AROUND THE WORLD IN 365 DAYS

2022 – yet another one of ‘those years’; yes, this glorious century hasn’t exactly been short on them, and if you, like me, had a fittingly crap Christmas then you won’t be sorry to see the back of 2022, even if 2023 is hardly loaded with optimistic anticipation. When a year is characterised by chaos, chances are the chaos is as prevalent at the top as it is at the bottom, and we certainly had that in abundance from our ‘betters’ this year. The fact that 2022 saw the UK led by three different Prime Ministers – including one who had the shortest run in the history of the office – suggests either those at the top are keeping up with the rest of us, or they’re largely responsible for the chaos, depending on how one apportions responsibility. But when one recalls the year began with the fall-out from the Partygate affair that eventually led to Boris’s premature exit, and that by the autumn his immediate successor managed to set off alarm bells in the City – provoking an even more premature exit – then looking to leaders for leadership proved an utterly futile exercise, fracturing even further the already fragile faith and trust in our elected representatives.

And then, the Health Secretary overseeing the pandemic response turns himself into a tawdry celebrity with a staggering absence of shame and guilt in a desperate attempt to court redemption; who in their right mind could respect an unprincipled worm like Matt Hancock, a man whose actions seemed as emblematic of the corrupt, degenerate decay at the amoral heart of an amoral administration as Boris Johnson himself? If that’s the way those at the top behave, perhaps it’s no wonder those of us who reside closer to the bottom express nothing less than absolute contempt for them – and no longer have any belief in their ability to make our lives better; and if they can’t, who can? That can’t really be good for democracy. But it’s not as if the UK was alone in being exceptionally ill-led in 2022. Out in the colonies, Monsieur Trudeau reacted to a grass-roots challenge to his authority by unleashing every verbal weapon in the Woke arsenal to demonise and discredit the protesting truckers and their supporters; he even stooped to freezing their bank accounts, exploiting the vulnerability of a monetary system the public has been bludgeoned into depending on and using lessons learnt during the pandemic, when those doubting the wisdom of lockdowns and untested vaccines were smeared as enemies of the people.

Closer to home, in Soviet Scotland, the even more authoritarian and illiberal SNP pressed ahead with their plans to allow men who simply ‘identify’ as the opposite sex to be legally recognised as women – surgery not included – after a mere three-month trial period. Hot on the heels of wee Nicola’s attempt to push for yet another independence referendum being rendered null and void without Westminster’s say-so, the Scottish Gender Recognition Reform Bill not only faces potential legal challenges in the rest of the UK, but could prove to be an Identitarian step too far, certainly if the uproar amongst women’s and children’s rights campaigners is anything to go by. One hopes it might belatedly alert the more English-phobic Scots that their nasty nationalist darlings don’t necessarily have their best interests at heart. The long-overdue revelations of the crimes committed in the name of ‘diversity’ by the likes of the butchers at the Tavistock Clinic and the pseudo-paedophilic charity Mermaids had at last enabled dissenting voices to finally be heard without censorship, yet the SNP turned a blind eye to all this, displaying greater sympathy towards the ‘human rights’ of male sex offenders than in preserving natural-born women-only spaces.

The ‘empowerment’ of confused adolescents by such a bill is a dangerous development that threatens to set back progress just at the point when it was finally being made; the scandal of Tavistock and its ilk was gaining exposure as endless stories of children brainwashed into believing gender reassignment was the answer to all their teenage problems were being heard, yet the SNP bill fails to acknowledge the damage done just as it fails to recognise Transgenderism in its most superficial form is effectively the latest adolescent cult. Online videos of schoolboys in makeup undergoing ‘period pains’ in their bedrooms is a sick trend that recalls devotees of fanatical religious sects being possessed by the Devil; however, unlike past tribal loyalties with a short sell-by date, any emotionally disturbed teenager buying into this particular cult and paying the ultimate price with life-changing surgery can’t simply bin the clothes and haircut that served as the visual hallmarks of the cult once he or she moves on to the next one – as teenagers are prone to doing; and the SNP bill ignores the evidence to appease its rainbow flag-waving activist friends. Mind you, those activists now have such a deep foothold in so many of our institutions that the 2+2=5 dogma they espouse is in danger of becoming legal fact; even revered dictionaries have capitulated to this fantasy reality, further adding to the sense that the West is rapidly disappearing down the toilet.

