Is silence still violence? If it is, then a whole lot of people, from the Hollywood set to the virtue-signalling left, are guilty of some serious violence right now. Their silence on the Waukesha massacre, on the slaughter of six innocents by a man wielding his SUV as a deadly weapon, is deafening. More than that, it is sinister. Dancing grannies, an eight-year-old boy, people singing and cheering at a Christmas parade, all mown down. Six killed, 62 injured, in what police are treating as a suspected act of intentional homicide. That is, mass murder. And yet there’s been nothing from Hollywood stars who normally love to hold forth on terrible acts of violence. Influencers seem to have been struck dumb. There are no blacked-out squares on Instagram. The big woke corporations aren’t pumping out pained, concerned press releases. It’s just tumbleweed, everywhere.

Read this article here.

Everywhere one turns, fossil fuels are getting a bad rap. They’re the source of all our woes, apparently. We must keep them buried, in Earth’s guts, forever. There’s only one problem with this rash, hyperbolic onslaught on fossil fuels: everything about it is wrong. Far from destroying life on Earth, our discovery and exploitation of these fuels improved it enormously. If it wasn’t for humankind’s liberation of the ancient sunlight trapped in coal, or our burning of the petroleum that accrued from chemical reactions in the seas of the prehistoric era, modernity as we know it simply would not exist. Fossil fuels gifted us the wealth, comfort and liberties we in the West enjoy, and they’re doing the same right now for emerging countries like China, India and Brazil. We need to utterly flip the script on fossil fuels. They shouldn’t be demonised; they should be celebrated for helping to radically improve human existence.

Read this essay here.

The Australian, 13 April 2021

There was a dark, sad irony to the Harry and Meghan circus that cast a shadow over the final months of Prince Philip’s life.

In this spat between the Duke and Duchess of Wokeness and the stiff, unfeeling and allegedly racist “firm” whose clutches they escaped, Philip was always depicted as the regressive old guard.

They are the hip, aware royals, in touch with their feelings and fluent in the California-speak of therapy culture and critical race theory.

Philip, in contrast, was the patriarch of the ancien regime, the embodiment of white privilege. He was, to use Simon Jenkins’ term, “male, pale and stale” – the worst thing you can be these days.

Sure, Harry denied that Philip was the mysterious royal who had queried what colour skin his and Meghan’s children would have.

That allegation against an unnamed royal, made by Harry and Meghan in their two-hour confessional with the Queen of their new world, Oprah Winfrey, made waves around the world.

And virtually everyone presumed it must have been Philip who said it. Even following Harry’s insistence that it wasn’t Philip, or the Queen, I was constantly having chats or receiving text messages in which someone would say: “Of course it was Phil.”

After all, he was the gaffe-prone Duke, the royal with a penchant for speaking bluntly.

That these rumours swirled around Philip at the very end of his life was not only unfair – Harry should be ashamed for putting his grandfather and grandmother through the wringer of global speculation as he was heading towards his final breath and she was preparing for widowhood.

No, it was, as I say, ironic too. Because when it comes to being an outsider in the royal family, Philip knew so much more than Meghan ever could.

Indeed, when it comes to personal suffering and even racial insults, Philip’s life was on a completely different plane to Meghan’s and Harry’s.

This alleged figurehead of the pampered old elite went through things that would make Oprah say far more than: “What….. WHAT?”

Philip was the ultimate outsider when he got engaged to the then Princess Elizabeth in the 1940s.

Of course he was no “commoner”. In many ways he was more royal than Elizabeth herself. He was Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark, blood-linked to Queen Victoria, tsars, kings, dukes and all sorts.

And he had wealthy, highly influential relatives in the United Kingdom – the Mountbattens – who took him under their opulent wing when his father, Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark, was expelled from Greece in the 1920s.

But around the very old, very traditional British royal family, Philip was an oddity.

Meghan complains that her wedding to Harry became a huge political affair over which she had little control. Well, Philip’s own flesh and blood were forbidden from attending his wedding to Princess Elizabeth in 1947.

His three sisters were banned from the ceremony because they had been on the side of Germany in the war. They were considered part of the enemy.

As for struggling to find a role in the royal family – something Harry and Meghan talk about incessantly – Philip had that far harder too.

“I am nothing but a bloody amoeba”, he said of his struggle to play a meaningful and, as he saw it, manly role in the family he married into.

When the establishment, from Churchill downwards, forbade the royals from taking Philip’s surname – Mountbatten – Philip cried: “I am the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his own children.” (The double-barrelled name Mountbatten-Windsor was eventually quietly adopted.)

Then there’s the racism. Harry says someone in The Firm wondered out loud about what his offsprings’ skin colour would be. We don’t know who this was, what exactly they said, or even whether it was said with racial malice or simply innocent if old-fashioned curiosity.

What we do know about Philip, however, is that he was subjected to genuinely prejudicial slurs when he took up with British royalty.

As Private Eye magazine reported last month, Philip was referred to as “The Hun” and even as “Charlie Kraut” by senior royals and courtiers – a reference to the German connections of his family.

Others called him “Phil the Greek”. Even the widely adored Diana is said to have privately referred to him as “Stavros” – a slur used against people of Greek origin.

Did Philip do a long TV interview complaining about these barbs and jests? No, he just got on with things.

Private Eye recounts the time Philip was sailing near the Isle of Wight one year when the skipper of another boat shouted: “Oi! Out of the way, Stavros!” To which Philip replied: “It’s not Stavros, and it’s my wife’s f**king water so I’ll do what I f**king please.”

That’s the spirit.

