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” and the cops record it, no questions asked, no evidence or corroboration or oath, just record it, so now it’s on the person’s record, end of story, have a nice day, mind the gap.

How is that any kind of way to deal with people and laws?

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 in response to the ruling.

The EHRC has also repeatedly said ministers do not need to wait before acting on the ruling.

For Women Scotland co-director Trina Budge accused Mr Swinney’s administration of “arrogance.” She told the Mail on Sunday: “The Supreme Court ruling should have been the final word on the matter but it seems the arrogance of the Scottish Government knows no bounds. How it thinks it can possibly continue to defend these policies as being lawful is simply beyond our comprehension.”

The arrogance and the profound hatred of women.

The group’s summons, served on Scottish Ministers, the Lord Advocate and the Advocate General, was formally called by the Court of Session on September 10 after ministers failed to withdraw the policies within the 21-day deadline. Government lawyers have now confirmed they will appear in court to defend the guidance.

So they’re not just passively stalling, they’re defending their continued assault on women’s rights.

Ms Budge added: “Since the Scottish Government failed to withdraw the schools and prisons guidance within the 21 days given, our summons was called by the Court of Session on September 10. They now have seven days to lodge any defence.

“The Scottish Government has confirmed on Thursday that they will be making an appearance at court and we look forward to hearing how they can possibly justify promoting policies that allow boys into the girls’ changing room and house male murderers alongside women prisoners.

“It flies in the face of their public statement about accepting the Supreme Court judgment, which of course ruled that single-sex spaces should be provided on the basis of biological sex, and not how someone identifies. We think this is a shameful action by the Scottish Government and are totally flummoxed at what they think they are doing.”

I look forward to finding out.

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.” Not doing so implies that the opposition opposes rights for trans people, which is a calumny and a lie.

Perhaps just as divisive for some voters was Sturgeon’s attempt to pass a law allowing Scots to self-identify their gender. This was thwarted by the UK government, but deepened a rift in the Scottish left perhaps best symbolised by two of Scotland’s most prominent public figures and feminists: Sturgeon and the vocally gender-critical Harry Potter author JK Rowling.

In Frankly, Sturgeon describes Rowling’s decision to wear a t-shirt with the slogan “Nicola Sturgeon – destroyer of women’s rights” as a turning-point, making her feel “more at risk of possible physical harm”. In her review of the memoir on her website, Rowling wrote that her intention was to prompt journalists to ask Sturgeon questions about women’s safety, adding that she has never blamed Sturgeon for threats she’s herself received.

When I asked Sturgeon about this review, she said: “I don’t know where she gets the time! She is a highly successful woman. I’ve bought Harry Potter books for all the young people in my life, I think they’re great, but my goodness, where does she get the time to obsess about me? I hate to tell her that it’s just not reciprocated.”

Sorry to repeat myself (previous post) but come on. She was the first minister of Scotland! JKR paid attention to her because of the power! It wasn’t personal!

She knows this, of course; she’s being facetious, not to say flippant. But it’s a ridiculous and childish way of being flippant. Women’s rights are not a joke, thank you very much.

She continued: “I don’t obsess about other individuals who happen to have a different view about me, they’re entitled to have a different view. There are some people in this life who, it strikes me often, spend an awful lot more time, like immeasurably so, thinking about me than I ever spend thinking about them.”

Sigh. Yes of course they do: you were the prime minister.

Maybe she wasn’t even being flippant? Maybe she really doesn’t get that people are bound to pay attention to bosses?

Will the two women ever come together to heal this split? “I think it looks really unlikely, but that’s not from my perspective,” Sturgeon replied. “Look, I have no great animus towards JK Rowling. I never have done. We disagreed vehemently on independence. She has a very different view to me on trans rights. She’s entitled to that. I wish she would argue her position without what appears to me sometimes indulging in a bit of gratuitous cruelty to trans people.”

Oh hey. Take a look at what some trans people say to us. You’ll find more than a bit of gratuitous cruelty, I assure you.

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 the rest of the women-hating crew. Seriously: have a word with them.

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.

