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I went into my segment with Tucker intent on challenging him if the opportunity presented itself, but the brief appearance focused on my Oxford speech and ended before I’d had the chance to raise my objections to his coverage of the war in Ukraine.
His producer WhatsApped me immediately after to congratulate me on the appearance with the invitation to “Please come back soon!”. ”Here is my moment”, I naively thought to myself and replied with the offer to come back and discuss my disagreements with Tucker on the war in Ukraine.
The response was telling:
”I’m just not sure it would be great TV to have him debate you on the war”.
[…]
The message was clear: we don’t want to have a discussion about this and if you keep pressing the issue you won’t be coming back on the biggest show in America.
There’s nothing wrong with any of this. No one is entitled to appear on anyone’s show to talk about a subject they nominate. Tucker and his producers are perfectly entitled to invite the guests they want to discuss the subjects they want. But the incident made it obvious to me that Tucker was not a truth-seeking journalist and that when it came to Russia and the war in Ukraine, at least, he had no intention of being objective. That much is obvious, especially after the events of the last week. But the real question is why?
– Konstantin Kisin
Like Kisin, I once saw Tucker Carlson as one of the good guys, on the same side. I am wiser now, even if we share a few of the same enemies. But sometimes, the enemy of my enemy is also my enemy.
In a previous post – borrowing from C.S. Lewis – I used the word “unconciliatory” to describe Sir Keir Starmer, and I increasingly find it the most appropriate one when thinking about the tenor of governance to which we are now subject. Labour’s victory in the 2024 election was artificial and its well of support is ankle-deep; since only one in five of the electorate actually voted for the party it was already unpopular at the very point of taking office. Politicians who were not thoroughgoing mediocrities would, finding themselves in such a position, be prudent. They would recognise their priorities to be consolidation, calmness and concession – their aim would be to lay stable foundations for future governance with quiet competence. But the current crop do not really understand the word ‘prudence’, or like it. So we are patently not going to get that. We are instead going to get a programme of improvement imposed upon us from above: eat your greens, do your press-ups, and do as nanny says (oh, and hand over your pocket money while you’re at it).
This will all unravel very quickly. People will not get with the programme, because people never really do, and certainly not when it has been designed by those they actively mistrust and sense have nothing but disdain for them. And therefore, in short order, as the truth dawns on the Government that the people are not on board with its plan of action, the sense of disappointment it feels is going to turn to rage. This will in turn have the inevitable result, as the rage becomes nakedly apparent, that the population will start to kick back – mulishly, and hard.
– David McGrogan
I highly commending this article, read the whole thing.
Tommy Robinson being interviewed by Jordan Peterson presents me with pair of people I am not predisposed to like. But set aside Robinson’s thesis about Islam in the UK for a moment, which you can agree with or not, I contend what the state does to try and shut him down is actually the critical issue. Indeed, I would say if even a small fraction of what he says about security services is true, we have rocketed past the point where normal politics can be relied upon for redress and remedy. Watch and listen with an open mind. We are not heading towards a police state, we are well and truly in one.
Striking Hezbollah is a very low-risk proposition compared to striking targets in Gaza or Iran.
Every single Gaza strike brought the possibility of mass casualties, but in Gaza, this was a feature, not a bug for HAMAS. HAMAS needs civilian casualties because they cannot win a fight against Israel. The world must be so horrified that they end the conflict with a cease-fire and a cease-fire means a HAMAS win.
However, civilians in southern Lebanon can flee north, which is something that cannot be done by residents of Gaza. This makes Hezbollah a much more attractive target and reduces the amount of propaganda that can be released by Hezbollah.
Hezbollah is in a bad situation and they are starting to realize that Iran is not coming to help them.
– Ryan McBeth
Victims are blamed, pressured into keeping quiet, and whistleblowers are pursued. In short, after an initial flurry of activity, we have taken the Rotherham vaccine and become inured to the plight of our young girls, who are foolishly looking to us in hope of salvation, imploring us for help and daily praying for justice – a vain yearning in today’s Britain.
Mentioning the scandal carries a “branding” sentence, which an increasing number of people feel unable to bear, preferring to throttle the source of the sound of suffering than to deal with the root of the problem.
One thing is for sure: it is for us, not the authorities, to judge them on their record.
The mother in Wakefield lived through two-tier policing, as have many thousands of other desperate souls. That is a fact.
– Alex Story
Media reaction to the National Wealth Fund has, in general, been positive, though (predictably) The Economist was critical. Interestingly, The Guardian did not appreciate the fund’s misleading name. Probably the most glowing responses came from the Financial Times. Many might think that this, as well as the various big names involved in the formulation of the policy — including former Bank of England governor Mark Carney and the Chief Executives of Aviva, NatWest, and Barclays — reflects the fact that this policy is well-formulated and fundamentally sensible. They would be wrong. As we have seen, there is nothing sensible about the majority of the ‘preliminary’ sectors chosen.
– Pimlico Journal
I commend this article in Pimlico Journal for its unflinching analysis of where we find ourselves in the UK. Follow the link and read the whole thing, which is a grim tale I wish I could convince myself is excessively bleak.