As for suffering – Philip can be forgiven if he raised an eyebrow at Meghan’s wobbly-voiced chat with Oprah about all the “difficulties” she has faced.

Philip’s early years were horrendous. As the BBC said over the weekend, his childhood was “stalked by exile, mental illness and death”.

His family was exiled from Greece. His mother suffered a severe mental breakdown and was committed to an asylum. His beloved sister Cecile died in a plane crash in 1937. Philip is said to have never recovered from that “profound shock”.

Philip was for a long time a man who felt lost. Even following his wedding to Princess Elizabeth he was known to put “no fixed abode” as his address. That’s enough to sadden even a republican like me.

So those who have embraced the woke fairytale of Harry and Meghan versus an uncaring establishment personified by Philip need to think again.

Reality grates against your PC mythmaking. Truth calls into question your self-satisfied moral narratives and your thoughtless division of the world into Good (the woke) and Bad (the old, white establishment).

But here’s the thing, here’s what was different about Philip and the generation he belonged to.

He didn’t wallow in his pain. He didn’t pour it on to the world. He didn’t make a public spectacle of his suffering.

Rather, he got on with life. He marshalled his inner moral resources to overcome his early difficulties and the emasculation he felt in the British royal family and did what he felt he needed to do: pursue a life of service to an ideal larger than himself – the Crown.

In contrast with today’s fashion for seeing every slight and burden as an intolerable assault on one’s “wellbeing” that must be gabbed about endlessly in therapy or on Oprah, Philip said in response to an interviewer who asked him about his hard early life that it was just life. The question is how we deal with it.

So, resquiat in pace, Prince Philip. With his passing, the old era seems to be passing more and more too.

And even the republicans among us might soon miss some of the values of that disappearing era – stoicism, strength, and the belief that it is better to give oneself over to a cause rather than to ponder like narcissus upon one’s own reflection and emotions.

I only Instagram: burntoakboy

The Australian, 13 March 2021

There’s a new commandment: Thou shalt not criticise Meghan Markle.

Woe betide anyone who even thinks about dissing this Duchess.

This commandment has been vigorously enforced here in the UK ever since Meghan and Harry’s sitdown with Oprah was broadcast on TV.

That televisual spectacle has unleashed an extraordinary chain of events.

The chattering classes have elevated Meghan into the patron saint of wokeness. They venerate her.

They cheer her for “telling the truth” about the royals, the media and much of the British public – we’re all racist, apparently – and they insist we all accept this truth into our lives.

And if we refuse? If we dare to question Meg’s decree that the British tabloid press is a hotbed of racism?

If we express scepticism about her claim that the royal family is a uniquely repressive and possibly racist institution?

Or – heaven forfend – if we balk at the sight of these two millionaires telling their billionaire buddy Oprah Winfrey about how hard their lives have been?

Well, then we’re in trouble. You’ll be accused of anti-Sussex blasphemy. You could even find yourself cast out of polite society, a shameful Meghan-doubter left to wander in the wilderness.

The political atmosphere in the UK in the wake of Harry and Meghan’s explosive chat with Oprah is strange, censorious and unsettling.

The royal pair’s main talking points were the archaic, uncaring nature of the royal family, the bigotry of the British media, and the difficulty of living in a country as racist as the UK. Charming.

With eye-swivelling speed, their “truth” has been institutionalised by the woke set as the truth.

Consider what happened to Piers Morgan when he dared to play the role of Doubting Thomas in the Harry and Meghan affair.

He said he doesn’t believe a word Meghan says. He especially called into question her claim that she went to “the firm” for help when she was feeling suicidal during palace life but they told her nothing could be done.

It would look bad, palace staff apparently said, for a member of the royal family to seek psychological assistance.

I think Morgan was right to question this. Of course none of us knows what goes on inside the royal households, but we do know royals have been more open about their mental travails in recent years.

Last year Prince Harry revealed he had been in therapy for three years. Princess Margaret famously saw a therapist. It was covered in The Crown. Harry and Meghan, along with William and Kate, openly campaigned on the issue of mental health.

So the idea that Palace HR shut the door in Meghan’s face when she told them she was suffering from emotional turmoil does sound a little iffy.

And yet for raising this question, for failing to genuflect uncritically before Meghan’s truth, Morgan was sent packing from Good Morning Britain.

His bosses told him to apologise on-air for his criticisms of Meghan.

They essentially demanded that he engage in a very public act of self-flagellation for the sin of questioning St Meghan. “Recant!”

He refused. And so he had to go. And when he did go the Twittermob whooped with delight, thrilled that a blasphemer against the high priestess of woke had been cast out.

Or consider the fate of Ian Murray of the Society of Editors.

This is an influential organisation that defends media freedom and journalists’ rights.

So naturally it felt honour bound to defend the British press against Harry and Meghan’s stinging criticisms of it.

Harry told Oprah “the UK press is bigoted, specifically the tabloids”.

Meghan went further. She accused the British tabloids of “inciting so much racism” against her, and said they were “bringing out a part of people that was racist”.

That is, the racist tabloid rags helped to unleash the racism that lurks in the hearts of many Brits.

Again, charming. What a way to treat a country in which thousands of people cheered you through the streets of Windsor to your wedding just three years ago.

The Society of Editors, as you would expect, kicked into action. It released a statement saying this “attack” on the British media was “not acceptable” without evidence.

Cue meltdown among the correct-thinking sections of society. Right-on journalists, and even some editors, denounced the society for daring to question Harry and Meghan’s “lived experience” of media racism.

The pressure became too much to bear, and so Ian Murray, the society’s executive director, resigned. This will allow us to “rebuild our reputation”, said the shamed society.