…

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 are a few dozen submissions published on the site. “This website will soon be converted into a searchable database of all 30,000 submissions, filterable by general location and job industry. This is a permanent and continuously-updating archive of Radical activists calling for violence.”

Most people whose messages have been posted on the site do not seem to refer to themselves as activists, nor did it seem many were calling for violence. Administrators for the site did not respond to a request for comment. The site also opened an X account on Friday.

Ok so not activists and not calling for violence but were they saying what a great guy Kirk was? If not, on the list they go. It’s all perfectly fair and aboveboard.

[Rebekah] Jones posted about Kirk on Wednesday, writing: “Save your sympathies for the innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire of MAGA’s violent political messaging machine.” The website republished that post along with other pieces of Jones’ personal information.

So we’re not allowed to object to MAGA’s violent political messaging machine?

Welp, I for one object to MAGA’s violent political messaging machine.

Some Republican elected officials are also publicizing people who posted about Kirk’s murder, including some public-sector employees like teachers.

Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee said a Middle Tennessee State University employee should be removed after writing they had “ZERO sympathy” for Kirk’s death. The university confirmed to CNN in a statement that the employee was fired “effective immediately.”

“No university employee who celebrates the assassination of Charlie Kirk should be trusted to shape the minds of the next generation in the classroom. The firing of this MTSU employee was the right decision, and it sends a clear message that this kind of reprehensible behavior must not be tolerated,” Blackburn said in a statement to CNN.

It’s interesting that she specifies celebrating the murder of Kirk specifically, as opposed to saying no university employee should celebrate a murder, period.

DC Comics canceled the just-released “Red Hood” comic book series after its author, Gretchen Felker-Martin, made comments about Kirk’s death on social media.

Interesting that Felker-Martin’s novel Manhunt that included burning JK Rowling alive was not seen as a reason to decline his new comic book series.

In since-deleted posts captured in screengrabs shared by other social media users, Felker-Martin allegedly wrote on social media after news of Kirk’s death: “Hope the bullet’s OK.”

“At DC Comics, we place the highest value on our creators and community and affirm the right to peaceful, individual expression of personal viewpoints. Posts or public comments that can be viewed as promoting hostility or violence are inconsistent with DC’s standards of conduct,” the company, which like CNN is owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, said in a statement. 

Oh? Then what about the JKR thing? Hello?

The website says its explicit aim is to get the people it spotlights fired. It was registered through a privacy service with an address in Iceland.

And the site’s name already implies that the people whose information it shares are responsible for Kirk’s murder, paving the way for harassment, Hank Teran, CEO at open-source threat intelligence platform Open Measures, told CNN. The website also echoes back to Kirk-founded conservative group Turning Point’s “Professor Watchlist,” whose purpose was to unmask what it called “radical professors,” but often led to harassment and violent threats directed toward people named on that list.

Altogether, “it could be reasonable to conclude that there’s some intent to incite harassment,” Teran said.

Harassment, and firing, and worse.

Oh surely not, he seems such a nice chap.

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 would say is: ‘Well, an ethnic cleansing almost took place.’ And now I offer back: ‘You mean like we actually did to the Germans.’” 

What do you mean “almost”? Is six million not enough to count as ethnic cleansing? And we actually didn’t to the Germans; what we did is prevent Hitler from winning the war that Hitler started.

In 1939, the U.S. and Canada turned away the M.S. St. Louis, which carried nearly 1,000 Jewish refugees. The ship was forced to return to Europe, where hundreds of the passengers were captured and killed by the Germans. Restrained by public sentiment, Roosevelt not only kept the country’s refugee caps largely in place but also rejected pleas to bomb the Auschwitz concentration camp and the railway tracks that led to it. When the United States finally entered the war, it did so not out of any special sense of obligation to the Jews but to defend itself after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

That indifference to the Holocaust was immediately dispelled when the Allied Forces liberated several of the Nazi camps where millions of Jews had been murdered. Entering the gates of these sadistic sites, American service members came face-to-face with unspeakable Nazi atrocities—rotting piles of naked corpses, gas chambers, thousands of emaciated adults. Denial gave way to revulsion.

