Australia reintroduces the stocks

Australia reintroduces the stocks. By Graham Linehan, comedian and writer, and creator of the tv series The IT Crowd and Father Ted.

Kirralie Smith runs Binary Australia, a campaign group that argues, among other things, that women’s football should involve women. In early 2023 she noticed that a men’s league footballer called Nicholas Blanch was playing on a women’s team in Wingham, and that another player, Justin Dennis, was doing the same in Sydney. She said so. She called Blanch “a bloke in a frock.” She asked, in her own words, why parents should be “put in the terrible situation of having to deal with an adult man in their daughter’s bathroom.”

Kirralie Smith

For this, the NSW Local Court found her guilty of “unlawful vilification.” Last week the Supreme Court of New South Wales upheld the finding on appeal. Smith and Binary Australia now owe Blanch and Dennis a combined $95,000, due within 28 days, doubling if she’s late.

The funny part:

The court has ordered Smith to publish [a statement], pinned to the top of every social media account she controls, and featured on the Binary Australia homepage, for three months. In it, she must announce to the world that she has “contravened section 38S of the Anti-Discrimination Act” and “incited hatred towards, serious contempt for, or severe ridicule of” two footballers, by means of calling them men. She’s also banned from doing it again.

The ruling doesn’t specify what word she’s meant to use instead. That’s the fun part she has to work out on her own, like the rest of us. Perhaps when the full text of the statement is released, we’ll find out what word we are supposed to use for people with dicks who insist on playing women’s sports.

Justice Belinda Rigg, who wrote the ruling, insists the point isn’t to stigmatise or shame Smith. Then in the next breath, she explains that she wants the statement seen by “a meaningful number of [Smith’s] followers, including those who recall the impugned posts,” so they can witness what she calls the “announcement of guilt.”

That’s not a legal remedy. That’s the village square. That’s the stocks. Australia has reintroduced the stocks as a punishment for uppity women.

Meanwhile Dennis, the goal-scorer who injured two female opponents in a single match (a separate double leg fracture in the same league was down to a different Flying Bats player), got a new alias. After the complaints piled up, Football NSW simply stopped printing his name on the match stats and started calling him “Inter Player.” His new club, the Flying Bats, won every one of their 17 matches last season, scoring 76 goals and conceding 8, which is a cricket score, not a football score.

This is what the country looks like now. A woman gets a $95,000 fine and a compelled confession for saying a man is a man. A man who hurt women on a pitch gets a pseudonym and a trophy.

Australia used to be a masculine place:

Australia can no longer be called the most masculine place on Earth, but it didn’t drift from macho to metropolitan. It skipped straight past and rebuilt the stocks for a new medieval age.

In the Australia Julia Gillard created, when a woman rings the alarm, the country’s institutions rush in, not to help her, but to cut off the sound. Smith’s punishment is so every other woman knows what happens if she rings one too.

hat-tip Phil C.

Thousands of Migrants Pour Across Border Into a Tiny Spanish Territory

Thousands of Migrants Pour Across Border Into a Tiny Spanish Territory. By Margherita Stanceti at the WSJ.

Thousands of migrants on Thursday poured into the tiny Spanish territory of Ceuta from neighboring Morocco, overwhelming local authorities and posing a political headache for Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.

Footage broadcast on Spanish television showed large crowds of mostly young men swimming around breakwaters and climbing over fences to cross into Ceuta. Most carried little more than the shorts and flip-flops they were wearing. …

Is it Islamophobic for Spaniards to be concerned about this?

 

The coastal city of Ceuta is in North Africa, but it has been part of Spanish territory for centuries…. But reaching Ceuta or Melilla doesn’t guarantee access to the rest of Spain or free movement across Europe, because the enclaves are subject to special border controls that restrict onward travel to the Spanish mainland.

Italy’s most senior politicians have called for Spain to be kicked out of Europe’s Schengen zone.

If the Spanish and European Governments didn’t want this invasion, they could easily have prevented it. They wanted it, says Eva V:

John Hinderaker at Powerline:

Muslims invaded Spain in 711 and conquered almost all of that country. They held Spain for centuries, until the Christian Reconquest finally drove out the last of the Muslims in 1492.

Spain’s government had already given 500,000 illegal aliens, mostly Muslims, legal status in that country [No, the intial estimate was for 0.5 million, but 1.2 million applied and were accepted].

That was the context for yesterday’s attack by Moroccans on the Spanish territory of CeutaSuddenly, thousands of Moroccans swam or boated around Spain’s fence into Cueta. Why did this happen all at once? They seem to have gotten word that the Spanish authorities wouldn’t stop them.

