormed to success in the European elections of 2019, our principal slogan was that we aimed to change politics for good. The 2016 referendum vote had been about removing the shackles of the anti-democratic EU, yes. But it was also a victory for ordinary people voting against the London-based establishment. We knew that the publics antipathy was not just aimed at individual politicians but also towards the mainstream media and the wider political class.

That sense of opposition among everyday people hardened as they saw the Westminster elites doing their best to frustrate the referendum result. A palpable hunger for a new way of doing politics emerged. The hope was that it could be more connected to real life; less detached and more responsive.

After the Tories humiliation in those European elections of 2019, they did seem to get the message that while Brexit was about leaving the EU, it also represented a chance for a new dawn to break in British politics more generally. This was encouraging.

Yet, despite producing the slogan Get Brexit Done, which was highly effective in the 2019 general election, the Conservative Party soon returned to business as usual. Johnson briefly appeared to suggest that he, too, was in favour of a new kind of politics, but there is scant evidence that he meant it.

On his watch, a new chumocracy filled up Number Ten. In addition, a group of trendy Londoners pushing their net zero agenda came to the fore - and stayed there. Indeed, apart from the legislation that allowed Britain to leave the European Union, it seems very much as though under Johnsons tenure, Britain has returned to the bad old days of the Cameron / Osborne social democracy, with barely a Conservative view to be heard.

Lets be clear: for the Tories to have squandered an 80-seat majority by introducing no significant reform of our electoral system or, indeed, of the country is genuinely shocking. Winning a fifth term will be impossible without some major changes. Frankly, even if the Tories had made some fundamental changes by now, pulling off a fifth term would still be tough. The economy is in the doldrums and the Tories have been in power since 2010. The electorate will be crying out for change next time.

If the Tories are to have a chance of staying in power, what is needed is Brexit 2.0.

Starting now, the Tories must make it clear that the UK will become self-sufficient in energy as soon as possible. They need to agree to overhaul various institutions including the House of Lords, which should be scrapped in its current form. There must be at least an element of proportionality in our voting. And the biggest change of all is that Britain must leave the European Court of Human Rights and genuinely take back control of its borders.

This kind of agenda would be able to bring together the Red Wall voters and most of the Conservative voters in the south. I would add that the Tories simply cannot lose sight of the fact that many traditional Labour voters are small c conservative in outlook, especially when it comes to social affairs. They resent having political correctness thrust upon them.

Do any of the current leadership candidates have the courage or the character to stand up for these things? Do they have the charisma needed to sell this plan to the voters? The next few weeks will tell.

See the article here:

If the Tories are to have a chance of winning the next election, what is needed is Brexit 2.0 - The Telegraph

Lauren Mcgaughy| The Dallas Morning News

Dallas If Jonathan Mitchell were a comic book character, he would be drawn holding a lawbook in one hand and in the other, a sledgehammer.

Best known as the architect behind Senate Bill 8, the state law that deputizes everyday Texans as abortion bounty hunters, Mitchell has spent years arguing that the U.S. Supreme Court should reverse its decision in Roe v. Wade. His legal theories and court cases helped lay the groundwork onto which the ruling came toppling down.

But as the rest of the country was bracing for the fall of Roe, Mitchell was already moving on. Since opening up a one-man legal shop in Austin four years ago, he has jumped headlong into myriad other lawsuits over everything from the contraceptive mandate to affirmative action and same-sex marriage.

Mitchell says his goal is to systematically dismantle decades of rulings he believes depart from the language of the U.S. Constitution or that impose constitutional rights with no textual basis. With the Supreme Court moving ever more his way, the cases he brings may be a bellwether for the direction of the nations legal establishment, and, by extension, the nation itself.

In a rare interview, the former solicitor general of Texas insisted that underlying his mission is not religious belief or political ideology or personal animus, but an unflinching conviction that federal courts must interpret the Constitution closely and cannot declare new rights not explicitly afforded in that document.

Mitchell sees himself in the role of redeemer not destroyer.

For decades, the Supreme Court has been making up constitutional rights that are nowhere to be found in the language of the document, Mitchell, 45, told The Dallas Morning News. These decisions are lawless, and they need to be undermined and resisted at every turn until the Supreme Court sees fit to overrule them.