And then Nuit et brouillard came out, in 1955, and more people saw some of what service members had seen, albeit at a much more comfortable distance.

Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the Allied Forces in Europe and future U.S. president, personally went to Ohrdruf, a subcamp of Buchenwald and the first Nazi camp liberated by American troops. “I made the visit deliberately,” he cabled to Washington, “in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’” Eisenhower then requested that members of Congress and prominent journalists be brought to the camps to see and document the horrors themselves. “I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald,” the legendary CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow told his listeners after touring the camp. “I reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it, I have no words.”

Two-thirds of Europe’s Jews had been murdered. American soldiers, drafted from across the United States, returned home bearing witness to what they had encountered. “Anti-Semitism was right there, it had been carried to the ultimate, and I knew that that was something we had to get rid of because I had experienced it,” Sergeant Leon Bass, a Black veteran whose segregated unit entered Buchenwald, later testified. In this way, the American people learned firsthand where rampant anti-Jewish prejudice led—and the country was transformed.

Though slowly, and never 100%.

Late last year, David Shor, one of the Democratic Party’s top data scientists, surveyed some 130,000 voters about whether they had a “favorable” or “unfavorable” opinion of Jewish people. Hardly anyone over the age of 70 said their view was unfavorable. More than a quarter of those under 25 did. The question is not whether America’s self-understanding is changing; it’s how far that change will go—and what the consequences will be.

Bad. They will be bad.

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.

…

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 police officer, one of the victims, for making the “the ultimate sacrifice.” But he’s gone nearly a week without acknowledging the death of David Rose, the Georgia police officer gunned down while protecting a federal agency’s headquarters from a gunman aiming to kill federal employees inside.

Well. You can see the problem. The federal agency in question was the CDC, and the whole idea of controlling disease is a liberal plot to corrupt Americans’ vital bodily fluids. A cop who protects the CDC is up to no good. Plus he wasn’t white.

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 yes they could be easily answered in the sense that she could just say “Your concerns are unfounded.” They could not be easily answered in the sense of explaining how and why making it official that some men are women would not destroy women’s rights. Yes it’s always possible to laugh the concerns off; no that doesn’t mean the concerns are bogus or wrong.

“When I realised it had become as divisive and polarised as it had, I should have paused and seen if we could find a different way of achieving the same outcome.”

But that “same outcome” is the problem. If you let men help themselves to women’s rights, then that’s the problem, and a different way of achieving it doesn’t make it not a problem.

Rowling’s hatred for Sturgeon continues to this day, with the Harry Potter author posting a damning critique of the former First Minister’s book, Frankly, on her personal blog after its release this year.

Is that hatred? Or is it perhaps a reasoned opinion of the book?

Despite this, Sturgeon says she harbours no ill will towards Rowling, and believes Rowling has “every right” to disagree with her views, especially due to her political position at the time.

“I don’t think that’s the same in reverse, but I am not accusing her of anything,” she says.

“If I have an issue with how JK Rowling goes about this debate, it’s that there does seem – at times – to be an attempt to be gratuitously cruel to trans people and I don’t think that’s warranted.”

What kind of cruel? You mean like disputing the demands and bullying and more demands emanating from the trans communinny? You mean failure to admire and flatter men like “Sophie Molly” and “India” Willoughby?

Also, Sturgeon should take a look at the cruelty directed at women by men like them.

“Most people want women’s rights to be protected and want trans rights to be protected,” Sturgeon says.

Yes but for the billionth time, when you define trans rights as men taking women’s rights, then that is not possible. You can’t protect women’s rights while allowing men to demolish them. It can’t be done.

“The one thing I believe really strongly, and I’m not going to just kind of change my mind on this, is that women’s rights and trans rights are not irreconcilable.”

Well then you’re admitting you’re an obstinate idiot. When trans rights=men can help themselves to women’s rights then the two are irreconcilable.

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.

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? Do all women have to put their career second?

All kidding and sarcasm aside, this is something that I hope will make Taylor Swift more conservative. Engage in reality more and get outside of the abstract clouds. Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge. 