Rod Dreher:

Spain’s Guardia Civil estimates the number of young men who invaded Ceuta and Melilla today to be around 40,000.

Depending on how you count, in the US Army, that would be between 2.6 and 4 divisions.

Media crickets in the UK:

I’m sat in a pub watching Sky News and there’s no mention of the invasion in Spain today, just repeated adverts for a documentary about a girl who lied about grooming gangs. Is this the state of the MSM? No wonder they want to stamp out citizen journalism on social media.

Meanwhile, Portugal is banning burqas and niqabs in public places, with fines up to 4,000 euros. Muslim men who force their wives or female relatives to wear one will also face 3 years in prison. Burqas were described as a ‘symbol of women’s oppression and a threat to public safety.’

hat-tip Stephen Neil

Elon Musk Was Right: Pedro Sánchez Is a Traitor

Elon Musk Was Right: Pedro Sánchez Is a Traitor. By Aaron Hanscom at PJ Media.

Search for “traitor” on X this week, and one man will flood your timeline: Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.

The reason? Shocking images of thousands of migrants from Morocco crossing the border and flooding into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. …

After watching video footage of migrants breaking through fences to get into the city, one would be justified in using the word “invasion” to describe what’s happening. Indeed, Santiago Abascal, the leader of the rising populist/conservative Vox party, called it just that and wrote that “Pedro Sánchez is its main promoter and guilty of all its consequences.”

The migrants don’t disagree. Video footage captured some of the arrivals chanting, “Viva Pedro Sánchez!” or “Long live Pedro Sánchez!” …

Their gratitude to the Socialist prime minister is due to his mass amnesty plan, which received 1.2 million applications by its June 30, 2026, deadline. …

Sánchez, of course, looks at every new immigrant as a potential future voter who won’t care about the mind-boggling corruption within his Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE). As increasing numbers of Spaniards take to the streets to demand the prime minister’s resignation, Muslim migrants are among his most loyal supporters.

[Here’s] a video of a Muslim store owner with a poster of Sánchez on his wall who says Muslims who become citizens are “100%” going to vote for the prime minister because of his support for Palestine and Iran. This is why I’ve called him the West’s most hostile leader toward Israel. …

As for the fate of Europe’s citizens, Abascal said Sánchez had “opened the doors of Europe to all dangers.” He described the prime minister’s high treason more vividly than Musk did: “For every rape, every stabbing, and every slash to the pockets of Spaniards to keep them afloat… there is a direct culprit: the mafia boss desperately calling in more hitmen to stay in power.

Sánchez, who is mired in corruption scandals, can’t go out in public now because, as Abascal says, everyone knows he doesn’t defend Spain’s interests and is only interested in holding on to power.

And when Muslims are the majority, do you think they will vote for Sanchez or his leftist party? What of LGB and trans then? What a short term strategy the left is following.

Green hydrogen bites the dust

Green hydrogen bites the dust. By Joanne Nova.

The Australian Hydrogen Council is changing it’s name to the (catchy) Australian Industrial Decarbonisation Council. That’s one way to back out of the Green Hydrogen disaster while pretending not to.

They are not even trying to give a sensible explanation (via Max Aitchison in The Australian):

“This might be the first recorded instance of a clean energy association scrubbing its original, core identity …

“Australia’s hydrogen opportunity was initially seen as broad and global,” the industry body says in answer to why it felt it needed a new identity.

“As the market developed, attention increasingly turned to the domestic industrial uses needed to support local decarbonisation, build capability and strengthen future export pathways.”

Which is a rather polite, understated way of saying the green hydrogen dream quickly turned into a nightmare.

Australia was going to be a Green Hydrogen Superpower (Stupid-power) only three years ago. Hydrogen was going to smooth out all the ups and downs of weather-dependent energy. But that fantasy crashed and burned within 18 months, as project after project collapsed.

To produce Green Hydrogen at $2 a kilogram, our former Chief Scientist, Alan Finkel, said the electricity used to make the hydrogen needs to be less than $30 per megawatt hour [domestic power costs ~$300/MWhr]. So, the grand irony is that the only generator in Australia that can make affordable hydrogen is the one they would never use, brown coal.

Wind and solar power can operate “cheaper” than that for short periods, but alas, like every other industrial process, once you’ve bought the land, built the infrastructure, hired the staff, and paid the insurance — it doesn’t make any sense to use it “for short periods” and leave it and the staff sitting around most of the day watching cat videos on Youtube.

Funny how almost nothing works more efficiently on an intermittent basis.

And in another sign that the climate change movement is on the way out, world leaders are set to snub an Australian-organised UN climate change meeting in Fiji this year, despite months of planning by Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen and more than $150m in government investment.