But where Mitchell sees himself as a devotee to the rule of law, his opponents detect an extremist. Regarded even by his harshest critics as an undeniably sharp legal mind, they fault him for, in their views, intentionally dismissing precedent and the real-world consequences of his actions in an effort to wipe a number of fundamental rights from the lawbooks.

When Mitchell threw his support behind Mississippis 15-week abortion ban, the case that toppled Roe, he urged the Supreme Court not to be squeamish about other rulings it might knock down.

Interracial marriage is protected under federal civil rights law even though its not specifically preserved in the Constitution, Mitchell wrote in an amicus brief co-authored by Chicago Law School chum Adam Mortara. The same could not be said for the court-invented rights to homosexual behavior and same-sex marriage, they argued.

Obergefell v. Hodges and Lawrence v. Texas, the rulings that declared bans on gay marriage and gay sex as unconstitutional, were as lawless as the abortion rulings, they wrote. If Roe were to be overturned, Mitchell and Mortara argued, the court should not hesitate to declare that these other rulings are likewise hanging by a thread.

Last month, Clarence Thomas said just that.

In a concurring opinion supporting the decision to overturn Roe, the conservative justice called Lawrence and Obergefell demonstrably erroneous decisions with no basis in the Constitution or U.S. history. He urged his fellow justices to reconsider them.

The judicial philosophy underlying the decision to overturn Roe is called textualism, a theory of interpretation that emphasizes a plain reading of legal documents based on their text. Mitchell is a strong adherent.

If a constitutional right is not mentioned in the constitutional text, it doesnt exist, Mitchell said in a wide-reaching interview. I dont care how desirable it may seem as a matter of policy.

His core belief in textualism is underscored by a concept Mitchell coined himself called the writ of erasure fallacy. Courts, even the highest in the land, can only stop certain laws from being enforced by certain defendants, his concept dictates; they do not have the power to alter or annul them.

This means Mitchell views nearly every Supreme Court ruling as strictly temporal decisions that can be reversed if the right argument is made in front of the right set of justices. And by extension, any law that remains on the books, even if it is deemed unconstitutional by the high court, can be revived if the court changes its mind.

For example, Texas legislators have refused to remove the states bans on same-sex intimate relations and gay marriage and from the lawbooks even though theyre unenforceable. And last week, Attorney General Ken Paxton argued that abortions should be illegal in Texas immediately because the state never repealed an abortion ban enacted in 1925. The Texas Supreme Court ordered late Friday that the ban can be enforced immediately.

Just six years ago, at the time of Antonin Scalias death, the majority of Supreme Court justices adhered to an interpretation of the Constitution that looked at it as a living document and relied more on precedent. But the court has shifted and become more receptive to textualist arguments even liberal justice Elena Kagan recently declared, were all textualists now.

This shift is one big reason Mitchell opened up shop in Texas. This is the moment, he believes, to pursue his goal of targeting decisions he considers based on improper interpretations of the Constitution. And with his experience in the state and its favorable tax laws, Austin is the place to do it.

Raised in Pennsylvania, Mitchell attended Wheaton College, which bills itself as preparing students to make an impact for Christ. He went on to study law at the University of Chicago, where he graduated with high honors.

Mortara, his law school classmate, describes his longtime friend as deeply thoughtful and moral, a man lacking even one unkind cell in his body. He insists Mitchell has been horribly mischaracterized as some kind of a Westboro Baptist guy fixated on taking away peoples rights.

He is very gentle, Mortara said. He is extremely polite and respectful to people of all backgrounds.

At Wheaton, Mitchell majored in computer science, and friends say he approaches law with the same deliberate focus one might when tinkering with a machine. They throw around words like genius and visionary and nerd. He is punctilious, they say, uncompromising when it comes to rules and conduct, and with a heightened concern for morality and codes of conduct.

By way of example, one friend offered up the way Mitchell bills his hours. Most lawyers split their time on the clock into increments of six minutes. Mitchell breaks his down even further to ensure hes not overcharging clients.