Why? Why should she submit to her husband? Why can’t submission just be off the table entirely? Why can’t couples be equals instead of one boss and one submitter? Why can’t neither of them be “in charge”? Why can’t coupling up be completely separate from the boss/servant relationship? Why isn’t it better for adults to treat each other as equals instead of jockeying for boss over underling?

NPR tells us:

Wednesday at Utah Valley University was supposed to be the start of what Kirk was calling, “The American Comeback Tour.” It was slated to take him to nearly a dozen colleges, from Utah to Virginia, Minnesota to Louisiana.

This is what Kirk did often – he went to colleges across the country, holding court, casting doubt on liberalism and challenging anyone within shouting distance of a microphone to take to it and argue with him.

His conservative friends and followers describe Kirk as a Christian, a father and the nicest person they knew — someone who engaged in the “free marketplace of ideas,” as Johnson put it on CNN.

Kirk was provocative and often clips of his talks and arguments on campus or what he said on his podcast went viral, often stoking controversy.

For example, here is just a selection of some of those things Kirk said:

“White, college indoctrinated women will ruin America if we let them.”

“I’m sorry, if I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.”

“We should bring back the celebration of the M.R.S. degree.”

“Maybe one of the reasons that Taylor Swift has been so annoyingly liberal over the last couple of years is that she’s not yet married, and she doesn’t have children. … Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge.”

“It is so materially insane to think that 1 in 5 American women will be raped in their life … meaning that they’re lying about being raped, that they’re lying about being sexually assaulted. Like a fraternity guy and a sorority girl at age 19 hooking up, both five drinks in at 2 a.m. and all of a sudden, like, she removes consent. Yeah, like, that’s a murky, middle gray area.”

Of former TV personality Joy Reid, former first lady Michelle Obama, late Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson: “They’re coming out, and they’re saying, ‘I’m only here because of affirmative action.’ Yeah, we know. You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to be taken somewhat seriously.”

Really?

He was a big fan of Donald Trump and he thought Michelle Obama is stupid? And he was happy to say so in public?

I wonder if it ever occurred to him that that kind of thing can inspire others to get violent. I wonder if he ever thought about the physical safety of Michelle Obama and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on Imbalance.

As someone who knows people on the same list of targets as the Hortmans and the Hoffmans, I do find this dispiriting, and the national government response of a half-mast flag at the Federal Buildings is a reminder of the lack of concern that the President had, choosing to golf rather than attend the funeral or even to visit when Melissa Hortman was lying in state, to be a reminder that the government is in the hands of people whose grief is dependent on the dead’s political persuasion. The RW conspiracy mongers who claimed that the murders were a result of Hortman voting for a budget deal that Republicans also voted for, and the governor ordered a “hit” on her, have never apologized or acknowledged that the murderer was a right wing crusader who had decided to be a John Brown.

And while there were a number of lefties who celebrated the death of Kirk, it’s a reminder that there are assholes everywhere and it’s not dependent on what your political views are. I have seen a whole bunch of righties declare that this sample is proof that the left are terrorists who want to kill people for their political views.

He did not espouse “Free Speech,” he espoused “Me Speech,” as Thomas Zimmer notes in this article:

The signature “contribution” of Turning Point USA, the organization Kirk founded as a teenager, is the “Professor Watchlist,” a website TPUSA runs. It serves to enable a McCarthyist hunt for “leftists” so that they can be publicly disparaged; once a professor is on the list, harassment, intimidation, and threat are guaranteed to follow. Kirk existed in a rightwing media and online eco system that runs on anger and monetizes outrage. And he was very good at his job, constantly telling his audience what new devious plot “the Left” was pursuing to take America away from “real Americans.” In the process, he propagated basically any rightwing conspiracy theory that has emerged over the past few years: the Big Lie about the 2020 election, Covid disinformation, Great Replacement… all combined with a hefty dose of bigoted white grievance. How much of what he preached did he *actually* believe, about the leftist conspiracies and dangerous “woke” domination? It’s unlikely even he knew. In significant ways, Kirk was the face of a New Right that is not “conservative,” certainly not in the colloquial sense, but devoted to permanent radical culture war.

