[If you don’t know, Sarah McBride is trans, ie a man.]
Plenty more where that came from…
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From the Telegraph:
England Ice Hockey refused to stop a transgender player flouting a ban on those born male playing in the female game.
It’s kind of annoying that this is presented as a transgender ban. Yes it is, but the point of course is that it’s a ban on men playing in women’s sport. Anyway…
EIH has also snubbed repeated calls to take action over the result of a fixture in which a hat-trick of goals scored by the player – who Telegraph Sport has chosen not to name – helped a team avoid defeat.
Those born male were banned from domestic female ice hockey from the start of this season following a decision announced by EIH and Ice Hockey UK (IHU) in March last year, shortly before the Supreme Court ruling that only those born female were women under the 2010 Equality Act.
But a transgender player was subsequently allowed to defy the ban in a Women’s National Ice Hockey League (WNIHL) Division 2 South match between Haringey Greyhounds and Solent Amazons in September.
Telegraph Sport has been told EIH officials refused to stop an Amazons player taking part in the fixture despite being warned beforehand the individual had been born male.
The player went on to score three goals and set up another in a 5-5 draw that could have a bearing on promotion and relegation from the division at the end of the season.
Two witnesses present at the match confirmed they were fully aware the player was transgender and had been shocked that no action was taken to prevent the rule breach.
One said a teenage member of the Greyhounds team told him bumping into the adult player – who played men’s ice hockey before transitioning – “was like skating into a brick wall”.
Both said the EIH’s refusal to act had made players and officials afraid to voice their opposition to what had been allowed to occur.
A month after the game, the Women’s Rights Network wrote on social media that the transgender player had been removed from the Amazons’ roster.
That prompted a response from the father of one Greyhounds player, who wrote: “That game’s points should be given to my daughter’s team and Solent should be heavily sanctioned for their weakness and complicity. I even called it at the game that they had a fella playing.”
Ice hockey, it’s worth noting, is a fast and dangerous game, where typical male advantages in speed and strength would be significant – and dangerous for the women players.
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Yes, we’re in North Korea, and yes, it’s another ideological crackdown. From the Daily NK:
North Korea’s ruling party apparatus in North Hamgyong province issued a special directive in April 2026 ordering a crackdown on ideological nonconformity among young people, as authorities sought to exploit the Kim Il Sung birthday holiday to tighten control over a restless generation.
A source in North Hamgyong province told Daily NK that the North Hamgyong Provincial Party Committee issued the directive on April 13 through the Socialist Patriotic Youth League (the national youth political organization operating under the Workers’ Party of Korea, which mobilizes young people for ideological campaigns and labor). The directive called on members to intensify the “struggle against anti-socialist behavior” in the name of national security and regime preservation.
Wel yes: regime preservation is of course the name of the game here.
The provincial party committee highlighted that North Hamgyong province, which borders China and Russia, sees a higher frequency of illegal activity than other regions, including the circulation of South Korean dramas, films, and music, as well as unauthorized use of foreign currency. The directive stressed that April should mark a turning point, with all anti-socialist behavior in the province eliminated entirely.
The directive specifically identified the adoption of South Korean speech patterns and clothing styles as the most overt forms of anti-socialist behavior among young people in the province. It noted that South Korean speech had become so commonplace among young people in border areas that it was being used as naturally as standard North Korean speech.
Authorities also flagged what they described as a double standard among youth: outwardly reciting revolutionary slogans while privately criticizing party and leadership policies and harboring what the directive called “fantasies about capitalism.” Such conduct was characterized as anti-socialist behavior subject to punishment without exception.
Is there a limit to the level of ideological coercion? – or will it just keep ratcheting up, until every individual has a party official following them around, monitoring every movement, attaching electrodes to measure for deviant thought processes? Whatever, I doubt any society, any civilisation, has yet approached the level of Orwellian pressure for ideological conformity that North Korea is currently enforcing.
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REMINDER: Omer Shem Tov is an Israeli civilian who was kidnapped by terrorists from a music festival during the violent Hamas massacre on October 7, 2023.
Talk about “atrocities” and “a troubling disregard for life.”
[The Undergraduate Student’s Association Council? Which undergraduate student?]
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“It must be crushing what the f***ing Israelis are doing to your country.”
The moment I pushed back, the moment I told him the truth, that I support Israel and want to see the regime in Iran fall, he erupted in pure rage.He began screaming about his uncle’s high rank in the IRA, glorifying terror as a “success story” to justify the total erasure of Israel. To be trapped in a car with that level of brainwashed vitriol, being shamed and attacked for defending the Jewish people, is a burden I can’t describe.
Being Iranian is so incredibly taxing. You spend your life fighting the regime that destroyed your home, only to have strangers weaponise your identity to justify their antisemitism. To my Jewish friends: I see the hate you face. I will never stop standing with you, no matter how much it costs.