Hes a happy warrior, said Hiram Sasser, a longtime friend of Mitchells and executive general counsel of the conservative legal nonprofit First Liberty Institute. Hes a formidable ally.

After law school, Mitchell clerked for J. Michael Luttig and Scalia. He was there when the justice wrote one of his most memorable dissents to the 2003 Lawrence ruling declaring Texas ban on gay sex unconstitutional.

From 2010 to 2015, Mitchell served as Texas chief appellate lawyer under then-Attorney General Greg Abbott. He argued in front of the Supreme Court four times and defended the states laws against same-sex marriage and abortion. A member of the conservative legal organization the Federalist Society, he later taught law at Stanford and the University of Texas at Austin.

Then-President Donald Trump nominated Mitchell to head the Administrative Conference of the United States, an agency meant to improve federal rule-making and other processes, but he was not confirmed.

In 2018, as Trump appointed his second of three justices to the high court, Mitchell opened his own firm in Austin. Its the first time hes been in private practice.

Mitchell has thrown himself headlong into the abortion fight in Texas. He helped draft city ordinances that sought to outlaw abortion at the local level and had a hand in crafting Senate Bill 8, which empowers private citizens to sue anyone who aids or abets an abortion for up to $10,000.

The bill, which essentially bans abortion after about six weeks, became law in September. It was tested by the Supreme Court and allowed to stay in place.

Senate Bill 8 is now considered model legislation by other red states that may use it to deputize their citizens to enforce other conservative laws. Mitchells role in crafting the legislation catapulted him into the national spotlight.

But Mitchell hardly ever speaks to the media. He doesnt appear to have any social media presence. There are only a handful of photos of him online and he would not consent to a portrait for this story. Even when Senate Bill 8 was passed into law, he wasnt at the public signing ceremony.

Mitchell, married with children, says he does not have time for hobbies and sees no need to seek the limelight. His firm doesnt issue news releases when it files new cases or marks a win.

The payoff comes in the victory itself.

While Mitchell values his privacy, his work now appears to be everywhere.

He has his hands in cases from California to New York involving such disparate concepts as redistricting, subsidies for Black farmers and religious liberty. While there are a handful of conservative nonprofit law firms pursuing similar cases, with whom Mitchell at times works in tandem, he sees himself as stepping into a void where other private attorneys rarely dare to venture.

The big law firms wont touch this stuff. So it sometimes feels as though I have the field to myself, Mitchell said.

At least two of the roughly 50 cases he is pursuing involve same-sex marriage.

In both, Mitchell argues that government employees with the power to perform marriages in Texas should be able to recuse themselves from performing gay weddings due to religious beliefs. One of the cases, which is awaiting a decision from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, provides a preview of how Mitchell would argue for the reversal of Obergefell.

In a brief filed in June 2020, Mitchell argued that Obergefell improperly subordinates state law to the policy preferences of unelected judges.

There is no constitutional right to same-sex marriage, Mitchell argued on behalf of his client, a county judge who argues that his Christian faith prohibits him from marrying gay couples. Mitchell added: The federal judiciary has no authority to recognize or invent fundamental constitutional rights.

Thats why their amicus in the abortion case that overturned Roe was purposefully provocative in part to make Mississippis arguments appear more moderate in comparison and to give the high court the fortitude to declare that these rights had no basis in the Constitution.

We wanted to show the justices that the entire edifice of court-invented rights should be rejected, because many of those rights such as the rights to contraception and interracial marriage are protected by other sources of federal law, so there is nothing to fear from repudiating the supposed constitutional basis for those rights, he said.

Despite these cases, Mitchell said he is not trying to dismantle gay marriage.

If state legislatures want to pass laws legalizing it, they can, he said. But until the Constitution is amended to include the right to same-sex marriage, he argues that the Supreme Court wrongly decided this issue and the ruling is in play.

When asked about his personal views on the matter, Mitchell said he considers the policy to be a much closer question than whether same-sex marriage is a constitutional right.

Im a formalist and legalist by orientation, he said. Policy decisions are for the political branches to sort out.

The problem, opponents say, is that there are real-world consequences.

