Poor India. He never thought he would see the day when we went back to that kind of language. What kind? The kind that calls men “men”. Shocking, isn’t it.

Pure evil.

Memorial panels honoring Black American soldiers at a military cemetery in the Netherlands are gone. Removed on orders from the Trump administration.

Today is Veterans Day.

That’s all it took. A complaint from the Heritage Foundation, the same organization that wrote Project 2025. The American Battle Monuments Commission removed them earlier this summer. Quietly. Dutch officials only learned about it last weekend.

Let me tell you what was on them.

August 5, 1943. Camp Phillips, Kansas. The 960th Quartermaster Service Company activated. Two hundred sixty Black soldiers. All under the command of white officers, as Army policy dictated in WWII. They trained on bivouacs, security, and night patrols. Then they shipped out.

Late 1944, they arrived at what would become the Netherlands American Cemetery in Margraten. Twenty thousand American dead were waiting for them. No coffins. Bodies on tarps. Many had been there for days, sometimes weeks. Mutilated beyond recognition.

The ground was so waterlogged from freezing rain that machinery was useless. They dug graves by hand. In mud. In flooding. They tied corpses in mattress covers because there were no coffins. Bodies coming apart in their hands. The smell everywhere.

…

For decades, nobody acknowledged what the 960th did. Finally, in 2024, memorial panels were installed. Partly because of pushes from then-U.S. ambassador Shefali Razdan Duggal.

The Heritage Foundation saw those panels and filed a complaint. Trump’s administration removed them.

This is Project 2025 in operation. The people who wrote that blueprint are inside the administration, filing complaints about memorial plaques, deciding which soldiers we’re allowed to remember on Veterans Day.

They found a memorial to Black soldiers and classified it as a diversity program. Not the Jim Crow apartheid that forced those men to bury people who wouldn’t eat with them.

Heritage filed their complaint in March. Trump issued the order. The panels came down over the summer. No announcement, no notification to Dutch officials. The soldiers who dug the graves disappear from the story—what’s left is clean, comfortable, white.

It’s heritage all right.

I still think they’re straining at a gnat but swallowing a camel here.

Nandy criticises BBC’s ‘inconsistent’ reporting standards

Mr Shah is set to write to the culture, media and sport committee on Monday to express regret for the way the Trump speech, made on the day of the Jan 6 2021 Capitol riot, was spliced together. The Telegraph has previously disclosed that both Mr Davie and Mr Shah were warned of the doctored footage in May but appear to have kept quiet.

…

The decision to issue an apology has raised questions about why it has taken them six months to admit viewers were misled.

But they weren’t really misled. The two things Trump said were widely separated as opposed to connected, but the substance remains the same. It’s definitely bad practice not to make it clear when two sentences are not continuous, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily misleading. Trump was ranting and raging about forcibly stealing the election, and the fact that he did so in more than one section of the very long tedious speech doesn’t change what he was saying or what happened as a result of what he was saying. Some people ended up dead because of what he was saying.

BBC reports: Trump says he has ‘obligation’ to sue BBC over speech edit

And Trump is notoriously scrupulous about heeding his obligations.

Trump has said he has an “obligation” to sue the BBC over the way a section of his speech was edited in a Panorama documentary.

Speaking to Fox News, he said his 6 January 2021 speech had been “butchered” and the way it was presented had “defrauded” viewers.

Nope. I’ve just read big chunks of it, and there is no fraud or defraud, on account of how the speech is absolutely packed with raging and boasting and blathering.

Appearing on Fox News’s The Ingraham Angle, the president was asked if he would go ahead with the lawsuit, responding “well I guess I have to, you know, why not, because they defrauded the public, and they’ve admitted it”.

Trump continued: “They actually changed my January 6 speech, which was a beautiful speech, which was a very calming speech, and they made it sound radical.

No. As usual, he’s lying. It’s not “calming” at all. (It’s most certainly not beautiful. Trump talking ex tempore is never beautiful.)

BBC News has contacted the BBC for comment on the president’s latest remarks.

Ah but has the BBC contacted BBC News for comment? I’m getting dizzy here.

I got curious about the edit of Trump’s Let’s Insurrection speech, so I asked ctrl f to show me the two pieces. They are indeed very far apart. The speech as a whole however is not, how shall I put this – not a passionate plea to be calm and reasonable.

Part one, closer to the beginning:

And Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us, and if he doesn’t, that will be a, a sad day for our country because you’re sworn to uphold our Constitution.

Now, it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you, we’re going to walk down, we’re going to walk down.

Anyone you want, but I think right here, we’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them.

Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated.

Part two, much closer to the end:

But now, the caravans, I think Biden’s getting in, the caravans are forming again. They want to come in again and rip off our country. Can’t let it happen.

As this enormous crowd shows, we have truth and justice on our side. We have a deep and enduring love for America in our hearts. We love our country.

We have overwhelming pride in this great country and we have it deep in our souls. Together, we are determined to defend and preserve government of the people, by the people and for the people.

Our brightest days are before us. Our greatest achievements, still away.

I think one of our great achievements will be election security. Because nobody until I came along had any idea how corrupt our elections were.

And again, most people would stand there at 9 o’clock in the evening and say I want to thank you very much, and they go off to some other life. But I said something’s wrong here, something is really wrong, can have happened.

And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.

Our exciting adventures and boldest endeavors have not yet begun. My fellow Americans, for our movement, for our children, and for our beloved country.

So – they are indeed widely separated – but they are also indeed part of a deranged endless rant by a dangerous lunatic.

A Mighty Girl writes:

This Veterans Day, we’re paying special tribute to Admiral Lisa Franchetti and Admiral Linda Fagan, the two highest serving women in the military until they were both fired from their historic commands by the Trump administration with no explanation or justification. Former Coast Guard Commandant Linda Fagan, a four-star admiral, 40-year veteran, and the first woman to lead a military branch, was fired by Trump on Inauguration Day as one of his first acts in office. In February, Pete Hegseth — arguably the least qualified Defense Secretary in modern history — then fired Admiral Lisa Franchetti — a four-star admiral and the first woman to lead the Navy. These abrupt firings represented just the beginning of Trump and Hegseth’s sweeping military leadership purge — condemned by one military expert as “squandering an enormous amount of talent” and treating decorated officers with shocking disregard after their lifelong commitment to serving the American people.

Admiral Linda Fagan was sworn in as the Commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard in 2022, becoming the first woman to lead the Coast Guard in its 234-year history. During her 40 years with the Coast Guard, prior to becoming commandant, she has served on all seven continents; spent 15 years as a Marine Inspector; commanded Sector New York, controlling all Coast Guard operations in the New York metropolitan area and Albany; and served as the Coast Guard’s second-in-command as well as the commander of the Coast Guard Pacific Area.

After being fired by Trump on his first day in office, she was then abruptly evicted from her house at Joint Base Anacostia Bolling with just three hours of notice. She wasn’t even given enough time to gather her personal effects and household goods even though Coast Guard leaders had granted her 60 days to find new housing. According to Homeland Security officials, the unnecessarily swift and cruel eviction was because, as the base’s acting commandant was told, “the president wants her out of quarters.”

Shortly after Fagan’s eviction, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem moved into the Coast Guard commandant’s home at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling. Military experts have noted this unprecedented pattern of Trump administration officials taking over housing traditionally reserved for senior military officers, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and presidential adviser Stephen Miller have also done by moving onto military bases, as yet another concerning erosion of the boundaries between political appointees and military leadership.

Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead the Navy, spent roughly half of her 40-year long career at sea, rising to command the destroyer U.S.S. Ross, and later a destroyer squadron, two aircraft carrier strike groups, all naval forces in Korea and the U.S. Sixth Fleet. She became the 33rd chief of naval operations in 2023, making her the first woman to serve as a permanent member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Ironically, this highly respected military leader with decades of distinction was fired by a former Fox News TV host with no senior military command experience, no experience managing large organizations, and no previous government service at any level. Hegseth’s only notable ‘qualification’ is his absolute loyalty to Trump.

It’s old news now but it’s stomach-turning.

Oliver Brown and Craig Simpson in The Telegraph:

BBC bosses “ignored” warnings about pro-transgender bias in its sports coverage, The Telegraph can reveal.

Messages seen by The Telegraph reveal that female staff repeatedly raised concerns over several years about the nature of reporting on gender issues.

BBC Sport bosses were told almost five years ago that stories about trans athletes were often uncritical and celebratory “puff pieces”, while glossing over any potentially negative impact on women’s sports.

However, insiders claim that the BBC persisted with overwhelmingly positive coverage of otherwise controversial athletes, including Lia Thomas, the biologically male swimmer, the weightlifter Laurel Hubbard, the cyclist Austin Killips and Imane Khelif, the boxer.

BBC staff have reported feeling ignored and feeling unable to voice opinions that went against the prevailing orthodoxy of affirming transgender identity.

We know. Boy do we know. I’ve been pointing it out loudly and rudely for what feels like several decades.

