Mick Hartley

A useful essay from Adam Louis-Klein, in Sapir, on “the latest pseudoscience to overtake academia”:

In his 1946 book Hitler’s Professors, linguist Max Weinreich documented how the German university — then the pride of Western scholarship — fell with terrifying speed into the service of Nazi ideology. Within months of Hitler’s rise to power, professors across disciplines had issued declarations of loyalty. They did so not only to secure their posts but to align themselves with a social and political movement that promised prestige, resources, and renewed relevance. Entire research institutes were founded, fields reorganized, and new disciplines invented around the “Jewish Question.”

Weinreich revealed a moral and epistemic collapse that converted scholarship into ideology. Anti-Jewish libels  do not circulate on their own. They require institutional prestige to stabilize them. The university has long been an effective instrument for transmuting defamation into knowledge, serving not as a barrier to harmful ideology but as its most efficient vehicle.

At the moment of writing, the university has been lost to a new pseudoscience: antizionism. And there are Jewish faculty, like Fishberg before them, who lent it credibility. Our urgent and ambitious task is to make them see the scholarly error, as Fishberg eventually did, and get them to reverse course.

What the Nazi university did with the “Jewish Question” the contemporary university now does with the “Zionist Question.” Entire disciplines — anthropology, among them — have been reorganized around antizionist libel, based on a Manichean worldview in which “Zionist professors,” “Zionist ideologues,” and “Zionist administrators” are singled out as enemies of justice. In this imaginary, “Zionist” does not denote genuine persons or positions; it works as an all-encompassing metaphor of corruption that must be purged.

Antizionism is the ideology that treats Jewish peoplehood and sovereignty as an intrinsic injustice. It is today’s evolved form of anti-Jewish hate, less crude than classical antisemitism, but no less potent. Antizionism is more abstract, systematized, and rhetorically refined — ideally suited to academic environments that reward oppositional performance and repackage hostility as critical thought.….

Academia: the breeding ground of pseudoscience. Particularly US academia.

A BBC report:

A row has broken out over an event’s single-sex attendance policy.

Rosie Hayes told the BBC multiple venues in Brighton had cancelled or stopped hosting trauma-healing classes organised by her group Sisters Heal for the victims of sexual assault, rape and domestic abuse, which were limited to “biological women only”.

She has claimed the venues were pressured into dropping the event due to “intense harassment” from what she called “trans activists”.

Terf Watch Brighton, which describes itself as a grassroots collective of journalists reporting on “anti-trans efforts”, said it was not aware of any groups or networks coordinating opposition to Sisters Heal.

Of course the Beeb go straight to Terf Watch Brighton as their reliable source.

Hayes, who is a co-founder of Sisters Heal, told the BBC she restricted attendance to the class because “a lot of women cannot heal in a mixed-sex space”.

“Female survivors [of sexual abuse and domestic violence] have been harmed by male bodies, male voices, male presence, male physicality,” she said.

“It’s a trauma response that they have, which isn’t cognitive.

“They can’t reason themselves out of it.”

Terf Watch Brighton told the BBC the groups run and advocated for by Sisters Heal and similar organisations are discriminatory to trans women, and deliberately divisive.

“Their purpose is always, at least in part, to push trans women out of society – it is unreasonable not to expect complaints and political opposition.”

The old trans bullshit. Of course women need single sex spaces to heal. But for the trans activists everything has to be about them – “to push trans women out of society” ffs.. Never mind the trauma of the actual women, supposed to take second place to the imagined slight felt by the men in dresses.

Of course Terf Watch Brighton have the last word. Well, this is the BBC:

Terf Watch Brighton said the line drawn for the need for “single-sex services” was “arbitrary, unevidenced, and based on prejudiced myths about how gender operates in society”.

Photos from the Times news in pictures feature today:

Tetiana Khimion, 47, now a sniper in the Ukrainian army, poses in a park in Kyiv with a photograph of herself as a dance teacher before the war. [Sergei Grits/AP]

People bring flowers to pay tribute at a memorial in Bucha for the victims of Russian troops, marking the fourth anniversary of the invasion. [Alina Smutko/Reuters]

The graves of thousands of fallen Ukrainian military personnel in Kharkiv. [Chris MGrath/Getty Images]

From an interesting little essay by Peter Himmelman on Facebook:

Over the past several years, and especially since October 7, 2023, I have watched something unfold that is difficult to explain, especially if you assume it emerged entirely on its own. On that day, Hamas carried out the largest massacre of Jews since the Shoah. Families burned alive. Young people hunted down. Children murdered and taken hostage. And yet within hours, even before the scale of the atrocity was fully understood, a counternarrative appeared.