The courts have long looked to reliance interests, or how people come to count on legal decisions in their everyday lives, when reconsidering rulings. Throwing these considerations out the window is not only legally impractical, it is also fundamentally foolhardy and ultimately damaging, said SMU Dedman School of Law constitutional law chair Dale Carpenter.

First of all, there are the millions of gay people who have been wed since Obergefell was decided, not to mention the children, wills and end-of-life plans affected by those unions.

Whats more, if the state revisits Obergefell and Lawrence because gay rights arent explicitly stated in the Constitution, what case is next? Contraception bans? Mandatory sterilization? Racial segregation in schools?

I dont think Americans are ready to confront those questions again in the name of a kind of dry textualism, Carpenter said. It would be a very stripped down notion of the national floor on civil rights.

What Mitchell is attempting to do is move the legal establishment and, eventually, the high court more in this direction, Carpenter added. This kind of ideological change is called shifting the Overton window, and its been a successful strategy among the far right since Trumps election.

Charles Fried, the former U.S. solicitor general under President Ronald Reagan and a leading legal thinker, dismissed lawyers of Mitchells ilk as fringe actors.

Theyre not conservatives, he said. Theyre reactionaries. They want to undo the last 100 years.

Last fall, nearly 100 fellow Chicago law graduates condemned Mitchells involvement in writing the Texas abortion law in an open letter published online.

Mitchell played down some of the fears raised by his opponents. He is not worried, for example, about states outlawing contraception if that Supreme Court case is revisited because he said that right is protected by federal law.

But Carpenter warned about this way of thinking. Just a few years ago, it would have been unthinkable to say Roe would be overturned, so why shouldnt proponents for womens and gay rights be concerned?

There might be a temptation to think of him as a jurisprudential gadfly, Carpenter said. But I do not think he can just be dismissed. Hes an intellectual force and that has to be respected.

Mitchell has partnered with groups such as the nonprofit America First Legal Foundation, headed by Trumps former hard-line immigration adviser, Stephen Miller. Among clients, Mitchell counts Steve Hotze, a man who has compared gays to termites eating away the foundation of American moral fabric and who is known to pull out a sword at events and encourage his followers to pierce their enemies using the word of God.

Mitchell recently appeared on a podcast hosted by Tony Perkins, the head of the openly anti-LGBTQ group the Family Research Council. Perkins called Mitchells abortion strategy brilliant.

Mitchell pushed back against tying his views to those of his clients.

Everyone deserves representation. White-shoe law firms represent murderers, al-QaIda terrorists and child molesters like Jeffrey Epstein, Mitchell said. Of course, none of those law firms would represent Dr. Hotze, and they would ostracize any lawyer who does. But I dont enforce a political correctness test for the clients that I represent.

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After Roe, architect of Texas abortion law sets sights on gay marriage - Detroit News

Should anything happen to Louie Gohmert, Louisiana Congressman Clay Higgins seems more than ready to fill the vacuum of being referred to as "America's Dumbest Congressman".

On this date in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, as well as 2021, Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day published profiles of Clay Higgins, the U.S. House Representative from Louisianas 3rd Congressional District after an improbable win in the 2016 elections where he finished second in the jungle primary, but came from behind to defeat fellow Republican Scott Angelle with 56% of the vote. That won Higgins, a guy nicknamed the Cajun John Wayne, the right to go to Washington, D.C. and replace Congressman Charles Boustany, (whose own bid for U.S. Senate failed, due to the unsavory rumors about him soliciting prostitutes that popped up).

Anyway, when we say that Clay Higgins victory in the 2016 elections was improbable, we arent joking around. Scott Angelle was considered a favorite in that race for months, and as of February of 2016, Higgins was still serving as a sheriff in St. Landry Parish, making appearances on the Crime Stoppers show where he would not just ask the community for help in finding felons, but would start berating and mocking them in segments on the show. That got him some notoriety, particularly from the right, because over time, Higgins rants started to get well, a little alarming, and kind of racist. So, of course he had a few guest spots on Fox and Friends in 2015. But as Higgins continued to get more and more over-the-top in his segments on Crime Stoppers, he went viral when he asked for help with The Gremlins gang, seventeen individuals who just so happened to be African Americans who he referred to as heathens, thugs and animals while threatening them to turn themselves in with a contingent of officers in SWAT gear and with rifles because, You will be hunted, you will be tracked. And if you raise your weapon to a man like me, well return fire with superior fire.