 

Meaningful political discussion is now impossible because the biased media has left at least half the population with no idea of reality

Meaningful political discussion is now impossible because the biased media has left at least half the population with no idea of reality. By Hans Mahncke, who is focused on covid, but what he describes applies to every issue since about 2007 (the year JournoList was founded).

We are living through a massive information crisis in which at least half the population is being systematically misinformed, making any sane national debate increasingly difficult.

Without a shared factual foundation, there is nothing to discuss. People are not merely drawing different conclusions from the same evidence. They are living in entirely different realities.

That is what makes the Fauci story so tragic. He caused untold harm, yet millions of people know almost nothing about it. We can debate precisely how large a role Fauci played in the creation of Covid, but half the country does not even know that Covid came from a lab. We are therefore several steps removed from the basic conditions required to have an intelligent discussion.

Other facts are even more black and white. Fauci’s private diary contradicts what he told the public. His own words reveal a man of almost limitless narcissism. These are not matters of interpretation. They are documented facts. Yet we still cannot have a national conversation about them because the media either refuses to report them or actively lies about them. Anyone who is not on Twitter, which is most people, may never encounter the underlying evidence at all.

The result is that I increasingly find it almost impossible to discuss any of this with ordinary people, whether family members, acquaintances, or people at events or birthday parties. Unless someone has followed the evidence closely, there is no common starting point.

Before you can debate what happened, you first have to dismantle at least ten years of falsehoods and omissions.

I do not know how this ends, but it is not sustainable. A country cannot function indefinitely when its people are no longer capable of discussing almost anything beyond sports on the basis of shared factual knowledge.

Sightbringer says the system is doomed:

America’s shared reality was fractured by a legitimacy system that chose perception management over confession.

The public adapted to that betrayal.

Now the old machine cannot restore trust without admitting why trust disappeared, and it cannot admit why trust disappeared without indicting itself.

So it will keep conceding the minimum, years late, after the political consequences have expired.

That strategy preserves the institution for another day. It guarantees the eventual death of its authority.

Endless lying by omission has created a fantasy world for consumers of left/mainstream media. It’s pointless trying to discuss issues with them, because they are simply unaware of so much.

And on covid, now that Fauci’s diaries have come out and Fauci has pleaded the fifth (121 times)  rather than answer questions before Congress under oath:

It all cuts in one direction. Every last bit of it.

Not once have the private documents, emails, diaries, text messages, or internal discussions vindicated what these people were saying publicly.

They lied about the origin of Covid. They lied about lockdowns. They lied about masks, vaccines, contact tracing, and everything else.

The private record never supports their story. It destroys it.

But try explaining to my mother that covid came from a lab, that Fauci lied, or that the mRNA “vaccines” were dangerous. She’s been watching the ABC since 1968, so is totally clueless. “But surely,” she might say, “they would have told us if there was a problem. You’re just making stuff up.”

UPDATE on cognitive dissonance on the left as the truth is revealed (by Glenn Reynolds):

Fauci, and Faucism, represented the apotheosis of what the managerial/academic/journo class desires: An excuse for sweeping power, based on (alleged) expertise, in which they could ride roughshod over those stupid proles and flyover people while preening about the allegedly superior moral and intellectual qualities that justify their rule.

Then it turned out that they were wrong about nearly everything and — as Fauci’s diaries demonstrate — knew it at the time, at least at the top. And their overreach is one of the things that gave us Trump 47.

That this is out in public now produces cognitive dissonance. The easiest thing to do is to check out of the discussion.

Confronted with the truth, what does a leftie do? If they were so disastrously and immorally wrong about this, what about all those other issues? Some will be red-pilled, but most will dig in and defend the con.

Experiments show that (very roughly) a third of who people have been conned refuse to believe it even when the con is explained to them.

Most journalists working for leftist publications in Australia are paid by the Government

Most journalists working for leftist publications in Australia are paid by the Government. By George Christensen at Confidential Daily.

The next time you read a political story from Nine, Seven, Crikey, The Conversation, The Saturday Paper, Mamamia or any of the scores of other outlets taking part in Labor’s latest media scheme, there is something you may not be told.

The Federal Government is likely to be paying the journalist who wrote it. …

Through the Journalism Assistance Fund, the Albanese Government is handing out $67.6 million to publishers across the country. Successful applicants receive $39,000 for each eligible full-time journalist over three years, with payments continuing until 2028. …

More than 2,000 journalists are reportedly covered by the program across 184 private newsrooms. The money has not only gone to small rural papers battling to keep a reporter on staff. Some of the largest and most powerful media companies in the country are among the biggest beneficiaries.

Fairfax Media Limited, part of the Nine group, received more than $8.1 million.