It was a shocking spectacle. A journalists’ organisation being demonised for having the temerity to question Harry and Meghan’s denunciation of British journalism as prejudiced and vile.

Now, some in the Meghan-worshipping set want to go further and actively cleanse the media of its sinful bigotries.

Labour MP Holly Lynch has chastised the press for failing to imbibe Meghan’s sermon about racism.

“A lot of media outlets have not heeded those calls for a change”, she said. We “might start needing to think about” getting the government involved, she added.

Other MPs are calling for a debate about how to “tackle racism in the media and the mental-health strains of persistent press coverage”.

This is chilling. Press freedom in Britain was won by radical journalists who were willing to stand up to kings and queens and to demand an end to crown censorship of the press.

Yet now, in the sainted name of Meghan Markle, MPs are wondering if we might need government action to ensure the press is not too insulting to a Duchess.

Everywhere one looks, the chattering classes are insisting we all bow down to Harry and Meghan’s sermons.

The post-Meghan moment is a good chance to “explore racial inequality” in schools, says one educational expert. MPs are calling for an investigation into alleged racism in the Palace. Across social media, among millennials and Generation Z, Meghan is worshipped. Her claim that racism is rife in modern Britain is accepted as gospel truth.

It is all so bizarre. It’s like a sequel to the summer of BLM madness we had here last year.

That became a neo-Maoist spectacle, with statues being torn down, “offensive” comedy shows being taken off streaming services, and various institutions – from the British Museum to the Natural History Museum – promising to atone for the “sins” of Empire and colonialism.

This is what the Harry and Meghan affair has tapped into, and revved up – the self-loathing of the woke elites; the belief among sections of the political class that Britain is a nasty, racist country that must constantly beat itself up for the crimes of the past.

It’s such a dispiriting, misanthropic view. No wonder it turns off so many ordinary people, who take pride in the UK and who don’t believe that our newspapers, our royals and our people are racist.

This is the new divide in Britain.

On one side are the super-aware, painfully PC self-loathers, and on the other side are people who feel patriotic and content.

Meghan may have become the holy figurehead of the self-loathing lobby. But the rest of us are very sceptical indeed about the things she says and the idea that she is a deliverer of truths that must never be questioned.

And if that makes us blasphemers, so be it.

I only Instagram: burntoakboy

If I responded to every bad-faith criticism of spiked and me, I’d never get anything else done. But every now and then it’s worth responding, if only as a way of exploring what motors some people’s obsessive and dishonest opposition to spiked.

John Gillott, a science writer, has written a Medium post criticising spiked’s coverage of Covid-19 and singling me out for special opprobrium. It is a classic of the bad-faith genre. It contains actual lies, and wilful distortions. Let’s take a look.

Gillott cites my editorial from spiked last week, in which I argued that the social solidarity of the first lockdown has given way, in this current lockdown, to a depressing climate of atomisation. He says I never talked about social solidarity during the first lockdown. Instead my emphasis was on the ‘oppressive, alien character of lockdown’. ‘No hint of the solidarity and community effort he mentioned in his most recent article’, he says.

This is a straightforward lie. A week into lockdown, I argued that people ‘have a strong sense of social solidarity’. People accept restrictions because they are ‘concerned for the health of their friends, families, community and society’, I said (23 March 2020). At the beginning of April, I wrote that ‘the social solidarity we have seen in recent weeks has been inspiring’. I wrote about the sacrifices people were making and the outpouring of help and assistance to vulnerable members of the community (7 April 2020).

The piece Gillott quotes to try to substantiate his false claim that I did not praise people’s social solidarity during the first lockdown was published in May. It was an exploration of the emerging tension between people’s willingness to make sacrifices during a pandemic and the difficulties that lockdown was causing in their lives. I referenced opinion polling that suggested more and more people were fearful of returning to normal life – polling that was causing great concern to the government at the time.

To those of us who appreciate that politics and society are complex, it makes sense that lockdown would have a contradictory impact. On one hand, people were keen to assist in stemming the spread of Covid-19. On the other they were concerned about their jobs and their children’s education, and some had been made to feel overly fearful by government propaganda. This was a point also made by one of the advisers to SAGE, Professor Robert Dingwall. Also in May, he suggested that the government’s public-health campaigning had ‘terrorised’ the population, weakening the social confidence necessary during a pandemic.

Why did Gillott cite a piece I wrote six weeks into the first lockdown and ignore all the other pieces I had written before then? Because he appears to be motivated by an impulse to deceive his readers, to convince them I did not comment on social solidarity, when I did. His belief that lockdown would, or at least should, generate social solidarity only, and no other conflicting social sentiments, strikes me as an infantile fantasy.

Gillott then cites a piece I wrote for the Spectator in mid-May to imply that I do not care about the deaths of elderly people during the pandemic. In that piece I pointed out the very low fatality rate of Covid-19 in the under-40s and the relatively low fatality rate in under-60s. Gillott asks: ‘What was O’Neill’s point here? That older people don’t count?’

This sly, defamatory aside is also fuelled by a wilful refusal to engage with what I have actually written over the past year. spiked was at the forefront of arguing for better protection of the elderly from infection and death. We covered the care-homes scandal – the release of possibly infected patients from hospitals back into care homes – weeks before the mainstream media.

Two weeks into lockdown, on 1 April 2020, I criticised the idea that older people’s lives were of less value than younger people’s lives. To those whose criticism of lockdown was based on the idea that we were harming the young ‘merely’ to save the old, I said: ‘You cannot put a cost on a human life… Every human life has intrinsic worth. Every life is worth saving. Whether you have 60 years left or six months left, your life has meaning and purpose.’