Making things even more troubling was that the seventeen men had their annoyed families come forward to wonder why the hell the Cajun John Wayne was threatening their loved ones, because they werent even aware of their family being in any Gremlins gang, saying that it may have been referring to an attempt by some of them to start a rap group years earlier. Higgins tried defending the polices information on the gang by saying his department had read it on the internet, which sounds a lot like Donald Trump, come to think of it. Oh, he also insisted his video wasnt racist because each of the officers in it also was standing near an African American community leader (similar to the we have black friends defense). Well, after his boss let Higgins know hed gone too far, he gave a public resignation, saying he dont do well reined in and that he would rather die than sacrifice his principles by I guess conducting himself professionally? Fox and Friends and other right-wing allies began to rally around poor, poor Clay Higgins for having his free speech quelled (even though the First Amendment doesnt allow you the right to speak without punishment from your employer on television while representing them). He parlayed the criticism against him into being the victim and started his campaign for Congress instead.

And then, once Clay Higgins advanced to the final two in the GOP Primary, partially due to receiving a large contribution from fellow fascist-lunatic and former Congressman Allen West, the local media started doing its job, and digging at the sudden political star that could end up in Washington, D.C. They noted that back in 2007, Clay Higgins previously had resigned from the Opelousas Police Department to avoid receiving disciplinary measures after he was accused of using excessive force, and giving false statements in the ensuing investigation.

But even more damning was when a public records request was made with the Lafayette County Sheriffs Office that discovered Higgins wasnt just dismissed because of the Gremlins Gang video his superiors had become appalled at how Higgins had begun trying to exploit his appearances on Crime Stoppers as a new means of getting revenue, using government e-mail to sell mugs and t-shirts with his likeness to fans of the show, and book himself on whatever talk shows would have him on to appear as long as they paid him in cash. The cash preferred nature of his bookings was because Higgins had the IRS garnishing money from his wages to pay back taxes and keeping payments off the books would prevent the IRS from getting their hands on it. Higgins even had dreams of appearing on his own reality show called American Justice where they would carry out SWAT raids, with him leading the charge, and talking trash to the crooks as they brought them in.

Okay so thats a month before the election. Theres Scott Angelle, a moderate Republican, and Clay Higgins, an arguably pretty racist, over-aggressive, fame-seeking, wannabe-fascist nut who seems to want to evade paying taxes. In 2016 thats the same formula that got Donald Trump elected, and Louisianas 3rd followed suit when presented with the same kind of candidate to represent them in the U.S. House of Representatives. Higgins website featured issue stances that were a hot bed of crazy, including an argument against all gun control because it didnt really exist prior to the 1960s (it did, and a need from rifles available to the public tending more towards the semi-automatic and automatic), and referring to the Affordable Care Act as follows:

2,800 pages of unintelligible psychobabble. Its the most egregious seizure of power and treasure from the American people in history. Its the worst idea in an elaborate history of bad ideas. Its a book of lies, based on lies, sold by liars. Obamacare must be repealed. Period.

Now, heres the thing the Gremlins gang video was a pretty clear indicator that Clay Higgins might be a bit of a bigot, and that he would overreact to threats. Well, if anyone had any doubts of if that was a fluke, we can be pretty sure it isnt now, because after a terror attack in London in June 2017, Clay Higgins responded a day later by calling for Christendom to go to war against Radical Islam, and giving the level-headed assessment that we should just kill them all.

The free world all of Christendom is at war with Islamic horror. Not one penny of American treasure should be granted to any nation who harbors these heathen animals. Not a single radicalized Islamic suspect should be granted any measure of quarter. Their intended entry to the American homeland should be summarily denied. Every conceivable measure should be engaged to hunt them down. Hunt them, identity them, and kill them. Kill them all. For the sake of all that is good and righteous. Kill them all.