And there is this undeniable set of observations by Zimmer:

All strands of the Right – Republican elected officials, the media machine, the reactionary intellectual sphere, the conservative base – have been embracing rightwing vigilante violence in an increasingly aggressive fashion. They have openly encouraged white militants to use whatever force they please to “fight back” against anything and anyone associated with “the Left” by protecting and glorifying those who have engaged in vigilante violence coded as rightwing – call it the Kyle Rittenhouse dogma, or the Daniel Perry dogma, or the Daniel Penny dogma, or the Ashli Babbitt dogma. The fundamental reality of American politics is that anyone who opposes Trump – politicians, judges, election officials, anyone – faces an avalanche of violent threat.

There is simply no equivalent to this among leaders of the Democratic Party or the influential circles of the institutionalized Left. It has become dogma on the Right to view the Democratic Party as a fundamentally illegitimate faction that must not be allowed to govern; that a nefarious, radically anti-American “Left” has taken over all the institutions of American life and desires to destroy the nation; that there is no room for restraint or compromise with the “enemy within”; that all measures, regardless of how extreme, are justified and indeed necessary in this struggle for the very survival of “real America.” That is what Donald Trump and the leaders of the Republican Party have been propagating relentlessly. That is how rightwing intellectuals have been portraying the political conflict. And that is also what rightwing media activists like Charlie Kirk have been telling their audience.

They really do consider us to be traitors, and while the Democrats do have this inexplicable devotion to trans ideology, there is nothing on the scale of hatred towards us that can be considered an equivalent from the Democrats. A government that honors Ashli Babbit and gives her family $5 million for wrongful death is not the friend of freedom nor liberty, and Kirk was a driver of that ideology. We are talking about someone who wanted single-party rule, not free speech.

Golly. I just learned that (some? many?) UK universities have a “gender expression fund”.

UCL is one.

Many people experience feelings of stress and anxiety at the disconnect they feel between their gender identity and appearance. We have created the Gender Expression Fund to provide financial assistance for students to purchase items that will make them more comfortable with their gender presentation and, we hope, improve their wellbeing.

Grants can be used to purchase gender affirming products such as clothing, binders, packers and beauty products.

Grants can also be used towards travel to medical or therapy/counselling appointments, but we are not able to provide funding for treatment or other medical procedures.

We anticipate grants will usually be around £50, but in expectational [sic] circumstances may be up to a maximum of £100.

Oh why bother. Just ask everyone to pitch in an old unwanted skirt or bra or lipstick. Ask Mummy to share. Convert a pillowcase into a blouse. Be creative. If you can pretend to be the other sex you can surely pretend that your trainers are actually catch me-fuck me shoes.

Sure enough, they’re Reichstag Firing it already.

[Utah Governor] Cox’s impulse to appeal to what Abraham Lincoln called the “better angels of our nature” was on display this morning in a press conference, where, flanked by FBI Director Kash Patel and local leaders, he announced the arrest of Tyler Robinson, the suspect in Kirk’s killing, on Wednesday.

“This is certainly about the tragic death, political assassination of Charlie Kirk. But it is also much bigger than an attack on an individual,” Cox said. “It is an attack on all of us. It is an attack on the American experiment. It is an attack on our ideals. This cuts to the very foundation of who we are, of who we have been, and who we could be in better times.”

This kind of language was once common among mainstream politicians responding to a tragedy; now Cox is a notable and praiseworthy outlier in his own party. Trump’s response has been mercurial. At times, the president has seemed to call for a calm, measured reaction to the shooting. “He was an advocate of nonviolence,” Trump said of Kirk on Thursday. “That’s the way I’d like to see people respond.” In the next breath, however, he cast blame and demanded forceful reprisal. During Cox’s remarks this morning, the governor seemed almost to be trying to speak to Trump—or at least to those who might be swayed by his rhetoric.

“We have radical-left lunatics out there, and we just have to beat the hell out of them,” Trump said yesterday…“My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence,” Trump said in a brief speech Wednesday night, “including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law-enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.”

In other words his administration will “go after” anyone it feels like, regardless of facts or evidence or the law or any other inhibiting reality.