The kind of criticisms that the lockdown lobby made of Lord Sumption recently, after he weighed up the relative value of old lives vs young lives, had been made on spiked a full nine months earlier. We also criticised the blanket lockdown policy on the basis that it distracted resources from where they were required: around care homes in particular and for targeted protection in the community more broadly.

Whether Gillott commented on the problems facing elderly people back then, in March and April 2020, when spiked was covering these problems regularly, I do not know. I sincerely hope that old people’s lives are not only important to him when they can be used to score points against critics of government policy.

Gillott then moves on to a piece I wrote in mid-May about the possibility that lockdown was also causing ill-health and death. He says that as a ‘Covid sceptic’, ‘O’Neill found it very easy to convince himself that many people had died of things other than Covid’.

That term ‘Covid sceptic’ shows the juvenile level of discussion we are dealing with here. More importantly, I did not ‘find it very easy to convince myself’ that there were excess deaths from things other than Covid. Rather, I found myself persuaded by the arguments about such excess deaths that were being made at the time by scientific and medical experts.

The piece of mine that Gillott cites references the British Medical Journal, which in May argued that the ‘staggering number’ of deaths we had seen in the community in recent months could not be explained by Covid alone. It also quoted the Chief Medical Officer of Scotland, who had expressed concerns that there may have been a rise in non-Covid deaths because people were too fearful to visit a hospital.

As late as mid-June, experts at Imperial College were saying that around 9,000 excess non-Covid deaths had occurred during the first three months of the pandemic. Gillott criticises spiked for not referring to the work of mainstream scientists, and yet calls us ‘Covid sceptics’ when we do. Are the British Medical Journal and Imperial College also ‘Covid sceptics’ for raising the possibility that people had died as a result of the measures introduced to tackle the pandemic?

Some experts now believe that most (though not all) of those excess deaths were also Covid-related, though not recorded as such for some reason. It’s just as well, then, that my piece back in May pointed to this very possibility: that ‘some of [these deaths] will have been Covid-related too, but just not recorded as such, for whatever reason’.

Finally, Gillott mentions a piece I wrote in September criticising the reintroduction of lockdown measures. He then swiftly moves on from my piece to start talking about unnamed Covid sceptics ‘on Twitter’ who in September were asking ‘Where’s the second wave? It’s over.’ His implication is that I was saying something similar. But I wasn’t. I did not say Covid had disappeared. Falsely attributing sentiments to a writer is not a serious way to approach important public issues.

What are we to make of this use of distortion, misrepresentation and outright lies to try to smear a publication as ‘Covid sceptical’? It suggests to me that the aim here is not to honestly engage with the substance of what people are saying, or the important matter of how society should respond to a serious pandemic. Rather, the aim seems to be to demonise those who raise questions about government policy, and who suggest that galvanising the demos to face down the novel and serious threat of Covid-19 would have been preferable, in both the short term and the long term, to institutionalising some of the most extraordinary authoritarian and atomising measures of modern times.

The climate of hostility towards those who have criticised lockdown measures is intensifying. Gillott’s piece captures the extent to which such hostility seems to be driven less by a serious concern for science, truth, reason and open discussion, and more by a strange intolerance against those who would defend the ideals of freedom and democracy even in the darkest moments.

Find me at Instagram: burntoakboy

The Australian, 6 February 2021

In January 2018, at an anti-Trump Women’s March in London, a laughing, pink-haired feminist waved a placard that said: “No country for old white men.”

Fast forward to 2020 and who was the British hero of the hour – of the entire year, in fact? It was an old white man. A very old white man. Captain Tom Moore.

From woke political agitators mocking old white men to a nation taking an old white man to its heart – there is a very important story here.

It points to one of Captain Tom’s most wonderful achievements – his shattering of the ageist prejudices of the new left. His laying to waste of the idea that if you are old and white and male, then you are by definition a bad person, a toxic person.

Captain Tom did many great things. His proving that Britain *is* a country for old white men, that we do value the sacrifices and wisdom and charity of our older generations, should definitely be counted among them.

Captain Sir Tom Moore, the undisputed hero of Covid Britain, died on Tuesday, at the age of 100.

He became a national treasure in the UK in 2020 when he walked 100 lengths of his garden in the run-up to his 100th birthday, to raise money for NHS charities that were combatting Covid-19.

The image of Captain Tom leaning on his Zimmer frame as he persevered in his garden walks has become iconic. There are murals of it on streets in the UK.

He became a global sensation, too. The world media rushed to cover this heartening story of the 99-year-old army veteran doing his bit in the battle against the virus.

Soon, politicians and even royalty recognised Captain Tom for his sterling work during the two great crises that have battered the UK in modern times.

First, the Second World War, in which Captain Tom served in the India and Burma campaigns. And secondly the Covid calamity, during which he propelled himself on to the frontline of assisting the health service: his walking raised £33 million.

Boris Johnson and numerous other politicians paid tribute to him. And at a special service at Windsor Castle, the Queen knighted him. As Boris said when Captain Tom died last week, “he cheered us all up… he embodied the triumph of the human spirit”.

He did something else, too. He demonstrated – not that it should have been necessary to do so – that old white men can give a great deal to society; that being old and white does not make one a bad person.

In recent years it has been open season on white men, especially old white men.

According to the woke left, to the identitarian set that now wields so much influence in politics, education and culture, oldness and whiteness are toxic qualities, signifiers of “privilege” and “regressive attitudes”.

Think about the casual, cavalier way in which “white man” has become an insult.

I’ve lost count of the number of times people have said to me, “You would say that, you’re a white man”, as if my skin colour, my entirely accidental racial make-up, negates my point of view.