Israel was blamed. The victims were recast as perpetrators. The language spread with astonishing speed. Genocide. Colonialism. Resistance. These words did not emerge gradually. They arrived pre-packaged, as if they had been rehearsed and readied for a moment of maximum psychological effect.

And then something else became visible. The language replicated.

The same phrases appeared on handmade signs in New York and London. The same chants were heard on campuses separated by oceans. The same formulations, the same accusations, the same moral certainties, delivered with the strange precision of actors who had never met but somehow shared the same script. There was a theatrical aspect to what we were seeing.

Not in the sense that the emotions were fake. I assume much of the vehemence was sincere. But sincerity does not preclude choreography. Actors can believe deeply in the lines they have been given. They can inhabit them fully. What was striking was the uniformity. The compression of complex history into identical slogans. The speed with which those slogans moved from iPhones to city streets.

To understand how this happens, it helps to follow the structure that supports it.

Last week, I listened to an important conversation between journalist Melissa Chen and Israeli historian and analyst Haviv Rettig Gur. Chen said something that clarified the geopolitical foundation beneath events that otherwise seem disconnected.

“Iran,” she said, “is able to behave the way it does because China is willing to absorb the cost of its isolation.”

This is not speculation, it’s is an observable economic relationship. For decades, Iran has been the subject of international sanctions intended to limit its ability to fund its military and its regional proxies, including Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. Those sanctions cannot achieve their intended effect if Iran continues to sell its primary export.

Today, according to energy analysts, roughly eighty percent or more of Iran’s heavily discounted oil exports go to China. Tankers move across the sea, sometimes disabling their tracking systems. Oil is transferred ship to ship, relabeled, and sold. China receives the energy it needs to sustain its vast industrial economy. Iran receives the revenue it needs to sustain its regime. And with that revenue, Iran continues its regional project.

Iran’s leadership has never hidden its intentions. In 2005, then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for Israel to be “wiped off the map,” language that has been echoed and reiterated by senior Iranian officials ever since. This objective is rooted partly in revolutionary ideology and partly in theology. In the Iranian regime’s view, Israel represents both a Western outpost and a non-Muslim sovereign presence on land they consider inherently Islamic. Its existence is seen not merely as a political problem but as a civilizational affront. This belief has practical consequences.

Iran provides funding, weapons, and training to its proxies. They, not Iran, carry out the attacks. The attacks provoke war. The war provokes global reaction. And institutional trust across the West begins to erode.

That chain reaction now unfolds in a digital information environment shaped heavily by platforms such as TikTok, owned by the Chinese parent company ByteDance.…

You may not see China when Jewish students are harassed on Western campuses. You may not see Iran when protesters chant for Israel’s elimination. You may not see the economic and ideological structures that connect oil fields, social media feeds, and society-dissembling street demonstrations.

But invisibility is essential to their function. The most effective form of influence is the one that feels like your own conclusion.

War, it turns out, no longer requires bombs. Sometimes it requires only a story, and the patience to let others tell it for you.

Wesley Yang spells it out:

Transgenderism is an ongoing project of attempting to normalize a bizarre subculture built around esoteric pseudo-medical practices from the outermost fringe of human extremity and make it compulsory for every American to join that subculture and to make that subculture the mainstream culture of the Western world. One requires only the most cursory understanding of the pioneering figures responsible for the mainstreaming of transgenderism — who they were and what their motives were — to understand this as a matter of certainty.

It is as if ascetics who scourge themselves with whips in public or amputee fetishists began teaching their beliefs to young schoolchildren and recruiting them to join their ranks. One is forced into the strange position of referencing practices that are not more bizarre than transgenderism — that are indeed arguably less bizarre — to make an analogy in an attempt to restore some semblance of sanity and proportionality to our thinking about this. The normalization has already gone far enough that the whole culture suffers from vertigo where it is unable to orient itself in space or time.

