All entries by this author
Sep 17th, 2025 7:53 am |
By Ophelia Benson
If you don’t like the history, just rewrite it.
The Trump administration has ordered the removal of signs and exhibits related to slavery at multiple national parks,according to four people familiar with the matter, including a historic photograph of a formerly enslaved man showing scars on his back.
The individuals, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with the media, said the removals were in line with President Donald Trump’s March executive order directing the Interior Department to eliminate information that reflects a “corrosive ideology” that disparages historic Americans.
Those two sentences don’t quite go together. The first says Trump ordered the specific removals, the second says the removals are in line … Read the rest
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Sep 16th, 2025 4:12 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Oh right, it’s all Obama’s fault.
Right right right. Race was in no way an issue in the US until Obama came along. Those centuries of race-based chattel slavery? A mirage! A myth! A story told by the devil!
Obama did all the dividing and Trump has just been trying to stitch it back together. The man is a saint.… Read the rest
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12 comments
Sep 16th, 2025 10:13 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Well there’s when you do it and then there’s when we do it.
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said the Trump administration will be “targeting” hate speech, which she differentiated from free speech — and then tried to walk it back a day later. “There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech,” Bondi said in an interview with “The Katie Miller Podcast” that aired Monday, appearing to shrug off First Amendment concerns.
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In an interview later Monday with Fox News host Sean Hannity, Bondi said that “we all believe in the First Amendment,” but that people who’ve said “horrible things” about Kirk in the days since his murder should be held to account.
“It’s free speech, but you
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Sep 16th, 2025 9:51 am |
By Ophelia Benson
The Scottish government just cannot get enough of hating women.
The Scottish Government has confirmed it will challenge For Women Scotland’s legal bid to remove guidance that allows male-born prisoners to be housed with women and permits transgender pupils to use single-sex facilities and sports in line with their gender identity.
Because women prisoners must not be allowed to be housed away from men and girls must not be allowed to use toilets or play sports away from boys. Female people must be punished and bullied or all the fun goes out of it. Why bother being trans if you can’t make women miserable?
For Women Scotland co-director Trina Budge accused Mr Swinney’s administration of “arrogance.” She told the
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Sep 16th, 2025 8:40 am |
By Ophelia Benson
A tangled web.
Fox News host Brian Kilmeade apologized on Sunday for saying days earlier that people who are experiencing homelessness and mental illnesses should be executed – remarks that prompted calls for him to be fired.
The host said his comments on Wednesday were “extremely callous”.
Kilmeade’s about-face came amid a climate in which people across the US are either being fired from or disciplined at their jobs amid a coordinated effort to clamp down on commentary that is critical about Turning Point USA’s executive director, Charlie Kirk, who was shot to death at an event in Utah on Wednesday.
Mere hours before the conservative political activist was killed, while on the rightwing Fox News program Fox &
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Sep 16th, 2025 6:37 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Unions kick women to the curb.
The trade union movement “spat in the face of women in the workplace” when they rejected the Supreme Court’s ruling on biological sex, the co-editor of a bestselling gender-critical book has said.
Susan Dalgety said misogyny still “festers at the heart” of unions after delegates at the Trades Union Congress (TUC) unanimously voted to dismiss updated guidance on single-sex spaces.
The motion, which was carried at the TUC’s annual conference in Brighton on Tuesday, declared that April’s Supreme Court ruling breached the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).
There is no “human right” for men to force everyone to agree that men are women.
Dalgety, who co-edited The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht,
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Sep 15th, 2025 2:47 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Can we discuss this?
The backlash to “inappropriate” public comments made in the days following Charlie Kirk’s death has sparked a new wave of firings and suspensions, with a number of university employees disciplined for sharing their views.
Who decides what’s inappropriate? Are we allowed to talk about his words and ideas?
It follows reports of teachers, firefighters, journalists, nurses, politicians, a Secret Service employee, a junior strategist at Nasdaq and a worker for a prominent NFL team, being censured in some form after publishing opinions on Kirk’s politics or death.
But we need to be able to talk about his politics, because they affect all of us.
At Florida Atlantic University, an art history professor was
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17 comments
Sep 15th, 2025 11:39 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Lawsuit.
Maurene Comey, a federal prosecutor who handled criminal cases against Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, is contesting her abrupt July firing in a lawsuit that challenges Donald J. Trump’s claim of sweeping presidential power.
Ms. Comey, whose father, James B. Comey, is a former F.B.I. director, says in the lawsuit filed on Monday that she was never given a reason for her dismissal. She contends that no plausible explanation exists other than that she is the daughter of one of the president’s best-known adversaries — or her perceived political affiliations.
Ms. Comey is among many federal prosecutors and Justice Department officials who have been fired in President Trump’s second term, with no reason given beyond Article II
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3 comments
Sep 15th, 2025 10:29 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Good grief. What a mess of a system.
Also, side note – how does Helen do that? Talk quickly to get all the information out without any stumbling or losing track or umming or you knowing or like-ing or sort of-ing?
Anyway – the system. Yer trans person goes to the cops and says “This woman said these harassy things to me” … Read the rest
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5 comments
Sep 15th, 2025 9:45 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Dang. The Scottish government really does hate women.