No wonder Vladimir Putin doesn’t see the West as an obstacle to his imperial ambitions; in his own way, Vlad is as much a fantasist as the Trans activists or the Net Zero climate zealots vandalising works of art, and he’s getting away with it as much as they are; only a couple of days ago, yet another former ally who had the nerve to question Putin’s Ukraine adventure ‘committed suicide’ via the familiar leap from a skyscraper window; I wonder why Putin’s enemies never just opt for the old gas oven or bottle of pills, eh? Funny, that. But while Vlad disposes of his foes on foreign soil completely unchallenged, he found that his assault on Ukraine received its most devastating setback not from the timid West, but from the courageous Ukrainians themselves. The perfectly natural wave of sympathy for the innocents exposed to the merciless march of the Russian war machine led to Brits who just a few months earlier weren’t even allowed to visit each other being encouraged to open their doors to Ukrainian refugees; less public sympathy was reserved for illegal economic migrants hailing from the war-less environs of Albania as the unscrupulous people-smuggling trade appeared to be one of the year’s few boom industries. Whether Rwanda is the answer is another matter; sadly, the Channel has rarely been kind to opportunists.

If Vladimir Putin was shaken out of his complacency by the unexpected resistance of the Ukrainian people, Iran’s similarly ruthless rulers were equally taken aback by a rebellion on home turf, largely led by incredibly brave young women publicly trashing the symbols of their oppression – something that was again met with notable silence from the gutless West. And when overseas protests did receive tacit support from the West, such as those that occurred as a result of China’s futile attempts to maintain a ‘Zero Covid’ policy, that support came from none other than Justin Trudeau, incapable of discerning the parallels between the inhumane authority of the Chinese Government and his own approach to both the truckers and the coronavirus. Indeed, having been presented with unimagined control over their own people during the pandemic, it was unsurprising that many Western leaders have been reluctant to relinquish the powers they’d acquired, continually extending their over-reach into the private lives of their citizens in an insidious trend that needs to be resisted.

Back home, a series of strikes by both rail and postal workers served to gift additional joy to a British public already browbeaten by a surge in fuel costs, though at least the whole ‘cost of living’ narrative has provided the MSM with a boost to the flagging Project Fear plotline. The fact that the one certainty of 70 years’ vintage should breathe her last in the middle of all this chaos seemed almost symptomatic of a year in which nothing and no one could be relied upon or trusted anymore. 2022 was a year bereft of certainties, and after the last twelve months, only a fool would confidently reach for the crystal ball and predict what comes next.

© The Editor

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FOUL LANGUAGE

Doctor Johnson may have had a hell of a task on his hands in attempting to chronicle the multitude of words comprising the English language over 200 years ago, but even he would’ve baulked at the task of defining words in the dictionaries of the 21st century. After all, the lexicon has been so twisted and skewered by (amongst others) politicians providing their own unique, upside-down interpretations to cover their corrupt backs that nobody is quite sure what certain words officially mean anymore. The dictionary entry for the word woman may well now provide the 4+4=5 description of a chick with a dick, whereas an actual woman might be found under ‘birthing person’, ‘chest-feeder’, ‘person who bleeds’ and so on. Likewise, the word racist has become obligatory to describe anybody who challenges the consensus, almost ceasing to have anything to do with someone who can’t see beyond the colour of another’s skin – and, of course, the inability to do so has now been reinstated as the legitimate mainstream policy on race, anyway.

Similarly, the old-school trend of nicknames that describe the opposite of a person’s most distinctive characteristics would seem to be in the doldrums today bar one notable exception. In the grand tradition of an outlaw built like a brick shithouse being known as Little John, the word ‘liberal’ has been so subverted over the past decade that it’s now attached to the most illiberal, intolerant and authoritarian people one could ever wish to avoid. Unfortunately, many ‘liberals’ are hard to avoid because the worst of them tend to be in positions of power. Abusing the meaning of a word that used to embody an ideology today’s so-called liberals are sorely lacking, the wolves who wrap themselves in liberal clothing have had their true colours and their true intentions exposed like never before during the pandemic; and what’s been especially interesting is that they’ve not made any attempt to hide their illiberal natures once laid bare before the global glare because they’ve simply shifted the goalposts. Sure, the justification has been that each fresh curb of civil liberties is being done for the public’s own good, yet they’ve overstretched their authority with the kind of enthusiastic relish that would shame the most dictatorial despot whose regime is of the sort Western powers were once fond of changing.

At the height of the coronavirus panic in the UK, it was the ‘liberal’ Labour Party that was screaming for far more draconian laws and restrictions on the public than even the less-than liberal Tory Government was prepared to introduce; and over in the colonies, the incursion of the state into the private sphere via the sham of ‘saving lives’ has highlighted the illiberal reality of two world leaders who were once celebrated in liberal circles for their anti-Trump, touchy-feely brand of politics – New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern and Canadian PM Justin Trudeau. The hideous Ardern has been discussed on here many times before, but the smarmy creep who seems to use the American Psycho of Brett Easton Ellis’s controversial 80s novel dealing with a yuppie serial killer as his style model has exceeded his sinister smiling soulmate of late by taking the North Korean form of governance imposed with such glee during the pandemic and extending it into crushing any opposition to his rule – particularly if it emerges from the proles.