The Narcissistic State represents a reversal of the key principal of the British social contract as outlined by Bishop Gilbert Burnett in the wake of the Glorious Revolution of 1688: that ‘government is for those who are to be government’. As the state starts once again to exist for its own sake, its priorities diverge from those of its citizens, and it increasingly starts to fail them.
Yet, like individual narcissists, the Narcissistic State demands praise even in failure, as encapsulated in the language adopted by the NHS ‘heroes’ or the ‘painstaking’ work the Metropolitan Police put into failed investigations. Here we recall the citizens of the Eastern Bloc who were not only expected to endure cold, fear, and hunger, but also to applaud those who kept them in such a condition. It never accepts blame or criticism, and reacts sclerotically when confronted with either. Indeed, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner himself physically lashed out at a reporter for asking him the question which is pressing most heavily on the mind of the public. Instead of looking to itself for answers, British law enforcement is going to the four corners of the earth to seek extrinsic causes for very civil unrest it has seeded. The Director of Public Prosecutions has suggested that foreign states might wish to extradite their citizens to Britain for departing from our state-sanctioned political narratives. Yet the same cohort will segue in the next breath to discussing the danger of Britain being affected by the authoritarianism of other governments; self-knowledge never being the forte of narcissists.
– Pimlico Journal
Earlier this month, the Met Office claimed that climate change was causing a “dramatic increase in the frequency of temperature extremes and number of temperature records in the U.K.”. Given what we now know from recent freedom of information (FOI) revelations about the state of its ‘junk’ nationwide temperature measuring network, it is difficult to see how the Met Office can publish such a statement and keep a straight face.
[…]
It’s almost as if the Met Office is actively seeking higher readings to feed into its constant catastrophisation of weather in the interests of Net Zero promotion. Whatever the reason – incompetence or political messaging – serious science would appear to be the loser. As currently set up, the Met Office network is incapable of providing a realistic guide to natural air temperatures across the U.K. Using the data to help calculate global temperatures is equally problematic.
– Chris Morrison
My lack of current knowledge on the area means I felt no need to weigh in, but it seems astonishing how little reportage there is regarding what’s been happening in Bangladesh for the last few weeks, very much a side issue it seems.
There is a fairly interesting article in Unherd about the current disturbances in UK, but the missing elephant in the room, a very large Halal elephant, is that after Oct 7th 2023, UK streets have been choked with large numbers of marches by Islamic folk & their secular green-haired Gays-For-Gaza supporters, deeply invested in a war in which UK has little to no geopolitical stake. These marches drove British Jews off streets as genocidal slogans were chanted in Arabic (من المية للمية / فلسطين عربية) & the flags of proscribed organisations were flown times beyond counting a few feet away from lines of indifferent policemen, over and over and over again.
Contrast that with the heavy handed treatment of the small sporadic counter-protests which flew Union flags or (gasp) Cross of St. George, things that only cause dyspepsia to those infused with high-status Guardian reading opinions.
However, the war in Ukraine, where the UK geopolitical interest is manifest to anyone not a fan of Putin & Imperial Russia’s Z-fascism, did not produce constant street level responses beyond some shouting at the Russian Embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens. Why? It’s not a divisive issue, so Ukraine’s supporters didn’t really feel the need to. Few in UK want to see Europe to be destabilised by allowing Russia to once again bordering with Romania & Slovakia with interior supply lines.
So, Ukraine’s fight for survival has not induced British Ukrainians to run for office in Westminster or (more bizarrely) local councils based entirely on their views about a foreign war & appealing to a sectarian/ethnic vote.
Yet that is exactly what has happened since Oct 7th on the issue of Gaza. To understand the pent-up resentment without looking at that is to miss a huge element of how we ended up where we are.
The Labour Government (nor indeed the entirely pointless Tories) do not even understand the problem let alone have a solution, well, other than to just dial up the repression against online words and to dish out more riot gear to hammer some gammon. Instead of actually thinking about this, we saw assorted MPs & various worthies muttering darkly about the “EDL”, an organisation that doesn’t even exist anymore, making this a bit like when Royalists dug up Oliver Cromwell after the Restoration to “execute” him post-mortem.
… hope and prayers for the freedom fighters in Venezuela. Hoping for a Nicolae Ceaușescu style exit for Nicolas Maduro.
The foreign ministers of Australia, Japan, India and the US issued a joint statement after the massacre, saying ‘We underscore the need to prevent the conflict from escalating’. Likewise, Britain’s foreign secretary, David Lammy, has said ‘we are deeply concerned about the risk of further escalation’. These are warnings to Israel, aren’t they? These powerhouses of Western diplomacy, with their noisy teeth-gnashing over ‘escalation’, are essentially telling Israel to chill out. Indeed, one US security analyst told the Guardian that ‘the most pressing task for US officials’ is to ‘delay any Israeli retaliation’ in order that we might ‘achieve de-escalation’. Relax, Israel – it’s only 12 kids.
– Brendan O’Neill
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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