The Scottish Government has confirmed it will challenge For Women Scotland’s legal bid to remove guidance that allows male-born prisoners to be housed with women and permits transgender pupils to use single-sex facilities and sports in line with their gender identity.
Forcing women to share all their spaces with men, no matter how dangerous that is to the women. That’s some intense hatred.
While John Swinney welcomed the “clarity” provided by the ruling, the Scottish Government has said it is awaiting further guidance from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) before issuing advice to public bodies. Some bodies, including the Scottish Parliament and Police Scotland, have already updated their policies
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Sep 14th, 2025 12:30 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Anoosh Chakelian, Britain editor of the New Statesman (and a woman), talks to Nicola Sturgeon:
The UK government blocked her attempt to introduce gender self-identification to Scotland. She believes she “lost the dressing room” when struggling to name the gender of a rapist, identifying as a woman, who was initially sent to a female prison. But still she remains an increasingly rare mainstream political voice standing up for trans rights.
That’s the end of the paragraph, and the next one shifts the subject. We are left with no clue what is meant by “standing up for trans rights.”
Journalists really need to stop doing this. They really need to ask their subjects exactly what they mean by “trans rights.” … Read the rest
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
11 comments
Sep 14th, 2025 11:46 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Oh come ON.
JKR doesn’t “obsess about” Sturgeon, she resists powerful people who undermine women’s rights. None of this is about Sturgeon the person, it’s about women’s rights and how we can continue to have them when so many powerful people are hell-bent on taking rights away from women in order to give them to men.
As for “gratuitous cruelty” – have a word with people like “Sophie Molly” and “India” Willoughby and … Read the rest
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1 Comment »
Sep 14th, 2025 10:15 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Be careful what you say.
Dozens of social media posts and messages about the murder of Charlie Kirk, including some that celebrated his death, are being spotlighted by conservative activists, Republican elected officials and a doxxing website as part of an online campaign to punish the posters behind the messages.
Prominent far-right influencer Laura Loomer, a US senator, and a site called “Expose Charlie’s Murderers” have all drawn attention to people who have posted messages about Kirk’s Wednesday assassination.
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The Charlie’s Murderers site, whose domain was registered anonymously and which says it is not a doxxing site, claims it has “received nearly 30,000 submissions,” according to a message on the site’s front page on midday Saturday. Currently, there
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27 comments
Sep 13th, 2025 2:24 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Let’s bring back…um…anti-Semitism?
“The story we got about World War II is all wrong,” a guest told Tucker Carlson on his podcast two weeks ago. “I think that’s right,” replied Carlson. The guest, a Cornell chemistry professor named David Collum, then spelled out what he meant: “One can make the argument we should have sided with Hitler and fought Stalin.” Such sentiments might sound shocking to the uninitiated, but they are not to Carlson’s audience. In fact, the notion that the German dictator was unfairly maligned has become a running theme on Carlson’s show—and beyond.
“What is it about Hitler? Why is he the most evil?” the far-right podcaster Candace Owens asked in July 2024. “The first thing people
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10 comments
Sep 13th, 2025 11:58 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Selective sympathy and outrage.
Things President Donald Trump talked about publicly this week: Sylvester Stallone’s body, the $200 million ballroom he wants to build at the White House, receiving a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, not receiving a Kennedy Center lifetime achievement award and taking over the police force in the nation’s capital.
Something Trump hasn’t talked about: a gunman, upset by coronavirus vaccines, who on Aug. 8 killed a police officer while firing hundreds of bullets at the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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A few weeks ago, within 15 hours of a shooting in New York in which four people were killed, Trump called the incident “tragic” and commended a
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Sep 13th, 2025 11:24 am |
By Ophelia Benson
More chat with Sturgeon:
“Nicola Sturgeon: Destroyer of women’s rights.”
That’s what JK Rowling wore on a t-shirt, which the author posted on social media in 2022, after Scotland attempted to pass a Gender Recognition Reform bill in an attempt to make legally transitioning an easier process.
Sturgeon says what Scotland attempted was not a “groundbreaking experiment” – with identical legislation already in place in the Republic of Ireland and many other countries.
But, Sturgeon admits, she was slow to recognise the intensity of the concerns about the legislation, because following other countries didn’t feel “controversial”. These “concerns”, from people such as Rowling, she adds were “unfounded” and could be easily answered.
“I didn’t properly engage,” she says.
Well … Read the rest
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2 comments
Sep 13th, 2025 10:37 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Uh………..
It’s the T shirt. It doesn’t show up very well. The tiny letters under the crossed-out names say “Dead Names – The 2025 list”
Geddit? Susie Green is calling for those five people to be killed.… Read the rest
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Sep 13th, 2025 8:54 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Well at least we know he considered women subordinate and hence inferior.
And we want Taylor Swift on team America. We want you to leave the island of the wokeys. And we would welcome you with open arms. One of the reasons why so many people on the right have been just skeptical or at least a little bit negative on Taylor Swift is, up until this point, that’s not a great role model for young women, to wait all the way until you’re 35 and just put your career first.
Why? Why isn’t it? Do all women have to have children, whether they want to or not? Do all women have to have children long before they are 35? … Read the rest
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