The hypocrisy at the heart of the metropolitan political class in its ‘liberal’ guise is never better exposed than when challenged; name-calling via the same old lazy insults is the default response for an elite that have no capacity for debate because they are ideologically bankrupt. They’ll just stick their fingers in their ears and scream ‘racist’. Trudeau himself fell back on precisely that kind of dangerous rhetoric in the Canadian Parliament this week. Confronted by enraged MPs appalled at his state-of-emergency response to the ongoing truckers’ protests, Trudeau had nothing in his arsenal but the usual tired weapons. ‘Conservative Party members can stand with people who wear swastikas,’ he whined. ‘They can stand with people who wave the Confederate flag.’ In other words, if you disagree with the actions of your government and oppose the policies of the Prime Minister in suppressing dissent, you are not entitled to that opinion unless you’re prepared to accept that such an opinion means you’re a fifth columnist.

Like the truckers, Extinction Rebellion can prevent people from getting to their jobs, yet the SJWs masquerading as police will dance with the latter on the pavement rather than batter them; BLM/Antifa can torch a city centre and inflict anarchy and mayhem on the lives of law-abiding citizens, only to have the MSM portray the carnage as a ‘mostly peaceful protest’ as they take the knee in solidarity; and 17 million people can vote in a democratic referendum against the advice of their political overlords and they are denounced as bigoted white supremacists, twisting the actual meaning of those words and making it impossible to distinguish between the genuine article and the simple protestor because the descriptions have been rendered meaningless. Basically, if you have the right opinions you have carte-blanche to do as you please; if you have the wrong ones and – importantly – if you don’t obey the middle-class ruling class, then you’re the scum of the earth and it’s utterly legit to silence you with whatever undemocratic means the ruling class see fit to use.

Justin Trudeau has taken this approach into disturbing new areas this past week by proposing that anyone donating to the fund supporting the protesting truckers will have their bank accounts frozen; yes, you heard right. The kind of sanctions once reserved for Al-Qaeda terrorists – and usually with great reluctance at that – have been applied to those supporting a grass-roots opposition to Trudeau’s increasingly totalitarian attempts to keep pandemic policies going. This is a significant (and worrying) development because – however OTT and inhumane some of the restrictions introduced during the pandemic were – there are no sound grounds to use such powers in order to simply silence opposing voices once out of the Covid woods. This is an almighty abuse of authority entrusted by democratic means.

Any genuine liberal who might have voted for Trudeau because he wasn’t a Conservative should be able to see through this shit, realise what’s being done in their name, and be rightly outraged. But so relentless has the propaganda campaign been in demonising opposition and reinforcing power by smearing said opposition as ‘enemies of the people’ that the gut instinct in the genuine liberal now is to see all opposition as every racist, right-wing ‘phobe’ in the contemporary dictionary. How long before Trudeau’s desperate attempts to cling on are manifested as denying supporters of the protests access to supermarkets or healthcare or education or employment? Even Mrs Thatcher would’ve hesitated at introducing such legislation at the height of the Miners’ Strike, however much she might have fancied it.

I dunno. Maybe the word liberal and all the admirable aspects it is supposed to encompass was only ever a convenient smokescreen to hide the fact that many elements of the Left have always been as censorious, pious and zealous as the worst of the Right; it’s just when the Right is in the ascendency and has the power to exercise its most extreme tendencies, genuine liberals are in sore need of an opposition and the Left is understandably painted as the humane alternative. However, turn the tables by handing power to the Left and one sees the identical tendencies eventually emerge. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. One only has to look at what an unprecedented worldwide crisis lifted the lid on where liberal leaders are concerned. But perhaps power just does that to everyone who grabs it, whatever archaic label they see fit to claim.

© The Editor

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HOUSE OF GLASS

So, Bunter’s post as Jezza’s deputy is looking increasingly perilous courtesy of the Momentum faction, is it? Perhaps Karma should be held responsible – not so much instant as slow-burning. Regardless of the motivation behind this move, Tom Watson has had it coming for a long time, not for his opportunistic, Lib Dem-esque stance on Brexit and his shameless positioning of himself as an eventual leadership challenger; but for the disgraceful part he played in the Carl Beech saga. Indeed, who can forget his grandstanding from the backbenches as he sought to make a name for himself at the expense of innocents who were mere obstacles to his ambition?

Recalling Watson’s hysterical performance in promoting a Westminster paedo network that never was, I can’t help but wonder how many vigilantes he inspired into action by legitimising their obsession. I never cease to be suspicious of those who feel the need to advertise a particular virtue to the point whereby one wonders why they’re making such a song and dance about it. Could it be they have something to hide? After all, many’s the time the hard-drive of a self-appointed ‘paedo-hunter’ turns out to be crammed with enough evidence to expose them as being no better than those they purport to be saving our children from. A psychiatrist would no doubt surmise they were suppressing shame over their own repugnant leanings by projecting them onto another individual and thus somehow subconsciously absolving themselves of their wicked thoughts. Which brings us nicely to the previously-squeaky clean apostle of PC politics, Justin Trudeau.

Before we go any further, I must stress I’m not insinuating Canada’s Prime Minister is a closet paedo; no, I am of course referring to the emergence of photographs and videos revealing that a man tirelessly sold as a liberal alternative to the President across the border at one time had something of a party penchant for ‘blacking-up’. Someone like Trudeau Jr, who has made a career out of spouting cringe-inducing Woke sound-bites – once famously using the term ‘people-kind’ (presumably because to say ‘mankind’ was misogynistic) – suddenly being outed as once having had such an outrageous hobby is probably far worse than being found guilty of possessing indecent images. The images that have forced him into a humiliating confession of past misdemeanours are about as indecent as it gets for someone who has done his best to signal every virtue on the 21st century checklist.

With just a month till Canadians go to the polls, Trudeau is struggling to justify the revelations that initially emerged when Time magazine excavated a photograph of him blacked-up (complete with turban) when dressed as Aladdin in 2001. Trudeau wasn’t some frat-boy adolescent prankster at the time, either; he was a 29-year-old teacher, presumably old enough to know better. Evidence of three separate instances of Trudeau in full boot-polish cosmetics are now doing the rounds and Trudeau himself admits he can’t recall how many times he played the comedy ‘Sambo’. Surely such a shameful confession is enough to unleash the familiar hounds to bring down this blatant racist, no?

Strangely, however – as has already been mentioned on Twitter – the dependable David Lammy is nowhere to be seen. Labour’s resident Racism-Finder General is usually first out of the blocks when it comes to pointing the accusatory finger, yet the man who sees race-hate in everything has curiously failed to comment on the subject via social media. But he’s not alone in his mysterious reluctance to condemn the Canadian PM. One of the genuine pleasures when a scandal of this nature breaks is observing how the ideological allies of the accused squirm in their seats and make excuses.

Nesrine Malik, Guardian scribe and ‘Diversity’ darling of London’s chattering classes, excused Trudeau’s actions on account of the fact he was blacking-up nearly 20 years ago, when the act was apparently acceptable. So, unlike allegations of historical sex crimes, there’s a statute of limitations on blacking-up? According to Malik, it was ‘a clumsy, childish, slightly juvenile way of blacking-up’ – Trudeau was 29, remember. ‘If he positions his apology well and contextualises it,’ she said, ‘I think he can dig himself out.’ Malik added – ‘The discourse around blacking-up has only become mainstream quite recently.’ So, that would explain the endless repeats of ‘The Black & White Minstrel Show’ we had to endure for decades after the series was axed in 1978, then. I just wonder how different the reaction of Malik and the rest would have been had the world leader exposed as a closet blackface 20-odd years ago been a certain Donald?

Nesrine Malik also said – ‘There’s two ways that people black-up; one is a deliberate racist way.’ I never realised there was a right way and a wrong way to black-up, but doesn’t such a claim go to the heart of Woke culture, a philosophy built on endlessly shifting sands to suit the fair-weather agenda set by its advocates, and one prone to moving the goalposts depending on the accused. Do we still have to suppress a snigger when Peter Sellers or Spike Milligan adopt comedy Indian accents in the wake of the Trudeau revelations or can we laugh again? Please let us know, for it’s beginning to seem that if there are any standards at all, they’re seeing double more than an alcoholic on his thirteenth whisky.

Don’t worry – the Woke Star Chamber will always let us know what they have decided is now racist, sexist and homophobic, anyway, just so we know what we have to feel guilty about today; but it seems good old Mr Trudeau is being let off with a caution, largely due to his sterling contributions to the cause that some ancient error committed at a time when we were all openly bigoted won’t adversely affect. Well, come on, it was 2001, after all – way back in the Dark Ages when we too busy splitting our sides at ‘Love Thy Neighbour’, ‘Mind Your Language’ and ‘It Ain’t Half Hot Mum’ whilst singing along to Al Jolson and spreading Robertson’s Marmalade on our toast to know we were doing wrong. Those were different days, man.

Yes, Justin Trudeau has been publicly revealed as a bit of an arse; but most of us had already worked that out, and we didn’t need an old image of him blacked-up to come to that conclusion. Perhaps if he hadn’t been so tediously relentless in his ongoing attempts to promote himself as the ultimate, self-flagellating apologist for his wealthy white privilege, he could’ve been cut some slack. Perhaps if he hadn’t signalled his virtue with such holier-than-thou gusto, this storm-in-a-teacup would be recognised as such. But the fact the guilty party is someone who has worn his PC credentials as a T-shirt ever since he ascended to office makes it a big deal. And hilarious.

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© The Editor