Nine Entertainment [owner of the SMH and Melbourne’s Age] received another grant of almost $8 million.

Seven Network received about $5.6 million, while West Australian Newspapers received more than $4 million. …

These are companies with national television networks, major newspapers, large political bureaus, wealthy shareholders, and direct access to the most powerful people in Canberra.

They are also the organisations that regularly lecture everyone else about conflicts of interest. …

An extraordinary conflict of interest:

There is something badly wrong with a government helping to pay the wages of the very people meant to scrutinise it. …

There is no requirement for funded newsrooms to tell their readers.

A reporter can write about Anthony Albanese, Communications Minister Anika Wells, the Labor Government, the public service, or the department administering the money without a single line disclosing that the publication receives government support for journalists’ wages. …

Imagine a lobby group publishing a favourable report about a company that helps pay its staff. Every serious newsroom in the country would demand a disclosure. If a researcher received money from an industry body, that fact would be mentioned prominently. Politicians are expected to declare gifts, donations, and financial interests.

Yet a newsroom taking millions from the government can publish political coverage without telling the audience a thing.

Andrew Bolt has called for every taxpayer-subsidised journalist to disclose the arrangement at the bottom of each article. He is right. 

Influence and bias:

That does not mean every journalist taking part in the scheme has suddenly become a Labor propagandist. Most probably have not changed their reporting at all. Plenty will insist, with some justification, that no minister has ever rung them and told them what to write.

But influence does not usually work through a phone call from the minister’s office.

It works through dependency.

Editors know the company is receiving government money. Executives know the payments continue for years. Management knows future programs will be designed in Canberra. Everyone knows the industry is lobbying for more assistance as advertising revenue collapses.

No one needs to bark an order. The financial relationship is sitting there in the background. And it matters.

It matters when an editor is deciding how aggressively to pursue a government scandal. It matters when a proprietor is deciding whether to pick a fight with a minister. It matters when newsroom jobs are tied, even partly, to funding controlled by the same political system those journalists are meant to investigate. …

Canberra defines journalism, decides which publishers qualify, assesses their paperwork, approves their progress reports, and keeps the money flowing. …

Oh, how convenient:

Indeed, the rules produced a very politically convenient result for the government.

News Corp’s Australian publications, and Sky News Australia were unable to apply because the scheme excluded foreign-controlled companies.

The big list of publications paid by the Government is here (scroll down under the article).

Alexandra Marshall:

It’s hilarious watching the ‘morally pure’ leftwing media defend using taxpayer money to keep their failing publications alive while the conservative press have to survive in the free market of ideas with subscription services.

Yet another mechanism by which the left ends up owning nearly every opinion-making institution in the country — especially universities and the ABC/SBS — just by funding them with your taxes, administered by the left-leaning bureaucracy.

Could Melbourne become an Australian Detroit?

Could Melbourne become an Australian Detroit? By Robert Gottliebsen in The Australian.

The new Premier, Ben Carroll, is talented and in theory he could save the state, but his party has structured its strategies and policies to foster corruption and crime. Simply announcing a Royal Commission is a PR stunt. …

ALP politicians did not receive cash, but they saw $15bn stolen from the Victorian population by union officials and organised crime and they did nothing about it. Worse, they set up structures to perpetuate crime and corruption. …

According to the opinion polls, a huge number of Victorians, led by staunch ALP supporters, now fully understand the government’s key role in Victoria’s corruption plus the out-of-control crime. They now plan to vote against the ALP, which is why Carroll became premier. …

Goodbye Victoria:

If Victorian voters re-elect a corrupt, crime-fostering government, then a large number of employing enterprises will leave the state. The credit rating agencies will then almost certainly force some form of administration on the state, and a returned ALP government will be forced into huge government staff and service cuts. …

Many of Victoria’s large and smaller enterprises can’t operate a head office in a corrupt state, so are making plans to leave. The job and skill losses will be monumental….

Almost certainly the new premier must stop the employment-reducing, compulsory working-from-home nonsense which makes the state impossible to operate in. ….

Crime!!

Victoria is lucky. It has an honest police commissioner, Mike Bush, who knows exactly what is required to slash Victorian crime. He needs a non-corrupt government prepared to tackle the billions of dollars being injected into crime via building sites and illegal cigarettes. The state can turn off the building site money tap. The cigarette money tap requires Commonwealth action.

The “Mike Bush remedy” for crime will almost certainly require a massive change in Victoria’s court system and its “woke” judges and magistrates, many of whom are in desperate need of “retirement”. Cities like Chicago and New York have been infested by crime in the same way as Melbourne and have implemented harsh penalty policies (after one chance) to remove it. It will be nasty, but is essential. Victorians are sick of crime and the failure of the government to tackle the totally broken legal system.

