“It’s so strange and unsettling to live through a mass delusion of this magnitude. Completely bewildering at times, but also endlessly fascinating.“

Michael O’Flaherty, Commissioner for Human Rights at the Council of Europe, has addressed a letter to the UK Parliament expressing concern over the Supreme Court’s recent ruling and what he described as the “current climate for trans people in the UK.” Janice Turner in the Times: No one bears more blame for gender ideology capturing public institutions…

Down the Lea in Hackney: And the Regent’s Canal at Islington:

Next month Aston Villa will be hosting Maccabi Tel Aviv in the Europa League. At MEMRI TV British Islamic scholar from Birmingham Asrar Rashid warns Maccabi Tel Aviv fans, in a lecture delivered in Amsterdam, that when Israel’s Maccabi Tel Aviv comes to Birmingham to play Aston Villa on November 6, “we will not show…

Oh dear. The former BBC journalist Mishal Husain has questioned whether Shamima Begum would have been treated differently by the media if she were not Muslim. Husain voiced concerns about the portrayal of Muslims as she delivered the 2025 Romanes Lecture at the University of Oxford in a speech titled “Empire, Identity and the Search…

Thread from Dennis Noel Kavanagh: 2/ The answer to that was “the wrong bodies to be heterosexuals”, because the 2012 Tavistock patient survey told us the 80% of boys and 90% of girls were same sex attracted. They had the “wrong bodies” to be straight. Stonewall pushed this. They aided and abetted this. 3/ The…

The BBC’s Lucy Williamson has a history with this kind of reporting. Back in December 2023, as I noted at the time, she reported on the violence and abuse that Palestinians supposedly suffer at the hands of the wicked Israelis in their jails. A poor lad, eighteen-year-old Mohammed Nazzal, was interviewed and photographed surrounded by…

Even BBC Verify can, reluctantly, get it right sometimes: BBC Verify has authenticated graphic videos that show a public execution carried out by Hamas gunmen in Gaza last night. The videos show several men with guns line up eight people whose arms are tied behind their backs. They are in a public square surrounded by…

Toby Young, head of the Free Speech Union, thinks that Steven Pinker’s idea of “common knowledge” – as outlined in his new book – explains cancel culture and academic pile-ons against heretics. Thus: As Pinker says: “People will expose themselves to the risk of reprisal by a despotic regime only if they know that others are…

Sonia Sodha reflects on the Brighton violence: Those of us attending Europe’s largest feminist conference at the weekend in Brighton had more than logistics to contend with. A rabble of angry men greeted us at the venue by screaming “shame on you!” and brandishing placards telling us to get out of their city. The previous…