Author Archives: Tim Newman

Ngo Area

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Over the weekend the journalist Andy Ngo got attacked by Antifa at a rally in Portland, Oregon:


He ended up in hospital with his face bashed up and bleeding on the brain. There were also reports that milkshakes laced with corrosive liquid concrete were being prepared in advance and handed out to people to throw.

This was allowed to happen because the Mayor of Portland long ago decided Antifa could own the streets, assault people on a whim, and he would order the police to stand by and let it happen. However, if Antifa met with any sort of opposition, the police would be sent in to break things up and the mainstream media ordered to run the narrative that Antifa weren’t to blame. This has been the way of things for Antifa in Portland for at least two years now. The difference this time is they battered someone who enjoys a lot of support from the wider world, whereas up to now they mainly targeted nobodies.

Of course, half the blue checkmark journalists who scream that Trump is waging a war on the free press were quick to defend Antifa’s actions, lay the blame on Ngo for being a provocateur, and declare that he’s not really a journalist. Unfortunately, the right have responded to this in the way they always do, by pointing out the hypocrisy in their one millionth attempt this year to shame the utterly shameless.

As I’ve said before, the right needs to understand what it’s up against. The Portland Mayor and Portland Police are the problem, so there’s no point appealing to them for help, and the same goes in other cities where the administration and police provide protection for lawless mobs who further the interests of the ruling classes. The right needs to work out who its true enemies are and fight them using their brains, not going toe-to-toe in unwinnable street battles or sending some poor sod like Andy Ngo in on his own to get his head kicked in.

Antifa are vulnerable, in part because they are made up of absolute whimps who only attack in groups, but also because they are reactionary as hell. If the right try putting on a march somewhere, Antifa show up in numbers and get it shut down. Well, what’s stopping the right arranging several dozen marches only one of which is a real one, or perhaps none at all, and letting Antifa play whack-a-mole? Charlottesville is generally considered to be a disaster for the alt-right because they provided the bogeyman the left has always warned about, i.e. gangs of neo-Nazis leaping from the shadows, and also because what passed for the alt-right leadership decided to turn this into the battle of Gettysburg. What they should have done is launch the tika-torch defence of the statue and then just melted away, and popped up somewhere else a month later or the next night. You don’t need to agree with the politics of the torch-bearers to acknowledge that it was spontaneous, surprised everyone, was visually effective, and sent liberals into utter meltdown.

That’s what the right needs to get good at, guerrilla tactics which take minimum effort but force their opponents to burn energy and resources in response, only when they arrive everyone’s gone. The North Vietnamese were spectacularly good at this, getting whole American divisions to hack their way through thick jungle chasing ghosts, and popping up somewhere else to hit the stragglers at their most vulnerable. But this will need a change of mindset, to stop appealing to mainstream institutions for help and inclusion and to understand the fight hasn’t just got dirty, it’s been dirty for a very long time.

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Willow Talk

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With great power comes great responsibility:

One-word oxymoron: polyfidelitous. Yep, it’s another self-justifying polyamorite. Someone hit that big red Tim Newman alarm button.

So let’s take a look:

Willow noted that because divorce rates are so high, it suggests that there is something left to be desired when it comes to traditional relationship structures in the modern age. She expressed that polyamory would probably be more common if couples could let go of their own fear of losing ownership their partners:

Right, but:

Yesterday, on the latest episode of Red Table Talk, 18-year-old Willow Smith kept it a buck about how she really feels about monogamy, and challenged us to see it differently.

We’re supposed to take relationship advice from an 18-year old? One who says:

My last relationship was fueled by jealousy and blind rage; checking each other’s phones and fighting about our findings, angry at social media interactions and flirty onlookers alike. It took me a while to realize that weren’t in love, we were in possession of one another, totally and completely.

Such wisdom! The irony is that Willow Smith is the daughter of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett, who have been married for 22 years. Given her father’s looks and popularity, and considering the usual longevity of Hollywood marriages, perhaps Willow should quit talking to gullible fools in the media and have a word with her parents about what makes a relationship work. Still, I guess taking relationship advice from teenagers is less harmful than promoting sex work to them.