Energy:

The Victorian boom years were based on gas and brown coal. The brown coal reserves are still there, and there looks to be more gas offshore plus the huge gas reserves under the coal. Technology now makes it possible to efficiently extract crude oil out of Victoria’s brown coal and therefore economically underpin Australia’s need for local diesel and aviation fuel. [I think David Archibald has mentioned coal-to-liquids about a million times on this website.]

Deep underneath our brown coal are massive reserves of gas dissolved in water and we need to quickly and inexpensively test whether that water will flow to the surface with its gas. Victoria can use the Latrobe Valley gas, with gas already discovered in the rest of Victoria and likely to be found in Bass Strait, to become a massive gas province, including an increase in gas-powered electricity generation to help in data centres. Eventually nuclear will be required.

Renewables mess:

The current renewables project around Australia is in complete chaos and we are looking at a trillion-dollar outlay which will skyrocket power prices. The federal government is concealing the horrendous costs and the “rort” deals it has done.

Remember the Commonwealth government is keeping secret the real costs because of the disaster they reveal.

Bureaucracy and DEI:

The toughest task is Victoria’s debt and fixing a non-functional public service. …

Efficiency in the public service is made impossible by the creation of an Aboriginal parliament-style body in the treaty. The treaty needs to be rewritten.

Imagine if Melbourne became Australia’s Detroit. Detroit used to be an exemplar city that hummed with industry and wealth, until the 1960s.

I am not a racist. I am a culturalist.

I am not a racist. I am a culturalist. By John Cleese.

I see I am being ritually insulted for my support of this man [Rupert Lowe of the Restore Party].

The uneducated call me a racist.

I am not a racist.

I am a culturalist.

I believe that some cultures are better than others.

I prefer cultures to do not advocate stoning, pederasty, wife beating, female genital mutilation, and beheading opponents.

Call me old-fashioned…

Restore Australia:

John Cleese is a patriot 🫡

He is currently engaged in the battle of trying to wake up as many NPC liberals as possible before the third world & Islamic takeover of the UK.

A naughty van in Berlin

A naughty van in Berlin. By Douglas Murray in The Free Press.

By now it’s all starting to sound like a bad joke. An Islamist terrorist drives a van into a Berlin Pride parade, killing one person and injuring dozens more. And how is it reported? Much of the media went with the usual formulation: that the attacker might as well have been a self-automated vehicle. …

[THis] is best understood as the “naughty van” phenomenon. If a van or car is driven into a crowd by an Islamist, you can swiftly tell who the culprit is because the vehicle will be talked about as though it suddenly took on a life of its own and began a rampage.

The naughty van, after it crashed into a tree

 

The reality is even more repetitive. The perpetrator of Saturday’s attack was a 21-year-old called Abdul Ballout. Born in Germany, of Lebanese parentage, last year he reportedly went to Lebanon to try to get to Syria in order to join ISIS. Arrested in Lebanon, he served three months in prison for a range of offenses including incitement to religious and sectarian conflict.

On returning to Germany he was convicted of preparing a serious act of violence and endangering the state, among other charges, and was sentenced to less than two years in prison. However the court seems to have released him, and he was put into a course of “deradicalization.” He apparently went to two meetings. His third meeting with the Berlin-based Violence Prevention Network was meant to take place Monday.

The left hoped it was a white Christian man, and yet again are disappointed:

At this point, everyone in Europe knows which positions to assume. The organizers of the Pride parade gave a press conference in which they admitted that they had hoped the perpetrator had been a white Christian man. …

Across the political landscape and mainstream media in Europe, you can hear the same pining for a more politically convenient reality. …

Assimilation into white culture is flagrantly not happening for one particular group:

Beginning with Germany’s Gastarbeiter [guest worker] program in the 1950s, it was just presumed that the migrants — including from Muslim countries — would either leave after a time or settle and become as European as anyone else.

Of course, neither of these things happened. And it took until the 2010s for Europe’s leaders even to admit that nothing to do with postwar migration had gone according to plan. But by then Europe was faced with a problem it had no answer for: How do you integrate a community that doesn’t want to integrate? How do you stop people from hating the society that has welcomed them?

The ideology runs strongly on the left, it does:

For those of us who have covered this story for years, none of it is shocking.

It is to be expected that Islamist terrorists will want to attack Christmas markets, pop concerts, Pride parades, and much more. It is to be expected that the media and many politicians will continue to try to put off the day that they actually acknowledge the problem that is facing them.

But what remains a marvel to some of us is that the moment of “waking up” never really comes. To put it another way, some people are so keen to remain in their delusion that they will deny the truth even as the weaponized vehicle accelerates toward them.