Rep. Higgins made no apologies after people were shocked at his stated desire to commit religious genocide, and blamed the negativity on his comments on political correctness. Because of course he did.

In his first year in office, Higgins also outed himself as a climate change denier in August of 2017, but more notoriously, he drew the ire of Jewish groups by filming a political video in the Auschwitz gas chambers without the permission of the museum, using the symbol of the Holocaust as a prop to defend his desire to increase United States military spending. Jewish leaders are, predictably, not pleased. On the upside, for all their long-standing grievances, at least Muslims and Jews can come together and agree, Clay Higgins is an ***hole.

Louisianas 3rd District choosing an outsider has not served them well, and even outside of his voting record. So far this term, Higgins has yet to learn his lesson about making ridiculous and inappropriate comparisons to World War II (as if the Auschwitz video wasnt enough of a teaching moment), deciding to announce in the middle of a hearing on immigration where Democrats were grilling Kirjsten Nielsen for her family separation policy by declaring that We have D-Day every month on our southern border.

That was slightly a better job than Higgins did than in the Michael Cohen hearing, when he tried to snare Cohen in a gotcha moment and only snagged his own ass for about ten minutes straight, obsessively asking Cohen WHAR BOXES? in regards to evidence Cohen had returned to him by federal investigators that he brought documents before the House Intelligence Committee for. (And thus making us all ask if Clay Higgins has been placed on the House Intelligence Committee ironically.) Higgins was of course, more apoplectic about the location of these boxes than the fact that what was contained in them detailed a series of financial crimes by Donald Trump, because of course he was.

Which isnt to say Higgins, the Cajun John Wayne has been on top of crimes committed by people within his own party, or even his own orbit. He was apparently unaware that one of his top aides liked to frequent massage parlors where victims of human trafficking were prostituting themselves for sexual favors.

No word on if Higgins is planning an episode of Crime Stoppers for the rest of his staff.

Anyway, his voting record is equally as embarrassing:

Clay Higgins is an over-compensating bigot and fascist, who is regrettably unlikely to be bounced from office by his constituents as long as he plays pretend about being tough on crime and enough people thinking this corrupt wanker actually wants to do something other than talk tough and grift while no ones playing attention.

One Year Ago, July 7th, 2021: Clay Higgins (LA) 2021 Update Two Years Ago, July 7th, 2020: Clay Higgins (LA) 2020 UpdateThree Years Ago, July 7th, 2019: Clay Higgins (LA) 2019 UpdateFour Years Ago, July 7th, 2018: Clay Higgins (LA) 2018 UpdateFive Years Ago, July 7th, 2017: Clay Higgins (LA) Original ProfileSix Years Ago, July 7th, 2016: Christopher Shank (MD)2016 UpdateSeven Years Ago, July 7th, 2015: Christopher Shank (MD) Original Profile

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Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day: Clay Higgins- 2022 Update - Daily Kos

Cheng, 60, took to Chinese social media platform Weibo on Sunday, writing: "I am shocked, furious and regret that the lyrics in my classic song Star Lighting have been changed indiscriminately!"

Several netizens agreed with Cheng, as some of them said that the organisers should use another song if they did not agree with some of the lyrics.

Even Mr Hu Xijin, the retired editor-in-chief of China's nationalist Global Times tabloid, weighed in onthe saga.

He wrote on Weibo on Monday: "I do not agree with such changes and feel they were unnecessary if they were done due to 'political correctness'. Political correctness should include respecting history, seeking truth and tolerating different literary and artistic expressions."

Mr Hu had also expressed support for Hong Kong singer Jacky Cheung in another episode.

Cheung, who is known as the God of Songs, was criticised by Chinese netizens recently after he used the phrase "Jia you, Hong Kong" in a video he recorded marking the 25th anniversary of Hong Kong's return to Chinese rule.

"Jia you" means "keep going" in Chinese, but it was also a rallying cry among protesters during the Hong Kong protests in 2019.

Mr Hu said China should unite those who share the views of the majority and not be overly critical on interpreting the artistes' words after they make the clarifications.

See the article here:

Cyndi Wang, Twins' tweaked version of 1990s song slammed by original singer - The Straits Times