This morning on Fox & Friends, Trump told the hosts, “I’ll tell you something that’s gonna get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less. The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime.” He added: “The radicals on the left are the problem. And they’re vicious, and they’re horrible, and they’re politically savvy.”

That’s the US head of state talking. I know it sounds like a drunk 13-year-old but it’s not, it’s the guy with the nuclear codes.

But if Cox and Trump represent two rival impulses within the Republican coalition, Trump is undoubtedly winning. “Democrats own what happened today,” Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina said on Wednesday. “Y’all caused this,” Representative Anna Paulina Luna of Florida told Democrats on the House floor. “It’s time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund, & prosecute every single Leftist organization,” the influential Trump adviser Laura Loomer posted on X. “We must shut these lunatic leftists down. Once and for all. The Left is a national security threat.”

So it’s time for a one-party state.

Don’t mention the women.

It was predictable that August in Edinburgh would see a flare-up of the gender wars. Scottish politics has been pivotal in the UK-wide battle over gender self-identification, and the issue has come up at the Edinburgh festival before. Probably no one would have expected the National Library of Scotland to be the battlefield. But when a bestselling gender-critical anthology, The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, was excluded from a centenary exhibition, that is what happened.

Trying to make the women who wouldn’t wheesht wheesht is a fool’s errand. They told you they wouldn’t wheesht!!

Its editors, Lucy Hunter Blackburn and Susan Dalgety, were already upset when they learned that their book had not been chosen for the Dear Library exhibition. They had not been invited to appear at the Edinburgh book festival either – despite their big-name contributors and hot topic. So they put in a freedom of information request. When it revealed that their book had received four nominations from members of the public, before being rejected at the urging of an LGBTQ+ staff network, they complained.

Last week’s result, after a pointed intervention by Index on Censorship, was an apology and a U-turn. Blackburn, a former civil servant, said it had been “emotional”, and that she would now tell her 97-year-old mother, a retired bookseller, all about it.

This perhaps sounds tame compared with the Irish writer Graham Linehan’s arrest at Heathrow by armed officers, and the row about the policing of tweets that followed.

Nah, it doesn’t, because it’s all the same thing. None of it is tame; all of it is aimed at silencing women entirely.

Blackburn and Dalgety were ignored not only by Edinburgh’s book festival. They have not been invited to any book festivals at all. Nor has Jenny Lindsay, the Scottish author of Hounded, which describes how she was driven out of her career as a poet and arts programmer due to her gender-critical views. There are more than 100 literary festivals in the UK each year, and big ones such as Edinburgh’s feature hundreds of authors.

I was invited to three literary festivals, and am lucky to be able to write about these issues in the Guardian. But I have also been snubbed. Last year the Conway Hall in London refused a booking for a launch of my book, and complaints to other venues where I was appearing were stressful and upsetting.

That’s the goal. Punish women for existing. Needle needle needle. Get all the institutions to tell us to shut up.

Jenny Murray points out an important distinction.

At last, evidence of a bout of common sense in relation to the policing of tweets. Sir Andy Cooke, His Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary, said this week that non-crime hate incidents should be scrapped and that officers must separate ‘the offensive from the criminal’.

If follows Met Police chief Sir Mark Rowley’s comments that he will talk to new Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood about a proposed change in the law meaning police officers would not be required to record and investigate complaints about tweets unless it is clear the suspect intended real harm and violence.

She notes that this is obviously prompted by what the cops did to Glinner last week.

The tweet may not have been in the best possible taste, but there was certainly a marked contrast between the police response to Linehan’s words and their response to the violent threats meted out by trans activists against women they call TERFS (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists) like me. While Linehan was arrested, the trans activists making frightening threats to me simply got away with it.

That certainly was a marked contrast, and we’ve been dealing with it for years. The police would never ever lift so much as an eyebrow at abuse and threats aimed at women on social media, but men who pretend to be women are a whole other story.

Why is that exactly? Why do the police see women as so much worthless garbage and men who pretend to be women as infinitely valuable?

As someone who has spent their life championing women’s rights, I have long been appalled by the impact of the Stonewall campaign which pushed trans rights to the detriment of women’s rights. I was not prepared to have breastfeeding dubbed ‘chestfeeding’ or trans women described as real women.