Insiders have expressed the hope that the scandal will force a culture change at the BBC, and that the trans issue will not be overshadowed by the treatment of the US president.

BBC Sport is currently led by Alex Kay-Jelski, who faced criticism for a column he wrote for The Times in 2019 while he was the newspaper’s sports editor.

In the piece, he wrote that Martina Navratilova, the nine-time Wimbledon champion, and the Olympic swimming medallist Sharron Davies, both vocal opponents of allowing biological males to compete in women’s categories, were “not experts” on the matter of trans participation in sport.

Hey you know what? You know who else is not an expert? Alex Kay-Jelski is not an expert on being a woman forced to compete against a man.

Ooooooh what do you know, suddenly the Beeb is aware of the Darlington nurses.

Oh gawd how they do get everything wrong.

Last week, a leaked memo to the BBC board from Michael Prescott, a former external adviser to the broadcaster’s editorial standards committee, was published by The Telegraph – a British newspaper, with a rightwing editorial slant, that has long been hostile to the BBC.

In his memo, compiled this summer, Prescott laid out a long list of alleged shortcomings in the BBC’s news output, from alleged anti-Israel bias in its Arabic-language service to an overly progressive slant in its coverage of transgender people and their rights.

Wrong! Wrong wrong wrongity wrong! There’s nothing “progressive” about it – and in addition that empty bit of flattery tells the reader nothing about what the memo actually said.

Reuters summarizes it this way:

Prescott said stories raising “difficult questions” about transgender issues were often overlooked, even when they had been widely reported and debated by other media outlets. He also noted that some features presented the transgender experience in an overly one-sided manner, lacking sufficient balance and objectivity.

The memo said the BBC failed to cover a case in which a group of nurses sued their employer over a policy allowing a transgender woman to use the women’s changing room.

There’s nothing “progressive” about any of it.

The Telegraph on Jolyon Maugham’s campaign to destroy women’s sports.

Almost two weeks ago the Maugham-led GLP announced it had begun legal action against the England and Wales Cricket Board over the latter’s transgender participation policy. The threatened lawsuit is the latest attention-grabbing case taken on by the GLP, which was founded by Maugham, an arch-Remainer, in January 2017 in the wake of the Brexit referendum.

Best known for defeating Boris Johnson’s government at the Supreme Court over the then prime minister’s 2019 prorogation of parliament, the group is now determined to overturn the same court’s ruling that only those born female should be deemed women under the 2010 Equality Act.

It seems such an abject tautology, doesn’t it? That only those born female should be deemed women?

Confirming the GLP’s legal challenge would focus on the “grass-roots” level of cricket, he said: “We will say that if you have a team that has a trans player and that team is happy to have a trans player in there and their opponents are also happy to play a team that has a trans player, why is it anyone else’s business?”

News flash: the other team won’t be happy. Why? Because that would be an unfair advantage. His hypothetical is like asking if the other party is happy to be robbed or assaulted or slandered.

He went on to reveal the GLP had “been in touch with football players” and teams who were “upset” about losing trans team-mates since the FA banned those born male from the women’s game. 

Yes, because they’re losing their unfair advantage.

And he warned the FA it faced being sued as well if the GLP won its case against the ECB. “If it doesn’t fall into line in a world in which we have won, we will certainly bring proceedings against the Football Association as well,” he said, indicating the ECB case could be the first of many.

“It’s a test case brought at the grass-roots sports level, but I think it does have implications for all sporting codes and, indeed, at all levels. There is no basis, we think, in law to adopt a hard-and-fast rule that trans people aren’t allowed to compete.”

That isn’t the rule though.

The GLP’s legal action was condemned by Sharron Davies, a leading campaigner for the protection of the women’s category in sport. “I’m horrified,” she said. “Yet again, this is all about shoehorning males into sport for females. The law has made it clear, and science has proved, we cannot remove all male physical advantage. In a sport like cricket, where a male can bowl considerably faster and harder, it’s not safe or fair to have non-conforming males in any level of female cricket. We’ve already seen male-on-female injuries.

“We find girls and women self-exclude when they are treated as less worthy of protection. And we know including males excludes females from female sport. Females are constantly told they ought to move over, stay quiet and give up their rights. This can’t be allowed to happen anymore. It’s up to all sports governing bodies, including in cricket, to make non-conforming males feel safe and welcome in male sport.”

But Jolyon Maugham somehow manages to disagree with that.

The corruption is not universally popular.

Donald Trump’s unprecedented pardoning spree for political and business friends since returning to the White House has prompted warnings from ex-prosecutors and legal scholars of “corrupt” pay-to-play schemes, conflicts of interest and blatant partisanship.

It has included hundreds of Maga allies, a cryptocurrency mogul with ties to a Trump family crypto firm, disgraced politicians, and others who could yield political and financial benefits.

Other than that it’s totally aboveboard.

Recently, Trump has sparked strong criticism for commutations or pardons that seem increasingly aimed at boosting political allies and some Trump family business interests, say legal experts and ex-prosecutors.

Last month, Trump commuted a seven-year sentence of expelled House member George Santos, who pleaded guilty in 2024 to 13 counts including fraud and identity theft and had only served a few months.

Trump fueled more criticism last month when he pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the multibillionaire who founded Binance, a huge crypto exchange that earlier this year inked a $2bn investment deal involving the Trump family crypto firm World Liberty Financial that is expected to yield tens of millions yearly to the Trump family.

Now why would anyone criticize that?

“The corruption of the pardon process is one of the less visible but nevertheless important aspects of Trump’s sullying of the Justice Department,” said Philip Lacovara, who was counsel to the Watergate special prosecutor.

Lacovara called the commutation of Santos’ sentence after only a few months in prison “bewildering”. He stressed that Santos “never exhibited any remorse for his chain of frauds, and his sentence was well within the federal guidelines for his crimes”.

It’s not bewildering when you remember it was Trump who did it. This is who he is: a guy who considers fraud a smart way to get money.

Other legal experts see Trump’s pardon abuses as akin to a “form of bribery”.

“The pardon process as a method for granting executive grace for deserving criminal defendants has been replaced by a pay-to-play system that is a thinly disguised form of bribery,” said former justice department inspector general Michael Bromwich.

Very very very thinly. So thinly you can’t really see it.

Another pillar goes splat.

The International Olympic Committee is set to announce a ban on transgender women in female competition early next year after a science-based review of evidence about permanent physical advantages of being born male.

So they finally figured that out, eh? Well done, but we already knew about those there permanent physical advantages of being born male. We knew and we said, over and over.

The BBC is beginning to sound oddly like Pharyngula…

As calls for reform mount, two former BBC employees have spoken to The Telegraph on condition of anonymity, offering a rare glimpse into the culture at the corporation.

Former employee #1

“There was something of a Left-wing cabal – and if you were more centrist in your politics, your opinion wasn’t appreciated. Eventually, you just stopped speaking up. They would absolutely talk about diversity of voices, then shut down anybody who didn’t agree with them.

…

“There was also this clamouring for diversity that made a bit of a mockery of it. They had a diversity scheme, but when they couldn’t find enough external candidates they just put internal people on it who wouldn’t have got through in a fair competition. Suddenly, people who weren’t particularly good at their jobs were in really sought-after positions simply to fulfil quotas and make things look a certain way.”

And time goes on and those people see to it that the BBC has extremely thorough coverage of the drag communinny but ignores women entirely.

“I also saw a certain worldview carried forward in programming. There were documentaries that were supposed to be about discovery, but they started from a fixed view and followed it through to the end – so then you’d have whole films built on confirmation bias.”

Oops.

Former employee #2

“I don’t think some of what I’ve been reading of late is representative of the corporation. What I do think is that there was a period when younger generations were over-empowered, and it skewed certain outcomes. People with very little experience were given far more say in decision-making than they should have had, mainly because older, white and middle-class staff were paranoid about the ‘optics’ of saying no.

“The fetishisation of youth meant that, regardless of whether they were any good, the assumption was that young people must know the answer. They don’t – or not yet, anyway. In some cases, there were people in very senior jobs who were far too inexperienced, making big mistakes with compliance and duty of care, and they were protected by the managers who’d put them there. Being young became a qualification in itself.”

I’ve talked about this often, I think. There’s this pattern – the changes that came about in the 60s and 70s and beyond were often sparked by young people, or by broad movements that featured a lot of young people and were energized by young people. Civil rights, feminism, LGB rights, anti-colonialism via opposition to the war in Vietnam – all featured young people in leadership roles. There was a pattern: older people are used to everyday racism so it doesn’t shock them the way it shocks younger people. It should but it doesn’t. Everybody got very used to that pattern, so this tacit belief formed that the old guard is always wrong, is always ignoring some burning injustice because they just can’t see it, therefore, young people are the ones who have to educate them or kick them aside or both, because young people always get this stuff right.

It’s taking us way too long to learn that they don’t.

The fix goes on.

President Donald Trump has pardoned a long list of his political allies for their support or involvement in plans to overturn the 2020 presidential election, according to the Department of Justice’s Pardon Attorney, Ed Martin.