In the aftermath of Saturday’s attack, late in the evening, a reporter for the German broadcaster NTV told viewers watching live that “The queer community naturally feels threatened, above all, by right-wing forces.” By that stage in the day the perpetrator’s identity was known. His motives could be easily guessed at. But somehow it doesn’t fit to say that the queer community feels threatened by Islamists.

Globalist left and your wokie supporters: you broke it, you fix it.

(Fixing it will be ugly and involve hurting innocents. Let the globalist left wear the ignominy. If we do it, they will carp on forever about how superior and nicer they are.)

UPDATE:

Japan is watching its temples burn

Japan is watching its temples burn. By the Scientific Department of Fire Risk Heritage.

In the first five months of 2026, nine major shrines and temples were lost to fire across Japan — including the 573-year-old Daihoji Temple national treasure and Reikado Hall, which housed Japan’s sacred Eternal Flame burned continuously for 1,200 years.

These losses are deeply significant for Japan’s cultural heritage.

However, they occur within the context of one of the world’s most comprehensive heritage fire protection programs: following the 2019 Shuri Castle fire, Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs launched a ¥13 billion ($82.3 million) initiative to upgrade fire safety at 107 priority sites, with 64 sites (60%) already completed as of early 2026.

While most 2026 fire causes remain under investigation, the incidents underscore the ongoing challenges of protecting wooden heritage structures and the importance of continued investment in fire prevention, international cooperation, and knowledge sharing among fire safety professionals.

Nine temples already in 2026. Unlucky! Coincidence? Look around…

Lozzy B:

Buildings that survived wars, earthquakes, and typhoons for centuries — gone in a single morning each.

One was 573 years old, founded before Columbus sailed. It burned for nine hours. Twenty fire engines couldn’t save it.

Another had stood for 300 years.

Another housed a sacred flame kept burning since the year 806.

And the comments on every single fire story are saying the same thing:

“This is exactly what happened to the churches in Europe.”

Hundreds of churches across France, Germany, and the UK burned in a single year. Officials called them accidents.

Locals called it a pattern nobody wanted to name: ISLAM

Wake up, wokies on the left. You broke it, you fix it.

Fauci kept a diary, it’s now online, and it proves he was a publicity-obsessed liar

Fauci kept a diary, it’s now online, and it proves he was a publicity-obsessed liar.

Diary on the Internet, by The Free Press:

Back when both the public health establishment and the mainstream media hung on Fauci’s every word, Republican Senator Rand Paul was one of the few in a position of power willing to criticize him — going so far as to say that Fauci should “go to prison” for “his dishonesty” in dismissing the lab leak theory. Paul has long been convinced that the virus did indeed result from a lab leak, a position that is no longer viewed as heresy but is taken seriously by a number of officials in the intelligence community. And he has never stopped trying to get to the bottom of it. Paul has subpoenaed Fauci to testify at a hearing his committee is holding on Wednesday. Fireworks are guaranteed.

Over the weekend, Paul struck the first blow. In advance of the hearing, he released the contents of a diary Fauci kept during the crisis, all 1,141 pages.

Trump was onto Fauci and Debra Birx by April 2020:

The fatality rate of covid in 2020 started at 14% in Italy and 3% in Australia, but quickly dropped to around 0.5%. The death rate from influenza varies (new strains cause more deaths, e.g. the Spanish flu), but is generally around 0.05%. The omicron variant of covid came along in 2022, when Australia opened up, and it was much less dangerous than earlier variants. It’s fatality rate was about the same as the ‘flu, at about 0.05%, a tenth of previous variants. Before omicron, covid was definitely more dangerous than the flu (at least in the short term — long term effects on our immune systems are still unclear).

Some right wing fools tried to claim the pre-omicon variants of covid weren’t any worse than the ‘flu. This was patent nonsense, which just made them look like non-credible in the eyes of most of the population. (File that under “how to so spectacularly not persuade people that you wonder if it is deliberate sabotage,” along with most crazy climate skeptic theories, e.g. chemtrails.)

The all-important fatality rates, by KanekoaTheGreat:

Fauci’s diary says he privately put COVID’s fatality rate at 0.2-0.3%. Under oath weeks later, he told Congress it was 10x the flu. The timeline:

Feb 8, 2020 (private diary): case fatality rate “more like 0.2-0.3%.”

March 10 (Hannity): “The mortality for this is about 2-2.5%. It’s probably lower than that, closer to 1%. But even if it’s 1%, it’s 10x more lethal than the seasonal flu.”

March 11 (Congress, under oath): “The stated fatality rate of this overall… is about 3%. If you count all the cases of asymptomatic infection, that probably brings the mortality down to 1%, which means it’s 10x more deadly than the seasonal flu.”