It’s even worse for older white men. As the British journalist Simon Jenkins says, if you’re an elderly white bloke these days you are written off as “pale, male and stale”. These PSMs, as Jenkins calls them, are the last social group it is “okay to vilify”.

We see this vilification all the time. Boomer-bashing has become almost a full-time pursuit among young radical leftists. (Captain Tom was older than the Boomers, of course, having been born in 1920.)

A recent book, by the venture capitalist Bruce Gibney, described the Boomers as a “generation of sociopaths”. “The Boomers ruined everything”, said the headline to one effusive review of that book.

Among millennial leftists, it is now commonplace to blame older generations for every ill of modern society.

This hyper-moralistic generationalism depicts older people as entitled and greedy, as self-satisfied home-owners who don’t give a damn about millennials.

Politically correct ageism reached its nadir in the UK following the vote for Brexit. The fact that older generations were more likely than younger ones to have voted Leave was held up as proof that they were regressive and racist.

A writer for GQ magazine even declared that “We should ban old people from voting”. The novelist Ian McEwan made the Guardian-reading set chuckle into their macchiatos when he said that Britain would soon become a pro-Remain country because 1.5 million of the “oldsters” who voted Leave will have died. “Angry old men… freshly in their graves”, he fantasised.

This fashionable ageism has been genuinely vile. It blames old people – especially old white men – for every bad thing. It grates against social solidarity by splitting the generations into warring camps.

And it threatens to impact on how we as a society care for older people. If more and more people view the elderly as greedy and prejudiced, if we are encouraged to mock the “pale, male and stale”, then that could well undermine the culture of respect and love that we need in care homes, and across society.

Captain Tom did his bit in this battle, too; in this necessary war against the new ageism and against the cynical whipping-up of generational tensions.

He reminded us that there is so much we can learn from older people. That their experiences are important. That their wisdom is valuable. It is wonderful that it was an old white man who became the hero of the Covid crisis, because that made visible to everyone that there is nothing “stale” about our older generations.

Covid-19 has hit older people the hardest. In the UK, largely as a result of lax control measures at care homes, thousands and thousands of elderly people have died. Many others, including Captain Tom, joined the crusade against the virus.

Maybe after the trials and tribulations of 2020, more people will recognise just how crucial it is that we care for older people, listen to them, and never, ever dehumanise them.

Published in The Australian, 6 February 2021.

Find me on Instagram: burntoakboy

I’m always surprised when people call me right-wing. I’m not offended – I think right and left are largely meaningless categories these days, so I see neither as a compliment or an insult – but I am surprised. So I scribbled down some of the ideas I’m most keen on, and have written about a lot over the past 20 years, and I am curious to know which ones are right-wing. I had always considered these leftish ideas, but perhaps I am wrong?

• Abolish the monarchy.
• Abolish the House of Lords.
• Have a unicameral democratic system with more frequent elections.
• Never expect an individual to live under laws or a political system that he or she cannot in some capacity consent to or influence.
• Defend due process.
• Defend legal rights – the right to silence, the right to trial by jury, the right to appeal etc – and do not let any government dilute or damage them.
• Only imprison violent offenders who pose a threat. Non-violent offenders should be punished in other ways.
• Get rid of all legal restrictions on speech, a la the First Amendment in the US: “Congress shall make no law…”
• Diminish official interference into people’s personal and family lives.
• Decriminalise abortion. No one should have the right to interfere with a woman’s bodily autonomy or individual sovereignty.
• Trust that women are just as capable as men of negotiating public life and work life.
• Decriminalise all drugs.
• No “sin taxes” on alcohol or fast food, as this pinches the purses of the less well-off.
• End the entire ideology of race and recover the humanist outlook that says our similarities are more important than our differences.
• Devise a serious industrial and economic strategy to reinvigorate the economy and create masses of new jobs.
• Support those in the Third World who aspire to have as much development and wealth as we in the West enjoy.
• Reject all forms of coercion or social pressure in matters of reproduction and allow families to decide for themselves how many kids to have. No population control in Africa, no one-child policy in China.
• Prioritise human need over environmental concerns, while acknowledging that the more a society develops, the more resources it can devote to cleaning up the environment, and that’s a good thing.
• No Western wars overseas.
• No interventionism that is likely to exacerbate foreign conflicts and cause harm to human life or safety.
• Build foreign policy on the principle, “First, do no harm”.
• Offer solidarity with all those fighting for progressive causes overseas, be it Iran’s rebels, the Kurds, or Yazidi women struggling against Islamo-extremism.
• Confront and criticise – but do not ban – backward ideologies and religious outlooks that demean women or minority groups or which encourage communally divisive behaviour.
• Use moral reasoning as much as possible in public life, as this is preferable to both narrow moralism (which eschews reason) and science (which eschews moral judgement).
• Reject the politics of fear, whether on crime, terrorism, hate crime, green issues, migration or whatever, as this makes reasoned, practical discussion more difficult, and people more fearful.
• People in power: never presume you know better than other people what they should think, say, read, eat or drink, who they should have sex with, how they should live, what they should believe, or how they should raise their children.
• Never give an individual a greater say in democratic politics on the basis of his class, race, educational achievements or expertise.
• It is preferable to give people work rather than welfare.
• It is better to give people welfare than to let them go hungry. But to fetishise welfare as a positive thing in and of itself is perverse.
• People in power: invest in research, development, technology, science, nuclear power, the space race, and new forms of industry.
• Encourage the young to define themselves by their achievements rather than by their inherent characteristics.
• Encourage them to be strong-willed, confident, self-possessed, desiring of autonomy, and resistant to the pressure to view their normal ups and downs as mental illnesses that require the intervention of officialdom.
• Encourage them to respect their elders! We need more intergenerational solidarity.
• Encourage excellence in the arts and staggeringly high standards in comprehensive education.
• Reject censorship of any kind in art, literature, entertainment and public life.
• Learn from the past, look to the future. Reject nostalgia but embrace historic achievements.
• Individuals, intellectuals and leaders, take risks.