Giving the same off-label cancer drugs that are used to chemically castrate adult sex offenders to pubescent children who have been brainwashed to fear the decisive stage of mental, physical, and emotional maturation that resolves gender dysphoria in children in most cases is self-evidently an act of madness and medicalized child abuse unmatched by anything in the history of modern medicine. It took the self-lobotomization of the American professional and managerial classes for our truth-seeking apparatus not to see this fact that is self-evident to any normal person with normal human instincts.

This self-lobotomization occurred across mainstream institutions of all kinds — all it required was the incantation of a few odious euphemisms, the manipulation of rewards and punishments, and confident claims by various authorities that self-evidently ludicrous claims were in fact settled science.

Now we are in phase one of recognizing that there was never any science to any of it.

It was all a lie told by cultists who managed to infiltrate and corrupt society’s knowledge-generating, certifying, and enforcement apparatus — it was the most outrageous of all such possible lies, so outrageous that nobody could believe that anyone would attempt it, much less succeed, unless there was some actual substance behind it, some real grounds for epistemic and moral confidence. There was none.

This was prompted by Jesse Singal’s piece in the NYT yesterday on the breaking of the gender medicine consensus in the US. Yang adds this:

Singal is still constrained to persist in the conceit that there are good faith actors who might undertake good faith research into “trans youth.” But he’s doing so largely as a rhetorical concession to make his message palatable to good liberals still unable to grasp the enormity of the con to which they’ve been party.

And, in response to someone who argues that there are trans people “whose psychology does not align with their biological sex”:

No there aren’t. There are people who profess in all sincerity to being happier while mimicking the other sex than before, but nothing about such claims, even if true, establishes, or ever could establish, that there are “real trans people.”

The term is nothing more than reification into a quasi-medical framing of the normal variation in tastes and interest.

Because gender identity is not a thing. Some people may feel more feminine, or more masculine, than gender stereotypes – many will be gay – but that doesn’t mean they’re “trans”, and need medical intervention.

📣🚨 NEW FSU MEMBER TESTIMONIAL

In 2020, cartoonist Stella Perrett was cancelled by the Morning Star, a daily communist news paper which she had illustrated for since 2015.

Trade unions threated to cut funding for the newspaper after it published a cartoon of Stella’s which… pic.twitter.com/ru3CEfc8L1

— The Free Speech Union (@SpeechUnion) February 24, 2026

Trade unions threated to cut funding for the newspaper after it published a cartoon of Stella’s which showed a crocodile claiming to be “transitioning as a newt” as it entered a pond full of newts who objected to the crocodile coming in.

Deemed to be a transphobe, the trade union council held a meeting to force the Morning Star to cancel Stella as their political cartoonist. The paper apologised for the cartoon, put staff through retraining and were faced with potential closure for the first time in its 70 year history due to the trade unions threatening to pull funding.

The cartoon was also reported to Avon & Somerset Police and recorded as a non-crime hate incident.

The Free Speech Union sent a pre-action letter of defamation to the Morning Star, and a demand for an apology and right of reply to the claims made about her.

Stella was the second women’s rights activist the Free Speech Union ever supported. Our single biggest category of cases involve people who get in trouble for expressing their gender critical views.

It was a cartoon. Not a call to attack trans people: a cartoon. Such was the power of the gender cult on the left that she had to be punished, and reported to the police, just for making a joke about it.

One reason it’s so useful to study Soviet antizionism is that it helps us trace the genealogy of left-wing antizionism to antisemitic conspiracy theory.

The ideologues of Soviet antizionism — the “Zionologists” — operated in a Marxist-Leninist ideological context and spoke in… pic.twitter.com/Z1jBgODmWh

— Izabella Tabarovsky (@IzaTabaro) February 24, 2026

The ideologues of Soviet antizionism — the “Zionologists” — operated in a Marxist-Leninist ideological context and spoke in left-wing idiom, but their personal views were informed by Russian far-right conservative thought, which had always disdained Jews. They imbibed The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Nazi theories, both of which were prohibited literature in the USSR.

The antizionist ideology they developed for the Brezhnev regime was grounded in that antisemitic framework. They talked about Zionists, but their tropes were those of the Protocols-informed conspiracy theory.

An easy way to understand this is to look at these two images, which I always display side by side at the beginning of my lectures and am using here for educational purposes only.

The image on the left is the cover of a French edition of The Protocols. The image on the right is from a 1972 May Day parade in Moscow.