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Added:
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Or, more precisely, another Green nutter spouting Nazi-grade antisemitic bile. Andrew Gilligan at the Spectator continues the valuable work of exposing the new Green lunacy.
A Green Party council candidate in Bournemouth says “the Zionists killed 20 million Christians” and are “trying to control the world.”
Feda Shahin, who is standing for the Central ward on Bournemouth town council, leads a group which caused significant national controversy by picketing the family home of the town’s then Tory MP, Tobias Ellwood, in February 2024….
Shahin is the Palestine Solidarity Movement’s “secretary general,” and was prominent in it in Bournemouth at the time of the Ellwood picket, though it is not clear whether she attended the event at his house. Speaking at another rally of the group in February 2026, she said that the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s private island “is a symbol of the headquarters of the Zionists who are trying to control the world.”
She has also accused Israel of being a country that “sucks the blood of [Palestinian] children,” one of the classic anti-semitic blood libels.
The Palestine Solidarity Movement’s X account reposts what appears to be a call for ethnic cleansing, saying that “Israel must be dismantled… its population must be de-Zionised.”
In 2025, Shahin said: “Before the Holocaust… do you know that the Zionists, before that, actually, during the Bolshevik [period], killed 20 million Christians. The committee that decided to kill these 20 million Christians had 500 people [on it], 480 of these people were Zionists.”
This ridiculous claim appears to be based on the fact that some leaders of the Russian revolution, such as Trotsky and Zinoviev, were Jewish – though about 90 per cent, including Lenin and Stalin, were not (one of Lenin’s grandparents was a Jewish convert to Christianity, but he was raised in the Russian Orthodox faith.) Even the Jewish revolutionaries were, however, fundamentally opposed to Zionism, seeing it as bourgeois and nationalist. No doubt this is another of those times when the Z-word acts as a synonym for Jews….
Shahin’s rantings are a rehash of the conspiracy theory of Judeo-Bolshevism, itself an adaptation of a supposed plot for Jewish world domination outlined in the pre-revolutionary anti-semitic forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Judeo-Bolshevism was used by the Nazis to justify their invasion of Russia.
Never mind all that, though. We have the Greens’ word for it that Shahin is “committed to building a safe, inclusive community” which “brings people together with a collaborative approach.”
Shahin is the fourth Green candidate in just over a week to be exposed by The Spectator for promoting extreme views.
Shahin declined to comment. The Green Party said: “Where there are examples brought to our attention that do not fit in with the views of the Green Party, we are looking into them.” Like the other four, Shahin remains an officially-endorsed Green candidate.
They’ve come a long way from saving the whales.
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Kathleen Stock on the new Stonewall boss. The old “no debate” stance has been dropped, in favour of a more compromising position. :
In the history of gay rights, there have always been fearless souls willing to face down mobs of pitchfork-wielding fanatics, but perhaps none so brave as Kezia Dugdale, incoming chair of trustees at Stonewall. In an interview with The Guardian this weekend, the former Scottish Labour leader did the unthinkable and praised JK Rowling.
She also asserted that polarised “culture wars” around gender should be dropped, and apologised for her own part in them. The new version of Stonewall, she says, is “not dogmatic” but aspires to be in the “messy, grey bit … because that’s where progress and consensus is found”.
This is all a far cry from the charity’s hardline stance on trans identity, taken only a few years ago. It’s also a stretch from Dugdale circa 2022, when the Gender Recognition Reform Bill was going through the Scottish parliament. Writing in this paper, the former politician felt moved to “call out the populist tactics” of those who opposed gender self-ID. She claimed “facts had been absent” from their objections, and accused them of having “fed on division” and being “riven with fear”.….
Online, the volte-face has gone down as well as you might expect. The trans-activist side believes everyone at Stonewall is a Nazi, and the gender-critical side thinks Dugdale is a hypocrite. Presumably she will use both reactions to her benefit, depicting Stonewall as holding the sensible centre ground, while surrounding crazies foam at the mouth.
Whatever Dugdae may now think – and it’s most likely that her views on gender haven’t changed – at least it looks like she now appreciates what a mess Stonewall got itself into with its aggressive approach. It worked at first, but the organisation just ended up disgracing itself.
So whatever Dugdale claims to have learnt from the past ten years, the lesson for the rest of us is to be wary of any lobbying group — on any issue — that tries simultaneously to cajole and terrify the public into a uniform ethical position on what should really be a matter of private conscience.
Meaningful change in grassroots attitudes doesn’t work that way. On the contrary: it requires you to take your opponents seriously as intelligent, responsible thinkers. Ultimately, you must be prepared to share a stage with them while they disagree with you; to defend their right to say their piece, against illiberal lunatics; and perhaps even go for a friendly drink with them afterwards, in full view of others. Whether the new incarnation of Stonewall is ready for that kind of unprecedented courage remains to be seen.
They won some battles, but lost the war. Time for a regroup and a rethink. Though I think – I hope – that it’s too late for them now.
Mick Hartley 