Neither did I want to work for an organisation – the BBC – so seduced by Stonewall that it asked us to put our pronouns on our emails. I didn’t want men with a penis, dressed in a frock and a wig, invading spaces reserved for women. I was determined that young teenage girls should not be encouraged to believe they had been born into the wrong body, to be given potentially dangerous, irreversible drugs and have their breasts cut off.

In 2017, I accepted a commission to write an opinion piece for The Sunday Times in which I insisted that while trans people should be treated with respect, they must also respect women and acknowledge that they were not the same as us. No matter how they dressed, they had no experience of what it meant to be a woman. They would never have a period, they could never become pregnant, their medical needs would never be the same as ours. They must not describe themselves as women but as trans women.

Friends had told me my career would be damaged by expressing my strongly held beliefs. I thought I didn’t care. The defence and protection of women and girls was at the centre of work I had done for most of my life. But my friends were right about the backlash.

First came transgender newsreader India Willoughby demanding that I should be sacked by the BBC. I wasn’t sacked, but was banned from discussing the debate on air. More tweets followed with India calling me a nasty cow and far worse. Then the threats from her acolytes began. ‘History has its eyes on you, those who dehumanise us might want to consider where they’re standing,’ wrote one.

Then came endless promises that I would be raped or murdered, leaving me genuinely worried for my safety.

So, again, why are the police on Team Trans Women and not on Team Women? Why does none of the above cause the police to question their choices?

Oh honestly. The levels of spite and petty malice here.

By an unhappy coincidence, the Polari Prize nonsense blew up the following day and, from my very first reply, my messages over the next 6 weeks were completely ignored, as were messages from my agent.

This morning, under threat of legal action, they finally deigned to respond, simply informing me that they were withdrawing the award.

How any organisation can say that my “insistence on empathy, justice, and authenticity is more vital than ever”, that I “confront uncomfortable truths with courage”, and that for “college students navigating questions of identity, belonging, and ethical responsibility, your work is not only moving, it is essential” and then rescind their prize when I demonstrate those very qualities is baffling.

Their cowardice is disappointing, but at least gives me another opportunity to be clear:

Awards are ultimately meaningless. The books matter. Readers matter. And if using one’s platform to defend the rights of women, children, lesbians and gay men means that some plaque doesn’t end up on my wall… well, I won’t be losing any sleep over it.

I’m staggered by the childish pettiness of not answering for all these weeks.

Trans ideology really is some kind of corrosive substance that eats the brain.

I’m seeing a lot of grief and anguish for Charlie Kirk on the left.

You know what I didn’t see? The same kind or amount of grief and anguish for Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark, not on the right and not even on the left.

Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband were killed, and state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife were wounded in politically motivated shootings early Saturday, Gov. Tim Walz said. Authorities have also identified a suspect who is still at large.

Why the difference?

Now if only we could have done that.

Bolsonaro found guilty of plotting coup

Four out of the five Supreme Court justices tasked with judging the former leader found him guilty. One judge voted to acquit him.

The 70-year-old has been convicted of leading a conspiracy aimed at keeping him in power after he lost the 2022 election to his left-wing rival, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

While the plot failed to enlist enough support from the military to go ahead, it did culminate in the storming of government buildings by Bolsonaro’s supporters on 8 January 2023, the justices found.

Sound familiar at all?

The charges carry heavy sentences and could add up to a prison term of more than 40 years. The justices have begun with the sentencing.

Casting the decisive vote, Justice Cármen Lúcia said on Thursday that Bolsonaro had triggered the “insurgency” of 8 January 2023, when thousands of his supporters vandalised the Supreme Court, the presidential palace, and Congress.

She found him guilty on all the five charges: attempting to stage a coup, leading an armed criminal organisation, attempted violent abolition of the democratic rule of law, and two more charges related to the damage of property during the storming of buildings in Brasília on 8 January 2023.

Why couldn’t we do that? How did we manage to let him get away with it and then re-elect him?

Justice Lúcia compared the attempted coup to a “virus”, which, if left to fester, can kill the society in which it has taken hold in.

Can confirm.