March 27 (Daily Show): “The mortality of this is about 10x the flu. It’s at least 1%.”

He wrote 0.2-0.3% in his journal — then told the public, over and over, a number 3 to 5 times higher.

He loved the limelight. The Free Press again:

[The dairy] also paints a picture of a mainstream media complicit in passing along Fauci’s untruths, with nary a skeptical note.

Fauci meticulously documents his own rising fame in the early months of the pandemic, and in doing so, he reveals why he believed himself to be beyond reproach. He notes that Julia Roberts and Stephen Curry wanted to shake his hand. People applauded him when he walked into a restaurant. Important people wanted his advice. Here is a typical entry, this one from March 1, 2020:

“Got call at home this a.m. (Sunday) from Governor Andrew Cuomo (NY) asking advice [on] how he should handle the COVID-19 situation in NYC. Had long conversation in which he stressed a few times how much his father (and mother) loved me and used to tell Chris and Andrew how much they respected me and how proud they were that I was an Italian-American.” …

No matter what was going on with the pandemic — no matter how many people were dying — Fauci kept close track of the interviews he granted. Sometimes there were a dozen in a single day. His diary conveys his obsession with his press profile — and his belief that he could get away with saying anything and the media would buy it.

The controversy over the origin of the virus is one example that stands out in the diary. In public, Fauci consistently dismissed the lab leak theory, even mocking it at one point as a “circular argument.” …

Why the media never challenged him, and how power works nowadays:

Given that so many of Fauci’s pronouncements were not backed up by anything that resembled scientific evidence, why was the mainstream media so eager to serve as his stenographer instead of digging into his claims the way journalists are supposed to? Why did they accept Fauci’s word as gospel?

The answer would appear to be found in one especially telling entry: “Chris [Fauci’s wife] and I went to a book party for our friend Ruth Marcus (Washington Post columnist), for her book Supreme Ambition about Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Party at the home of David and Katherine Bradley. . . . Elegant home. Super A-list at party: Senator Mark Warner, Kellyanne Conway, Andrea Mitchell, David Ignatius, David Frum, Zeke Emanuel, etc., etc. Rafe Sagalyn is Ruth’s agent and was there.”

Fauci was rubbing elbows with the crème de la crème of Washington media. They saw the world in the same way, celebrating a book that skewers a conservative justice. They were, all of them, friends. Like everyone else in the establishment, they thought Fauci was a hero. And which of them was going to knock him off his pedestal? …

And don’t forget President Joe Biden, who granted Fauci a preemptive, blanket pardon as one of his last acts in office. Fauci might otherwise have been investigated for possible perjury in any of his many appearances before Congress. Instead, the president formally placed him above the law and foreclosed any possibility of setting his record straight in the courtroom.

A little justice? Hans Mahncke:

So what happens now? When does accountability begin?

Fauci is due to testify publicly on Wednesday, and we already know what to expect. He will be evasive, slippery, and endlessly snakey, using every verbal trick available to avoid responsibility. But for the love of God, someone must confront him with the cold, hard reality of what he did.

Please do not make it a shouting match and please do not use any theatrics. Just say it plainly.

You, Anthony Fauci, outsourced extremely dangerous and reckless experiments that were banned in the United States to the Wuhan lab. You funded that work. You supplied advanced Western biotechnology and expertise. You empowered the scientists who carried it out. They then used that knowledge to create the virus that caused a global catastrophe and killed millions of people.

He can deny it. He can dodge. He can hide behind definitions and bureaucratic language. But someone must finally say it to his face, in public, and put the truth on the record.

 

Islamists persuade Muslims not to assimilate in the West by creating Islamophobia with terrorist atrocities

Islamists persuade Muslims not to assimilate in the West by creating Islamophobia with terrorist atrocities. By Grégoire Canlorbe at The Gatestone Institute.

One of the great successes of Islamist movements appears to have been to convince much of the third generation of Muslim families to break with assimilation.

Many of that generation were beginning to become more integrated than their parents or grandparents. They had begun to adopt some codes of European societies: freedom of individuals, freedom of movement, separation between religion and politics, sometimes even emotional and sexual freedom. You could see young Muslim women dating Christians, atheists, or non-Muslims.

For a number of years, though, you can see a retreat, particularly during conversations on “Islamophobia.” Islamists, often with the support — or complacency — of many on the “left,” have managed to instill in many Muslims a mentality of mistrust, sometimes verging on paranoia, leading them to believe that they are surrounded by enemies — that the non-Muslim society is fundamentally hostile to them, and that they must therefore not join it.