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Unoriginal Sin

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Regular readers will know I like to draw comparisons between environmentalism and the traditional religions that modern societies abandoned:

I mentioned climate change because this seems to be the aspect of modern politics in supposedly secular countries which most closely resembles a religion. Once again, we have the sacred texts, the high priests, the apostates, punishment of unbelievers, calls for sacrifices, and indoctrination all wrapped up in a great moral crusade stretching beyond our lifetimes that secures the blind faith of the followers. It makes me laugh when I hear atheists refer to “Science!” when talking about climate change: these people are no more able to challenge the pronouncements of the scientists, whose words have been filtered through the media and politicians, than a medieval peasant was able to challenge the high priests’ interpretations of sacred texts. They are as much wedded to faith as their devout ancestors, but they don’t realise it.

In support of this theory I present a chap on Sky talking about original sin:


Let the self-flagellation begin!

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Where do you stand on Israel?

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A week or so back Israel Folau, the Australian rugby player who’s been ostracised for exercising his religious freedom in a way which displeased the LGBTQ political lobby, decided to set up a Go Fund Me campaign ostensibly to help him with his legal fees. Now I don’t suppose Folau needs the money – he’s been a top-class professional athlete across three sports since he was 18 years old – but he might have done it to gauge how much support he had. Turns out it was quite a bit and the fund quickly passed five figures, leading the Sydney Morning Herald to abandon journalism for activism and ramp up the pressure to get the appeal shut down. After all, the last thing progressives want is for a designated wrongthinker to have an avenue of financial and moral support once the moral gavel has fallen.

Sure enough, once the inevitable mob had formed Go Fund Me dug around in their terms of service and discovered they reserve the right to yank any funding campaign on a whim, which they duly did. The smug grins of the SMH activists probably didn’t last long, though. Within hours the Australian Christian Lobby had set up an appeal which, when I looked this morning, had attracted over $1.9m dollars. That’s a lot of money, and I expect many donors aren’t even Christian but are seeing this as a way to signal their opposition to the increasingly restrictive speech codes being forced on Australians by their employers and with the full backing of politicians.

But the saga doesn’t end there. Via William of Ockham, the Sydney Morning Herald is now urging the government to intervene:

The Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission has been asked to investigate the Australian Christian Lobby over its role in helping Israel Folau raise more than a million dollars for his legal fight against Rugby Australia (RA).

Asked by whom?

A number of complainants, however, have confirmed to the Herald that they have raised their concerns with the charities commission over the fundraising role played by the ACL.

So it’s basically another attempt to sabotage Folau’s ability to raise funds. For all we know there might be no more than two complaints, both originating from the offices of the Sydney Morning Herald.

According to the ACNC, a charity must be able to show that the use of its funds furthers the charitable purpose in which it is registered, meaning the ACL would need to prove it is “advancing religion”, for example, by agreeing to help raise money for Folau’s individual purposes.

I’d say defending an outspoken Christian who is being persecuted for his religious beliefs is doing more to advance Christianity than the combined efforts of the Pope and Archbishop of Canterbury over the past twenty years.

“We got legal advice on this before we went ahead with it,” [ACL’s managing director Martyn] Iles  said. “Israel Folau is not a member and our charitable purpose is to advocate for changes in law and public policy and the advancement of the Christian religion. This is a religious freedom issue which for law has implications for law and public policy.

Quite, which is why it’s attracted so much support:

“Over 15,000 people have donated and the average donation is about $100 and about 10 donors per minute. That’s pretty incredible stuff. There’s a lot of juice left in this.”

It’s as if a lot of people understand this is a lot bigger than what Folau thinks about homosexuals. Which brings me onto this story:

A disabled grandfather has been sacked by Asda for sharing an ‘anti-religion’ sketch by Billy Connolly on his Facebook page. Brian Leach, who had worked at the Asda store for five years in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, was let go by the supermarket after a colleague complained the comments in the sketch were anti-Islamic.

Now Britain is not Australia, but the progressive mindset which dominates the ruling classes and the subsequent authoritarianism is much the same in both countries. We’ve arrived at a situation whereby expressing Christian beliefs on social media gets you fired while disrespecting Islam on social media also gets you fired. I don’t agree with other commentators who say blasphemy laws are being applied in the UK, this is something else. Far from being inconsistent, the two approaches are quite logical once you understand the objective of those in charge is to denounce, undermine, and ultimately destroy what was until recently the prevailing culture in the developed, Anglo-Saxon world. In practice, this means those who rule over us will pick and choose who can say what and when as they see fit, and deprive us of our livelihoods should we speak out of turn. For now, this means Christians cannot say anything mean about homosexuals and ordinary folk cannot say anything which might be perceived as a slight against Islam.

And you can be sure this won’t stop here. I expect Folau will soon find his bank withdrawing their services, sending him a curt letter that he has 14 days to find an alternative (having made sure the other Australian banks will also deny him). What then? Will his phone company cut him off because the Sydney Morning Herald is piling on the pressure, backed by various government bodies stuffed with vinegar-drinking cat-ladies and the sort of men who, when they were in school, told the teacher which kid drew the picture on the blackboard? Nobody should feel too sorry for Folau, but this is about much more than a multi-millionaire sportsman. What happens when they start coming for ordinary people, like a grandad who works in Asda for example? What happens when they come for you?

People, especially politicians, often get asked where they stand on Israel. I think that question may develop a second meaning, and one no less important than the original.

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Don Johnson

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One of the patterns of contemporary politics is that whatever silliness happens in the US arrives on British shores a short time later. Identity politics was born in the corridors of liberal American academia from which it spread first to the political mainstream and then corporations, probably via the HR department. Now we have the likes of David Lammy ranting about white supremacists on a daily basis and British companies leaping on the Pride Month bandwagon and droning on about their trans employees.

The last few days have shown the British left have adopted something else American: mass hysteria as a method of political persuasion. Donald Trump had been a household name for 25 years when he ran for president, and as such there wasn’t much about him which remained unknown. But as soon as he declared himself a Republican the left branded him a hard-right rapist and when he got elected went into a collective meltdown that’s showing no signs of abating. It’s been almost 3 years and they still haven’t got over the fact Hillary lost and a good chunk of the country doesn’t mind Trump. The Democrats have assembled a collection of lunatics to run against him in 2020 on a platform of white people paying black people reparations for slavery, the idea that Trump is literally running concentration camps, and open borders. Good luck with that.

As befitting the pattern, the British left have now gone into hysteria over Boris Johnson who looks set to become the next prime minister. Johnson is very much a known quantity: he has been a public figure in politics for two decades and was mayor of London for two terms between 2008-16. But the left now want us to believe he’s some sort of dangerous, far-right extremist who goes around assaulting women. The latter claim – which they’ve clearly borrowed from their American counterparts’ campaigns against Trump and Brett Kavanaugh – is based on a couple of lefty neighbours of Boris’ girlfriend having skulked around on the landing outside her door, made a recording of a row they were having, and sent it to the police “fearing for her safety”. When the police turned up and said nothing was amiss, the couple sent the recording to The Guardian. And so overnight Boris Johnson becomes an abuser of women, helped along by the self-appointed spokespeople of the Metropolitan chattering classes such as The Secret Barrister:

It is quite clear that Cleverly is taking issue with the couple sending the recording to The Guardian, not reporting to the police what they might have thought was domestic violence. But a barrister’s job is to obfuscate on behalf of their client, which in this case is the mass of hand-wringing Metropolitan liberals for whom she works full time pro bono (less book sales). She is quick to point out that there is nothing illegal about recording your neighbours’ arguments and sending a copy to the police, but issues dark warnings about anyone harassing the couple who have inserted themselves into the middle of this national story of their own volition. Meanwhile, the left is now going after Boris’ girlfriend Carrie Symonds, who didn’t do anything to bring this situation about. The hard left are now camped outside her door, a tactic they’ve learned from Antifa who turned up at Tucker Carlson’s house and sent his wife into hiding. So what does The Secret Barrister have to say about this blatant targeting and harassment of an innocent individual? Nothing, of course. And what do Britain’s feminists have to say? Again, nothing: women are only deemed worthy of privacy, protection from threats, and respect if their politics align with Laurie Penny’s. Otherwise, they’re fair game for all manner of misogynistic abuse.

The harassment of Symonds takes place a few days after feminists and assorted lefties emerged from a 48-hour tantrum after Conservative MP Mark Field threw some annoying Greenpeace protester out of a place she didn’t belong. Politicians and the media squealed that it was assault and normalising violence against women, and feminists declared women deserve special treatment as they are different from men after all. Predictably, Theresa May capitulated and suspended the minister concerned instead of standing up for him, but in doing so may well have driven more party members to back Boris over anyone else. Now I don’t think Boris is a conservative, nor will he make a good prime minister. He’s proven to lack any consistent ideology, is prone to blundering, and it remains to be seen if he really is the man to take Britain out of the EU.

But there is something of the Trump in him, and he’s bringing that to his leadership campaign. He’s refused to take part in the silly TV debates Sky has put on, he’s refused to talk about what happened in his flat, and people are getting the impression he’s the only candidate who won’t simply fold like a cheap suit every time lefty launches another round of faux outrage. American conservatives elected Trump in large part because he wasn’t prepared to grovel and apologise to those who hate them, and instead stood up to them in a way which drove them insane. Now the British left have adopted American political tactics, it’s perhaps not surprising the right are willing to back whichever candidate stands up to them, his politics and character be damned. I suspect the squawking over Mark Field followed immediately by the cynical use of “domestic violence” and the staggering hypocrisy over Carrie Symonds will backfire badly, and Boris will sail into No. 10 with a Trump-like immunity hanging over him. Personally, I hope he keeps making remarks which send the left into an apoplectic rage, and then doubles down and refuses to apologise. So long as he keeps doing that he’ll have my support, and I suspect that of many others.

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Persian Shrug

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A few days ago Iran shot down an unmanned US drone, which may or may not have been in Iranian airspace. The US military was prepared to respond with airstrikes but:

Mr Trump … called off strikes after being told 150 people would die.

He tweeted: “10 minutes before the strike I stopped it, not proportionate to shooting down an unmanned drone.”

Naturally, this being Trump, we find all this out via Twitter from the man himself. Equally naturally, the warmongers aren’t happy:


Bill Kristol is a fat fool who was a cheerleader for the Iraq War. His hatred of Trump is not to do with policy differences but personal ambition: Kristol was all set for a cushy job on the taxpayer dime in a Jeb Bush administration (assuming he’d have beaten Hillary) but Trump upset the apple cart by demolishing his patron and then becoming president. The refrain from the Never Trumpers since the day he was elected has been that Trump is an unstable lunatic who is likely to lash out and plunge the US into a major war without thinking. Only Trump’s done the exact opposite and refused to start a war despite being egged on by neocons and probably half the defence establishment, so suddenly he’s an unreliable peacenik. Here’s General Shapiro:

Do you think Benny boy is going to be pulling on a uniform and volunteering to fight? I sincerely doubt it. War with Iran will be absolutely devastating for all participants: it is not Panama, or even Iraq. Now one of the advantages of using unmanned drones is that shooting one down does not require the same response as if a pilot has been killed or captured. That’s the whole point of using them: while expensive, they are expendable to a much greater degree. The only people who think the US should go to war with Iran over the downing of a drone are unhinged neocons and people who think America and its military should act as Israel’s foreign policy bureau, regardless even of what Israelis themselves might want.

And no, I am not someone who buys into stupid conspiracies that Mossad is blowing up tankers in the Straits of Hormuz in order to goad America into destroying their greatest foe, Iran. There may be plenty of Jewish Americans who think the US should fight Israel’s battles as first priority, and there might be Israelis who want the same thing, but it doesn’t follow that Israel is calling the shots here, nor blowing up tankers. This is as daft as the pipeline theories, or this:


That’s right: the Somali who somehow got elected to the US Congress believes Trump pulling out of a nuclear deal left the Iranians with no choice but to start blowing up Japanese oil tankers.

It’s really come to something when there is violence in the Persian Gulf and Trump is the most sensible, restrained person in the room. I suspect Iran is just being Iran, using terrorism to leverage an advantage somewhere, although who knows what in this case? America ought to keep an eye on things, but it’s really not its business. Not a lot of people know this but most of the oil which leaves the Gulf gets shipped to Asia, not Europe or the US. Sure, oil is fungible which means disruptions to the Middle East supplies affects everyone, but it’s not Americans who are going to be scrabbling around looking for alternative sources, but the Chinese. So let them deal with it, by leaning on the Iranians diplomatically, commercially, or even militarily: I don’t really care. This is not America’s concern, at least for now, and it’s most certainly not ours. If the likes of Shapiro and Kristol want a war, well they can first go here and enroll themselves or their children. Until then, they should sit down and shut up.

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Soiffen SS

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Emmanuel Macron’s attempt to form a praetorian guard isn’t going too well:

President Emmanuel Macron’s new-look national service has got off to a shaky start, with 29 teenagers in the first group of recruits succumbing to heat exhaustion during a ceremony in Evreux, near Paris.

Well done, chaps. Now I thought France had abolished national service and indeed they had, but:

Mr Macron is France’s first president not to have done compulsory military service, which was abolished in 1996. The first batch of 2,000 recruits embarked on his updated version of national service at the weekend.

…

Several hundred politicians, public personalities and military cadets also attended the unveiling of the statue on Tuesday, the anniversary of General de Gaulle’s 1940 appeal to the French to resist the Nazis.

Mr Macron’s new “Universal National Service” is mainly civic but has a military component. It was launched at the weekend with a volunteer group, but is eventually to become compulsory for all 16-year-olds.

What better way to mark one’s opposition to Nazis than forming a compulsory politico-military youth movement?

The teenagers are spending two weeks under the supervision of soldiers and youth workers, who are training them in self-defence and how to respond to a terrorist attack or natural disaster.

Or, the ruling classes hope, put down the mob at the palace gates.

They are only allowed to use their mobiles during a one-hour free period each day.

Presumably so they can’t inform their parents that their supervisors are so incompetent they can’t even supply them with water and keep them in the shade.

They wear a uniform of black trousers, white shirts and a blue cap for ceremonies, and fluorescent vests for civil protection exercises.

I guess this will make things easier for when they defect to the gilets jaunes. At least they had the sense not to make the shirts black. Because of the sun, you see.

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Silly con Khan, eh?

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Back in March I wrote about what Lauren Southern said when she appeared on James Delingpole’s podcast:

What she learned was there are professional people trafficking operations selling a dream of an idyllic life in Europe, and charge hopefuls several thousand dollars to make the trip. They have all the logistics worked out, they know the crossing points and which techniques to use at each (which includes charging fences en masse), and coach people to pass the refugee assessment process. They tell migrants they will be welcomed on arrival, given every means of support, and presented with opportunities for work. They get away with such lies because half the west – including politicians and national newspapers – publicly declare that refugees are welcome and citizens have an obligation to accept them. Every time a politician gives a speech about how tolerant their country is and how migrants have always been welcomed there, it is used by ruthless gangsters to sell their people-trafficking services. Only when the migrants arrive they find themselves sleeping rough having blown $5k to get there, and spend years bouncing from one country to another on rumours of better opportunities.

Yesterday the mayor of London posted this tweet:


This is bordering on criminal. Sadiq Khan knows full well that messages like this will be used to persuade people from sub-Saharan Africa to come to London, where they will not be welcomed but instead find themselves with nowhere to live, without any means of support, and thousands of miles from their friends and family. Yes, the government might help a handful but most will end up drifting around the country sleeping rough. This is how thousands of African migrants end up living in Paris, with nowhere to go and a government too scared to send them back home. In London they’ll just end up in squats, under bridges, or in slum housing. Sadiq Khan knows that by declaring that “London is open” he is making a bad situation worse, but he does so anyway so he can look good in the eyes of the dim and deceitful. A serious country would never even have let this man become mayor of its capital city, let alone behave as he does.

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Dutch Coven

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We’re going to be seeing a lot more of this:

A Dutch engineering university is taking radical action to increase its share of female academics by opening job vacancies to women only.

Starting on 1 July, the Eindhoven University of Technology (TUE) in the Netherlands will not allow men to apply for permanent academic jobs for the first 6 months of the recruitment process under a new fellowship program.

Thus implying that women are only able to secure employment if men are excluded. Hurrah for female empowerment!

“We have been talking about [gender balance] for ages,” says TUE President Robert-Jan Smits. “All kinds of soft measures are taken and lip service is paid to it.

So why have you not resigned and handed your post to a woman? I’ve written about such people before:

At every step of their career they would have sandbagged and outmaneuvered anyone who represented competition, be they white, brown, yellow, male, or female. When they were middle managers somewhere eyeing their next promotion they weren’t harping on about the need for greater representation or increased diversity. No, they were promoting themselves. But now the top job is securely under their belt and retirement on the horizon, they want other people to sacrifice their career ambitions on the altar of diversity politics.

Back to the article:

Currently, 29% of TUE’s assistant professors are women; at the associate and full professor level, about 15% are women. With this program, TUE wants to reach 50% of women for assistant and associate professors, and 35% for full professors.

Is this a result of discrimination of the free choice of women? If both, what difference is down to discrimination alone? They don’t care of course, and are instead pushing for equality of outcome. As Jordan Peterson is fond of saying, this will not lead to a happy place.

The plan was announced today and is already attracting controversy. “People say it’s illegal; they say we will lower standards. That’s a load of baloney,” Smits says. Some critics say the program discriminates against men. “Yes, absolutely,” Smits says. “For years, men have been discriminating against women, and women haven’t been paid the same as men for the same jobs.”

So the way to atone for Smits’ generation discriminating against women is to start discriminating against the current generation of men? This is an idea so stupid it could only come from an academic.

Dutch and EU laws allow policies to recruit underrepresented groups, TUE says.

Of course they do: they are the result of special interests lobbying for greater power and privileges, and have nothing to do with equality.

[Biologist Isabelle Vernos] worries TUE’s program could place a burden on female recruits, who may face suspicion about their abilities and anger about the process.

Well, yes. Any woman who could have got the job in a fair competition against male applicants will be dismissed as a token diversity hire. This is why any competent, self-respecting female academic should avoid this institution like the plague.

The program is named after Irène Joliot-Curie, the daughter of Marie Sk?odowska-Curie, who received a joint Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935.

I feel irony is somewhat wasted on the administrators at TUE.

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Affrayed to death

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Here’s another story which involves the hierarchy of protected characteristics:

Four members of a girl gang who inflicted a “sustained and horrific” bus stop attack on a frightened Egyptian student who later died have been given non-custodial sentences.

Mariam Moustafa, 18, suffered a stroke which left her in a coma after being “pushed so hard” that she was slammed against a bus shelter on 20 February last year, and died almost a month later on 14 March.

After admitting affray in connection with the street assault, two 18-year-old women, who can now be named as Rochelle Dobbin and Netesha Lewis, and two 16-year-old girls were handed referral orders by a district judge at Nottingham youth court on Wednesday.

When news first broke of an unprovoked attack on an Egyptian woman in Nottingham, the media was quick to assume it was racially aggravated. However, when the ethnicity of her assailants became known they fell silent.

Lewis launched a violent attack on the student, punching her repeatedly and accusing her of being responsible for a social media account called “Black Rose”.

Moustafa was punched several times during an attack “fuelled by social media” near a bus stop in Parliament Street, Nottingham, at 8pm, while her friend Pablo Jawara tried to protect her.

So it was a premeditated attack. Nevertheless:

The district judge described the teenagers as “aggressive” and said they should be “condemned” for their actions. They were spared detention because the court should “avoid criminalising young people unnecessarily” and the teenagers could only be sent to custody as “a last resort”.

Well, we wouldn’t want to criminalise a gang of girls who beat another to death, would we?

At Nottingham crown court on Friday, Mariah Fraser, 20, was ordered to spend eight months in a young offender institution

For those of you who thought young offenders institutions were for minors, you were mistaken. It seems they’re for violent adult criminals in cases where judges can’t bring themselves to put them in prison. The Sun has more details about the attack:

She said: “Messages were flying around social media by someone called Black Rose and the girls thought that was Mariam.

“They were shouting things like ‘you watch fam, you’re going to get f***ed up when I see you, I’ll f**k you up again.’

“The six got on off the bus and were shouting abuse at Mariam. It was at this point Mariam collapsed.

“The defendants seemed unconcerned and were laughing.”

You know the legal term protected classes? It’s an American thing but it appears to apply to the UK as well, and it means exactly that. See also here.

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