Ignore the words and you can see that it’s the same image.

Read the words, and you understand the ideological difference: One says “The Jewish danger,” and the other, “Zionism is a weapon of imperialism.”

These images illustrate better than anything else that the only thing separating antizionism from antisemitism is that one speaks of Zionists and the other speaks of Jews.

Underlying both is the same conspiracist belief in the omnipotence and malevolence of Jews/Zionists seeking to gain control over the world. It’s about the Jew/Zionist who is both subhuman and superpowerful. The rest is details.

Once you understand that, it’s no longer surprising that the far left and the far right converge on the same anti-Israel and antizionist rhetoric.

It’s precisely why the anti-Israel left suddenly finds itself nodding to Tucker Carlson and why Candace Owens can rail about Zionists without becoming a leftist.

Soviet antizionism shows that left-wing antizionism and right-wing antisemitism share the same DNA.

It’s precisely why antizionism is a subset of antisemitism and inseparable from it.

“They pretend to be the firefighter, but they are actually the arsonist."

Dr. @EinatWilf shuts down Liberal MP's distorted view of the Middle East and breaks down how UNRWA and Hamas built tunnels to execute their invasion of Israel and the horrific October 7 massacre. pic.twitter.com/Dc9UVElNG5

— Shuv Majumdar (@shuvmajumdar) February 24, 2026

And that’s before you get onto the business of what they teach in UNRWA schools.

Round Walthamstow Wetlands this morning:

Suzanne Moore in the Telegraph:

One of the shocking things that happened when the news broke that the controversial Pathways trial assessing the effect of puberty blockers on children was to be halted was that no one had bothered to tell Dr Hilary Cass….

The Pathways trial – ignominiously dubbed the “Streeting trial” by shadow health minister and consultant paediatrician Dr Caroline Johnson – was stopped by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) over “fresh” concerns about how these powerful drugs may harm children in the long term. Cass was being interviewed on Radio New Zealand when the announcement was made. She seemed to have had no forearming from Streeting. She averred that it was “something to do with technical details being ironed out”, suggesting still that the trial was basically sound.

Actually, far from it: the MHRA recommendation that children could not consent to having their puberty blocked at eight, and instead had to be 14 to participate, effectively kiboshes the trial because most girls will have reached puberty by then.

Has Streeting used Cass as a political pawn since the report was published, to use her as a fall guy to mask his own failures of leadership? Many of us never understood why this trial had to happen in the first place, unless it was a sop to trans activists and an attempt to push this issue into the long grass.

We already know from countless studies what puberty blockers do: they affect bone density as well as cognitive development. They may cause vaginal bleeding in very young girls. But the main issue is that they are not taken in a vacuum. They nearly always lead on to cross-sex hormones. They are a fast-track to medicalising a child forever.

No new evidence caused the MHRA to pull the trial back. Rather, they got cold feet about the age of the children involved when it came to the trial protocol that meant asking them about “fertility preservation”. Are you really going to ask small girls who have never had a period about “egg retrieval” for freezing? Are you going to ask young boys about sperm donation before you set them on a path to future infertility? How can a child consent to this?…

Both Cass and Streeting speak of the demand from children and their families for these drugs, as though that in itself justifies the risks. We know that around 2,000 children went on blockers after being referred by the Tavistock gender identity clinic… before the NHS banned the drugs following Cass’s findings. The Tavistock failed to track the long-term medical outcomes of these children; furthermore, most NHS Trusts that ran adult gender identity clinics would not share their clinical data with Cass.

It is crazy that a new cohort of kids must be experimented on. As soon as the public began to understand this, they were appalled. None of this, by the way, is about the rights of adults to transition or present as they like. This is an issue about the safeguarding of children, a concept that gender ideology regards as utterly disposable.

Fundamentally, this is a moral judgement – and one that Wes Streeting has failed to get right. He has admitted that he felt “discomfort” about the trial but that’s not good enough.

As Health Secretary, he should have stepped in to prevent it. Cass is not a political animal, so it would come as no surprise if she felt compelled to appease the trans mob (she was subject to horrible threats by them, remember) with the concession of a puberty blockers trial. But if she could not stand up to the activists, then Streeting should have done.

But he was intimidated. He thought the trial might get the trans activists – not least the trans activists in the Labour Party – off his back. Not a good look for a prospective leader.