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The Australian, 13 June 2020

The West is in the grip of a Cultural Revolution. Modern-day Red Guards have declared war on the past. The Black Lives Matter protests that erupted in response to the police killing of George Floyd have morphed with staggering speed into a frenzied assault on history, liberty and reason.

No statue, no monument, no bust is safe from the woke mob’s frantic urge to purify the public square and erase all trace of people they disapprove of.

Over the past week these right-on vandals toppled a statue of the 17th-century slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol in England.

They cheered and jeered as Colston fell, and then stomped on his head before throwing the statue in a river.

It was a disturbing, almost medieval spectacle: a mob exacting some inexplicable vengeance against the likeness of a man who has been dead for 300 years.

Woke mobs also beheaded a statue of Christoper Columbus in Boston. Yes, they yanked off the head of one of the greatest explorers in history, the discoverer of the New World.

It brought to mind the way in which wild-eyed Taliban and ISIS members would hack with hammers at the heads of ancient statues they considered haram.

The new Red Guards also dragged down a likeness of Columbus outside the Minnesota State Capitol. Anyone who watches the clip of this act of infantile philistine vandalism will surely be shocked by the hysteria of the crowd.

“I want everyone to come up and kick him in the head!”, yells one of the fevered attendees. Thank God they’re only attacking statues. For now, anyway.

If a statue can’t be toppled, it is abused. The Winston Churchill monument in London had the word “racist” sprayed on it during a Black Lives Matter protest last week.

A statue of Queen Victoria in Leeds was also targeted. The mob spray-painted “MURDERER” on the base of the statue. They sprayed pink paint on the statue’s breasts and genital area. What madness is this?

Even the statue of Abraham Lincoln in London was targeted. Lincoln fought an actual war to end slavery. But he’s white, and American, and therefore bad – right?

Like good little Maoists, the PC vandals are now circulating lists of other statues to be dragged down.

In the US they want to erase all trace of Columbus and sweep away Confederate monuments too.

In the UK they’re targeting the colonialist Cecil Rhodes at Oxford University, a bust of Columbus in London, and even William Gladstone, the 19th-century Liberal prime minister.

Yes, this is how deranged the violent assault on history has become: they’re now raging against one of Britain’s most liberal PMs on the basis that his father was involved in the slave trade.

This week, under pressure from snowflake students, Liverpool University agreed to remove Gladstone’s name from the students’ halls of residence.

Gladstone expanded democracy in the UK with the Third Reform Act in 1884. He was the first PM to propose Home Rule for Ireland. He was so popular he was referred to as “The People’s William”.

And yet now he, too, must be erased, shoved down the memory hole, because a tiny gang of noisy historical illiterates have found him guilty in their kangaroo court of the things that his father did.

In these dark, intemperate times, the sins of the father SHALL be visited upon the son.

Now that even Gladstone is being targeted, surely the politicians and media people who foolishly cheered the mob who dragged down Edward Colston in Bristol will reflect on what they have helped to unleash.

Because it’s pretty clear now that this is not some righteous uprising against racism or the memorialisation of slave traders.

No, it has become a mad, undemocratic crusade against anything and anyone who offends the politically correct lobby.

These neo-Maoist efforts to cleanse the public square of people and ideas that the woke elites disapprove of is a continuation of what has been happening in our universities and elsewhere in society for two decades now.

This mad moment represents the bursting forth into public life of all the backward, illiberal, identitarian ideas that have been growing and festering in the academy.

That’s why the events of the past week are so important.

This no longer has anything whatsoever to do with George Floyd.

Rather, we are witnessing nothing less than a power grab by the politically correct machine; an attempt by the new intolerant elites to export their eccentric ideologies into every street and square and corner of the public sphere.

It really does echo the Cultural Revolution.

The original Red Guards likewise targeted “offensive” monuments. There was a “frenzy of smashing”, as one historical account describes it.

They especially hated statues of Buddha. They would tear them down and throw them on to bonfires. Such destructive behaviour was repeated in Richmond, Virginia this week when a woke mob pulled down a statue of Columbus, set fire to it, and then threw it in a lake.

The Cultural Revolution was a war against the “Four Olds” – old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits.

Today’s Woke Guards also rage against old ways of thinking that run counter to their own ideology.

They are remorseless. Culture that offends them must be banned. People who disagree with them must be cancelled. Re-education is their aim, as it was for the original Red Guards.

So over the past week it isn’t only statues that have been torn down – so has “offensive” entertainment and dissenting thinkers.

Netflix and the BBC have pulled comedy classics like Little Britain, the League of Gentlemen and all of Chris Lilley’s shows, on the basis that they feature white actors occasionally playing black characters.

A radio presenter on the Isle of Man was suspended for daring to question the idea of “white privilege”. A Welsh journalist was ditched as a judge for a literary prize after he criticised Black Lives Matter.

In the US the Cultural Revolution has exploded into newsrooms over the past week.

Stan Wischnowski, executive editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, was forced out for the speechcrime of using the headline “Buildings Matter, Too” on a piece about why the riotous destruction of buildings is bad.

At the New York Times, opinion editor James Bennet was sacked for publishing a piece by Republican Senator Tom Cotton calling for troops to put down the rioting.

This scandal at the New York Times is probably one of the most important events of the new Cultural Revolution so far.

For what has really taken place at this key liberal institution in American public life is a woke coup.

Younger staff members staged a “virtual walkout” over Bennet’s publication of Cotton’s piece. They denounced him, like jumped-up little Joe McCarthys, and accused him of wrongthink.

It was incredibly symbolic: the old liberal guard being swept aside by intolerant younger people, by the Woke Guards, who are utterly hostile to difference of opinion and open debate.

The New York Times has essentially been captured by the ascendant new elites. Given the role this newspaper has traditionally played in upholding the values of American liberalism, this could prove to be the most significant shift in the past week’s march of the culture warriors from their campuses into politics, the media and the public square.

These unforgiving woke elites have been waiting for a moment like this.

For years they have been honing their ideologies and their neo-Maoist tactics.

And now they are exploiting the anger over George Floyd’s death to enforce their writ across society.

Their deadening and divisive worldview is spreading fast.

They spent decades developing “critical race theory” – the idea that racism is ingrained into modern societies like America, the UK and Australia.

This theory, foisted upon students at every opportunity, presents racism almost as an original sin, a stain Western societies will never wash away.

It reduces black people to permanent victims of the virus of racism and depicts white people as the “privileged” beneficiaries of slavery and other historical crimes.

All blacks suffer, all whites are complicit: that’s the nasty message of this eccentric ideology.

And now this nonsense, this worldview that patronises blacks and demonises whites, is running riot. Literally.

It has spread through society. In recent days we have witnessed middle-class whites on their knees begging for forgiveness for historical events they had nothing to do with. We’ve had the Archbishop of Canterbury telling white Christians to “repent” for their racial sins. We’ve seen Nigella Lawson saying “white people” are “complicit” in racism.

The deranged assaults on historical monuments is critical race theory in action.

Well-educated youths are constantly told by their professors that Western society is a racist, rotten, patriarchal entity.

So the fact that these youths are now whooping wildly as they throw paint and insults at historical monuments is not really surprising.

They are the footsoldiers of a new ideology that is profoundly anti-Western, which views Western history as little more than a litany of crimes.

Witness also the mainstreaming of the gender lunacy that has been rife in higher-education circles for years.

The cult of genderfluidity, which preaches that you can be any sex that you like, is now rampant in political circles and popular culture.

It is striking that over the past week we haven’t only witnessed the march of the Cultural Revolution against the history and monuments of Western society, but also a demented witch-hunt against JK Rowling for committing the thoughtcrime of believing that people with penises are not women.

Yes, courtesy of the transgender ideology, even expressing biological truths is a risky business these days.

The religion of genderfluidity is now in classrooms, in changing rooms, and all over popular culture. There is no faster way to signal your decency, to advertise your virtue, than to utter the woke mantra: “Trans women are women.”

Many events from the past week echo the stifling culture that has been gaining ground in educational institutions.

The “calling out” of anyone who fails to take the knee – that is, bow down – to everything BLM represents speaks to the cancel culture that has been a key feature of woke agitation for years.

The erasure of allegedly offensive comedy springs from the fervour for de-platforming that has defined campus life for a long time.

Right-wing speakers, un-PC comics, people who question the gospel of climate change, anyone who believes there are only two sexes… they have all run the risk of being No Platformed by the self-elected moral guardians of the ivory towers, and now such PC censorship is taking hold in society at large.

And the desire to re-educate the masses about the West’s evil history and the reality of racism also comes from the PC elite’s long-standing desire to cleanse people’s heads of wrongthink and fill them with right-on blather.

The celebrated identitarian author Ibram Kendi has said we need a “radical reorientation of our consciousness”.

This is fancy lingo for re-education, for forcing the dim throng to buy into the woke view on everything from race to sex, from history to comedy.

They have had plenty of practice in this authoritarian enterprise. Many campuses have for years been holding diversity-training exercises, mandatory race-awareness courses, and lessons in sexual etiquette.

Now this Orwellian urge to wash away impure thoughts and replace them with the gospel truth of political correctness is a feature of everyday political life.

The new Cultural Revolution looks and feels like a war of the young against the old. Or rather, against the Four Olds. Against the ideas, culture, customs and habits of yesteryear that fail the purity test of today’s Woke Guards and the PC police.

There is unquestionably a generational dynamic at play. Millennials and Generation Z were brought up in safe spaces, over-protected by helicopter parents, and educated to believe that their self-esteem should take precedence over everything else – even over the right of other people to say things that one might find challenging or offensive.

But it strikes me that the true problem today is not so much blue-haired youths and twentysomething lefties with more PhDs than sense, even though such people seem increasingly shrill, censorious and sometimes ruthless.

No, the problem is the failure of adult society and of key Western institutions to say “NO” to the youths and chancers of the woke cult.From churches to the social-media giants, from the BBC to the police, too many institutions are caving in to the 21st-century speechpolice.

Over the past few days we’ve seen cops running away from BLM activists in London, church officials repeating the divisive mantras of the BLM movement, Netflix, the Beeb and others dutifully cancelling “problematic” TV shows, and a school in Sussex in England reneging on its plans to name one of its houses after JK Rowling simply because she thinks that men are men and women are women.

Every capitulation to the mob emboldens it. Who will stand up to the imperious ambitions of the PC brigade? Someone has to. Failure to do so will put liberty, free thought, reason and social solidarity itself at even greater risk than they already are.

The Australian, 13 June 2020

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The Australian, 11 April 2020

I want you to carry out a thought experiment.

Imagine if it was discovered that some men of the Muslim faith had engaged in awful acts of abuse.