In what turned out to be a bestseller in France, The Strategy of Intimidation, I explained that by launching barbaric jihadist attacks — such as Bataclan, Charlie Hebdo, London, Madrid, Barcelona, Brussels, Berlin, or the July 14 Nice attacks — radical Islamists in fact aim to induce hostility toward Muslims and provoke a clash between Muslims and non-Muslims, to motivate Muslims to separate from their non-Muslim environment and de-assimilate.

This strategy has been most effective. Islamic terrorism produces criticism of Islamism. The Islamists then say that the criticism is proof that they are victims of Islamophobia. Young people who were assimilated, or at least interested, are encouraged to withdraw voluntarily into an isolated Islamic community. This community then functions as a counter-society against Western society, which is perceived as harmful, decadent, “Islamophobic,” or “racist.” In this framework, withdrawal — whether it involves a veil, marrying only within one’s religion, Muslim clothing excluded by non-Muslims from everyday life, or abstention from some democratic activities — is then presented as a condition of survival in the face of a small minority community supposedly being oppressed by a large majority.

There is now a discourse in these Muslim communities that suggests it might be best if they separated themselves from the rest of society. The separation is being presented as a demand for protection, a right to difference, or even a right to reparations in the face of the supposedly “racist” attitude of Western society.

The discourse presents Western society as diabolically secular, anti-religious, perverse, Islamophobic, and, of course, Zionist. In this narrative, Christians are often described as the accomplices of Jews or Zionists — a view that further reinforces the hostility toward the host society and the wish to separate from it.

Violence by a few determined fanatics has kept Islam from evolving for 1400 years. It continues, but our left and ruling class have no idea. They still think Muslim immigrants will assimilate and become culturally white — while keeping their own cuisine and quaint dress sense, of course.

Meet the populist left

Meet the populist left. By Greg Sheridan in The Australian.

Surely the most under-reported story in Western politics today is the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America [DSA] and their incredible success in Democratic primaries, getting extrem­ist candidates up at the expense of mainstream Democrats. …

The DSA itself is not purely communist but it is extremely left. However, structurally it’s a coalition and several members of its ruling soviet, I mean committee, are self-declared communists, members in good standing of communist organisations.

The communist label is not a Trump slander, it’s self-description. Hasan Piker, an influencer and social media star central figure in the far left’s surge among Democrats, recently declared that communist dictator Mao Zedong, who was responsible for the death by state famine and slaughter of tens of millions of innocent Chinese, “one of the great leaders of this world”.

It’s a tragedy of the political illiteracy of our age that communism’s staggering crimes against humanity are now little known. They hardly figure in school or university education. …

The DSA is associated with left-wing senator Bernie Sanders and also radical New York mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Candidates the DSA has backed have won primary after primary in the Democratic Party.

Manifesto:

The DSA is conscious that while it’s having great success, especially via social media, it’s also generating opposition. So it recently published a manifesto to show how warm and cuddly it is. But this is the most radical document to have mainstream political influence in America in decades.

It calls for an end to capitalism. It wants the abolition of the presidency and the Supreme Court, with a new executive to be chosen by an elected congress. It wants a 32-hour work week with full pay and benefits, universal free housing, nationalisation and permanent state control of all the biggest corporations, an end to all student debt as part of an end to all debt, and an end to US sanctions on Iran, Cuba and Venezuela.

It wants ultimately to abolish the police and defund the military. And of course it has the usual stuff about climate change, demonising Israel and demonising America itself. …

Populist fringe, appealing mainly to university educated but downwardly mobile youngsters who cannot afford a house or children:

The far-left populists clearly want to ape many of Trump’s tactics: a concentration on social media, the absolute demonising of their opponents, a reliance on conspiracy theories, talking directly to voters — in this case often the young, which mainstream media has difficulty reaching — promising impossible benefits etc.

They don’t want to convert the middle. They want to anger and energise a base. …

They are tugging the Democrats to the crazy end of left:

Of course, the fact that Democrat politicians embrace the DSA rhetoric and enjoy its support doesn’t mean they will try to implement its grotesque platform.

But they will trend in that direction. The DSA told Mamdani not to increase the size of the New York police force and he complied. …

The DSA is already exerting a big and destructive influence on the Democrat mainstream. It is concerned with Gaza, climate change, identity politics, LGBTQI, inclusion.

Sounds something like the ALP national conference.

Understanding the current left, by ZeroHedge:

Fox News has begun publishing explainers to educate its audience about the emerging far left, while Trump administration officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, have declared war on the radical left and foreign subversion networks linked to Cuba, China and elsewhere …

To help map its many layers, Karlyn Borysenko, who describes herself as an anti-communist analyst, published an easy-to-understand infographic: