Britain Culture wars 

Arrogant National Trust betrays trust of the nation

The National Trust’s proposed “revolution” in its relationship with the public has caused justifiable outrage. Its ten-year strategy, revealed by The Times, is to shift its emphasis from enabling the public to visit its stately homes and gardens to promoting access to the countryside. Historic houses, it says, will be “repurposed as public space in service of local audiences” to junk the “outdated mansion experience”. The Trust declared that although it remained “committed to, and passionate about” country houses, arts and heritage, it needed to ensure that these were “meaningful…

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Culture wars Jewish people 

Support for Black Lives Matter repeats a lethal error of history

In the 20th century, thousands of progressively minded people supported Soviet communism. Believing this ideology was the key to a better world, they refused to acknowledge the horrific abuses under Stalin when millions were brainwashed, murdered or starved to death. Today’s progressives are behaving in similar fashion in response to another onslaught on civilized values, perpetrated in the name of an ideology with the same roots as Soviet communism. And just as in the last century, a dismaying number of its cheerleaders are Jews. In both America and Britain, Jewish…

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Culture wars Jewish people 

The progressive world: an antechamber to evil

After days of antisemitic rants on social media, the “Grime” rapper Wiley has finally been barred from Twitter and Facebook following outrage by Jews and others that he was allowed to use these platforms for his vicious incitement. This episode was particularly chilling. It involved a sustained onslaught of anti-Jewish invective by a prominent public figure who described Jews as “cowards and snakes,” likened them to the Ku Klux Klan and suggested they should be shot. He could do this with impunity because no one saw fit to stop him…

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Culture wars Jewish people USA 

The Jewish surrender to the west’s eclipse of reason

Rarely has a journalist’s resignation from their newspaper created such an impact as the coruscating letter with which Bari Weiss resigned from The New York Times. The moral bankruptcy of that paper has been plain for years to the many who have been shocked by its substitution of propaganda for objective journalism on many issues, including Israel. What really horrified people was Weiss’s description of the way she was victimized by her colleagues for challenging the paper’s group-think. They singled her out for her support for Israel as a Jew,…

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conversation Britain Culture wars USA 

Politically homeless as the western mind shuts down

To make oneself politically homeless may be regarded as a misfortune. To do it a second time looks like recklessness on steroids. In the Eighties and Nineties, I broke with my former comrades on the left. On a variety of issues arising from their repudiation of the western nation and its values, I challenged the orthodoxy and found myself condemned as having gone over to the dark side, otherwise known as “the right”. I concluded that the left consisted of people who denied evidence and reason in the furtherance of…

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conversation Britain Culture wars Videos 

Conversation: the eclipse of liberalism and the failure of conservatism

I was pleased to have a long video conversation (in two parts) with John O’Sullivan, former senior policy adviser to Margaret Thatcher and now president of the Danube Institute, a think-tank based in Hungary. Our conversation started by talking about my early years at The Guardian newspaper and my experiences while working there which led me to break with the left. We discussed my play, Traitors (yes, I did write one and it was actually performed at a fringe theatre in London in 1986), my experience of antisemitism which led…

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Britain Culture wars USA 

Mrs America and the start of the culture wars

Know much about Phyllis Schlafly? Indeed, have you even heard of her? Well, people are about to find out a lot more, and perhaps learn for the first time about the direct line from her to our current political and cultural tumult. Tomorrow BBC2 starts screening a brilliantly produced and addictive series, Mrs America. This deals with the tremendous fight put up in the 1970s by Schlafly, an anti-feminist, anti-abortion, anti-communist campaigner, against the US Equal Rights Amendment. That sought to end the legal distinctions between men and women over…

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Britain Culture wars USA 

The war against the west, and its defender

Across America, law and order has now broken down. There are repeated attacks on the police and a huge spike in the number of murders. On FrontPageMag, John Perrazzo reports: “On Sunday, May 31, eighteen homicides were committed in Chicago, breaking the city’s previous one-day record of thirteen, set 29 years ago. In fact, over the course of that same weekend as a whole, Chicago police responded to at least 73 incidents in which 92 people were shot, including 27 who died as a result. ‘We’ve never seen anything like it at…

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march Culture wars Videos 

The long march, and how to reverse it

I took part remotely in a discussion held in London by the New Culture Forum to discuss their new book, “The Long March: How the Left Won the Culture War and What To Do About It.” The first part of the title refers to the “long march through the institutions”, the strategy of achieving revolutionary change by infiltrating subversive ideas into all the cultural institutions of society and thus transforming it from within. As chairman Peter Whittle observed, however, it’s the latter part of the title that’s the most important…

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Culture wars Jewish people 

What have the Jews ever done for us?

I gave a talk to the sixth form and staff at London’s JFS school, under the title “What have the Jews ever done for us? The contribution of Judaism to western civilisation and modernity”. You can watch the talk here, and you can read an edited version below. What have the Jews ever done for us? The contribution of Judaism to western civilisation It’s an article of faith that religion and modernity are mutually exclusive. In one box, labelled modernity, are all the good things that we value: reason and…

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