Imagine if these men drugged, assaulted and raped girls over a period of years.

Imagine if they had treated the girls as their personal property.

Do you think the left-leaning media would demonise the men as evil and even satanic?

Do you think commentators would appear on TV to opine about Islam and its allegedly warped abusive culture?

Do you think, in short, we would see the same kind of fury aimed at those men as we have seen in relation to Cardinal George Pell when he was wrongly convicted of child abuse?

Would the Twitterati tweet for months on end about the wickedness of these Muslim men, as they have done with Pell?

Would someone take it upon themselves to daub a mosque with anti-Islamic slogans along the lines of the anti-Catholic bigotry that was spray-painted on to the door of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne following the quashing of Pell’s conviction for child abuse?

Would the supposedly progressive sections of society turn a blind eye to such foul mosque desecration, as they largely did in relation to the hateful anti-Catholicism painted on to St Patrick’s?

“Rot in Hell, Pell”, the graffiti said – a disgusting anti-Catholic hate crime.

And yet the kind of people who obsess over such “offences” as failing to use the correct pronouns for the 71 genders that apparently exist have been fairly quiet about this act of anti-Catholic bigotry.

We know the answers to the questions above. We know that the kind of people who have been most exercised about the “evilness” of Pell would not react in the same way if it had been Muslim men accused of abuse.

We know this because this isn’t a thought experiment at all. It’s real life. It has already happened.

Here in the UK, there has been a serious problem with grooming gangs over the past 10 years.

These gangs, mostly made up of Pakistani Muslim men, have abused large numbers of mostly white working-class girls.

In Rotherham, Oxford, Manchester and elsewhere, the gangs opportunistically exploited and assaulted vulnerable girls.

And what was the response from the left, the #MeToo movement, and the virtue-signallers of the Twitterati?

Silence.

For years the authorities themselves failed properly to investigate these gangs for fear of stirring up community tensions.

Earlier this year, an official inquiry into the grooming-gang scandal in Manchester found that “the authorities knew that many [girls] were being subjected to the most profound abuse and exploitation but did not protect them from the perpetrators”.

Why? Because they were concerned that an investigation might “incite racial hatred” and invite criticism of certain sections of the Muslim community.

The police, officialdom, feminists and leftists largely turned a blind eye to abuse by Muslim men.

But when it comes to Catholicism, the story could not be more different.

As in Australia, and other countries, Catholic institutions in the UK have had a problem with child abuse. There have been numerous historic revelations of abuse by priests.

And in this case, the right-on sections of society have been far from silent. In fact, they have been openly, loudly talking about Catholic abuse for years.

Even that term “Catholic abuse” is striking. In relation to grooming gangs, anyone who says “Muslim grooming gangs” is shouted down and demonised as a racist.

And yet the very people who rage against public discussion of problems within the Muslim community will happily talk about Catholic abuse and Catholic crimes.

When the former Pope, Benedict XVI, visited the UK in 2010, there was a huge public protest against Catholic abuse.

Leftists and members of the chattering classes gathered in their thousands. They waved placards mocking Catholicism.

“Abstinence makes the church grow fondlers”, said one. “The devil DOES wear Prada”, said another, in reference to the Pope’s famous Prada-made shoes.

It is of course a key tenet of anti-Catholic bigotry that the Pope is the Antichrist. We have seen that hateful idea re-emerge in recent years, in trendy Londoners’ denunciation of Benedict as the devil and the depiction of Pell as a satanic figure who deserves to rot in hell.

At that London demo, there was a cacophonous chant of “GO HOME, POPE”. I am a lapsed Catholic, but even I felt a chill hearing those words ring out through Whitehall.

It felt like a return of the ‘Roman’-bashing that has infected England for centuries. Catholics across the UK will have felt horrified by this anti-Papism.

The stark contrast between the discussion of abuse by Muslim men and the discussion of abuse by Catholic clergy is incredibly revealing.

Do some far-right people use instances of Muslim abuse to demonise all Muslims and Islam itself? Unquestionably. And they should be strongly criticised for doing so.

But here’s the thing: that is what the supposedly virtuous left does in relation to Catholicism.

They take historic instances of abuse and use them to demonise Catholicism, and even innocent men like Pell, as demonic and disgusting.

This is every bit as bigoted as when a hard-right idiot uses the problem of grooming gangs to say that Islam’s followers are all inherently suspect.

I fear we are witnessing a return of anti-Catholic bigotry.

I fear that much of the media discussion around Pell was not concerned with facts or reason, but rather was awash with the old, repugnant idea that Catholics and their leaders are a suspect community.

Strange, backward, possibly more loyal to Rome than Canberra or London… in short, not like us.

In liberal England, in sections of respectable Australia, and among American evangelicals, anti-Catholic bigotry has always been a problem. It ebbs and flows, but it perseveres.

In recent years, it has become more difficult to be openly anti-Catholic – we’re all meant to be PC, after all.

But it strikes me that the undoubted problem of historic child abuse in Catholic institutions has allowed some people to dress up their old bigotry in seemingly PC language.

Cardinal Pell is an innocent man. What has been done to him is monstrous. And it wasn’t only him on trial – it was Catholicism more broadly.

That supposedly progressive people used the trial of a Cardinal to carry out a showtrial of Catholicism will horrify Catholics across Australia and around the world. That upside-down crosses were spray-painted on to St Patrick’s is unconscionable. Where are we going with this?

This anti-Catholicism must stop. The Pope is not the devil, Cardinal Pell is not an abuser, and Catholics are not a backward people.

The prejudices of the progressive elite must be confronted in order that Catholics can feel comfortable in Australia and other Western nations.

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