The individuals listed in a proclamation, which Martin posted on X late Sunday, include high-profile figures like former Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and the president’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, among dozens of others.

Filth. We’re in the filth up to our eyeballs. A filthy corrupt kleptocratic state, with no escape open.

“This proclamation ends a grave national injustice perpetrated upon the American people following the 2020 Presidential Election and continues the process of national reconciliation,” read the document, which gives the date of November 7 in its text and the president appears to have signed.

Like hell it does. It doesn’t reconcile me in the least; on the contrary.

On the upside –

Presidential pardons only apply to federal charges, not state or local charges. None of the people on the list are currently charged with federal crimes, though some were named as unindicted co-conspirators in special counsel Jack Smith’s election subversion case against Trump, which prosecutors withdrew after Trump’s 2024 election victory.

However, state-level criminal charges are still pending against Giuliani, Meadows, many of the 2020 fake electors, and others on the pardon list. (They deny wrongdoing.) These 2020-related state prosecutions are ongoing in Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada. These figures will likely try to use the pardon to aid their defense, though a presidential pardon doesn’t cover state crimes.

The mills of justice grind slowly.

Speaking of the dear darling beloved BBC…

Two men agreeing with each other that the word “women” includes trans women, how cuddly and sweet. No need to consult women of course.

Transgender women to be banned from all female Olympic events

They never should have been allowed. Obviously.

The International Olympic Committee is set to announce a ban on transgender women in female competition early next year after a science-based review of evidence about permanent physical advantages of being born male.

Come on. They didn’t need a science-based review. They’ve always known about the permanent physical advantages. Everyone has. Letting men who pretend to be women compete against women was always a terrible idea. Everyone knew that, but way too many people were happy about it anyway.

I recommend playing the clip.

At 1:04 Tim Davie gets passionate and says we have to be kind and caring in this – and in context it seems pretty clear that he means kind & caring to the men, not the women. We have to be kind & caring to the men because they struggle under the burden of being the sex that can beat up women if it chooses to. Women are just the boring bitches who can get beaten up, which is obviously far less tragic than being the ones can do the beating.

At 1:16:

I mean for goodness sake, let’s get real here. This is this is this is being whipped up as well around us in a way that’s deeply deeply damaging to civilized debate about these topics.

In other words women who object to being replaced by men in their own sex, and thus losing rights and opportunities and safety and the list goes on – those women are whipping up “this” in a way that’s deeply deeply damaging to civilized debate so let’s first of all make the women shut up.

I’m glad he’s out.

Not parody? Really? Are we SURE???

Good Law Project’s Xmas card that it’s promoting.

I particularly love the framed portrait of a pencil stub. It’s probably Euan’s tiny pencil, right? A profound and beautiful work of art.

Euan pretends he’s a journalist but he would flunk 3d grade English. The man is barely literate.

Hadley Freeman on the witchfinders:

In 2021, when lockdown was driving people insane, Clanchy’s 2019 book about working with children, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, was suddenly derided on social media as racist, because she used physical descriptions like “chocolate-coloured skin”. The charge was led by three women: Monisha Rajesh, Sunny Singh and Chimene Suleyman, all middle-aged, middle-class writers, like Clanchy. Pan Macmillan, Clanchy’s publisher through its Picador imprint, abjectly apologised to them and parted ways with its writer…

…When The Sunday Times interviewed Clanchy in 2022, Rajesh tweeted, “Jesus f***ing Christ. Picador have just emailed to let us know that @thesundaytimes will be running an interview with Kate Clanchy this weekend.” She then grossly insulted those responsible. Quite why Pan Macmillan felt the need to tell these bullies anything is one puzzle. Another is how on earth it became the norm for adults to behave like emotionally incontinent tyrants. When The Times ran an interview with Clanchy last week, Rajesh posted a video of herself weeping.

But the good news is this time it didn’t work for her.

Ursula Doyle, an editor who felt hounded out of her job in 2024 after publishing Kathleen Stock’s feminist book Material Girls, says: “There had been highly political issues in publishing before — cultural appropriation, Brexit, MeToo, Black Lives Matter. But never anything before like the trans issue, where even to question it meant you were an evil person.”

And also where the putative wrongdoing is not in the same category as sexism and racism and xenophobia and the like, but a new and peculiar category of refusing to lie about a very basic fact about human beings. To avoid being yelled at for sexism, for example, there is the option of not being sexist, which is not all that onerous. To avoid being shunned as a terf you have to tell a stupid childish lie, not just once but forever. The rules are both more demanding and more ridiculous.