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The climate witch trials Questioning the climate-change narrative is now the ultimate form of heresy. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/07/22/the-climate-witch-trials/

This is an extract from Brendan O’Neill’s new book, A Heretic’s Manifesto. You can buy it on Amazon now.

In 1590, in Scotland, an elderly woman named Agnes Sampson was arrested. She was from East Lothian. Earlier in her life she had been a midwife and a healer, but lately she had been living in poverty. She was tried, found guilty and taken to Edinburgh Castle where, on 28 January 1591, she was strangled to death by rope and then burnt at the stake. Her offence? Climate change.

Sampson was charged with stirring up ‘contrary winds’, among other things. Her persecution stemmed from the troubles of King James VI whose attempts to bring his new wife, Anne of Denmark, to Scotland were continually thwarted by hellish weather. ‘Unusual’ winds capsized ships of the royal fleets. Twice did Anne’s ship have to dock in Norway due to the ‘fierce storms’. James, inspired by reports from Denmark of witches being burnt for their supposed part in the frustration of Anne’s journey, became convinced of a witches’ plot in Scotland, too. He pushed the idea of ‘weather magic’, where witches use their demonic power to cause ‘unusual’ storms, hails and fogs to descend on Earth.

The end result was the North Berwick Witch Trials, one of the deadliest episodes of witch-hunting in the history of Great Britain. Taking place a hundred years before the better-known witch-hunts of Salem in Massachusetts, the hysteria in North Berwick involved 150 accusations, copious amounts of torture to extract confessions and 25 deaths. Mrs Sampson’s was just one of those deaths. She and many others had been accused not only of the usual witchy things – mysterious healings, issuing curses and so on – but of something else, too. That they had changed the climate. That they had whipped up destructive weather. That they had deployed their malevolence to the end of ‘conjur[ing]’ terrible storms ‘in cahoots with the devil’. For in the words of Danish admiral Peter Munch, who had been tasked with transporting Anne to Scotland, what his ships had encountered was no normal climatic event – no, ‘there must be more in [this] matter than the common perversity of winds and weather’.

The women of North Berwick can be seen as among the earliest victims of climate-change hysteria, of that urge to pin the blame for anomalous weather on wicked human beings. And they weren’t alone. In Europe between the 1500s and 1700s, climate change was often the charge made against witches.

Communist Tactics and Martin Amis’s Blindness By Eileen F. Toplansky

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/08/communist_tactics_and_martin_amiss_blindness.html

I recently read Martin Amis’ Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (2002) which lays bare the enormity of the Stalinist legacy where more than 20 million people were murdered. It is deeply puzzling to read an author who documents the horror of the Left but who in 2016 also claimed that he “[was] Left of left.  Not very far left, but left, and [he] was that when [he] was 20, and [he’s] that now.”

Amis despised President Trump, whom he hated  and called a totalitarian.  But it was Trump who asserted “that America will never be a socialist country — ever.” And it is undeniable that socialism is the first step toward communism. In fact, it is Biden who seems the embodiment of all that Amis elaborated upon in his book. 

Let’s begin with attacks on religion.

In 1921 Lenin instructed a Red Army Commission to “give the most decisive and merciless battle to the [clergy] and subdue its resistance [.]”  (Amis 29).

Fast forward and repeatedly the Biden administration has nominated individuals to the highest levels of government who exhibit disdain for those they are charged to serve. Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra “displays not just an unwillingness to protect the rights of conscience but an overt antagonism toward people of faith.” In addition, “Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares and 19 GOP state attorneys general are demanding answers from the FBI and Justice Department and threatening legal action after a leaked internal FBI memo revealed that the agency had efforts underway to identify and treat Catholics as “potential terrorists.” 

America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything Christopher Rufo

America’s most effective conservative intellectual proves once and for all that Marxist radicals have taken over our nation’s institutions.

In the 1960s, Mao launched China’s Cultural Revolution. Cities grew overcrowded. Technocrats demanded progress from above. Anyone opposed was sent to be “re-educated.” China’s revolution was bloody, fast, and a failure, but what if America started a revolution at the same time, based on the same bad ideas, and it’s just been slower, calmer, and more effective?

In his powerful new book, Christopher F. Rufo uncovers the hidden history of left-wing intellectuals and activists who systematically took control of America’s institutions to undermine them from within.America’s Cultural Revolution finally answers so many of the questions normal Americans have, such as:

• Why is nearly every major corporation bending the knee to a far-left agenda?

• How did DEI suddenly become the department no institution can continue without?

• Why is race the main thing America’s rich, white elite wants to talk about? 

• When did the left adopt all this doublespeak, saying progress is a lack of progress, equality is not equality, speech is violence, and violence is speech?

• Has the goal of the left, for a century, actually been the destruction of every Western institution? 

Readers may not know the names of Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Paulo Freire, and Derrick Bell, but they will recognize the ideas they spread. How their radical, destructive ideology slowly worked its way from prisons to academia to classrooms to your human resources department will come as a shock.

Failing to act soon, Rufo warns, could allow the radical left to achieve their ultimate objective: replacing constitutional equality with a race-based redistribution system overseen by bureaucratic ‘diversity and inclusion’ officials. Most Americans don’t want this, but most Americans are no longer in control of our institutions. If the mainstream media’s depiction of a failing dystopia in need of a fresh start never sounded right to you, this expose and call to arms is the book you’ve been looking for. 

White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities What Moynihan understood that Sotomayor doesn’t. by Jack Cashill

https://www.frontpagemag.com/white-ethnic-flight-from-americas-cities/

In 1965, then undersecretary of labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan foresaw a problem that was about to undo the promise of Martin Luther King’s 1963 “I have a dream” speech, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and his boss Lyndon Jonson’s 1965 launch of the “Great Society.”

In reading her dissenting opinion last week on the affirmative action case before the Supreme Court, I got the distinct impression that Justice Sonia Sotomayor never read Moynihan’s The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, likely never heard of it, and certainly had no idea of how prescient it would prove to be.

Despite the “full recognition of their civil rights,” argued Moynihan, black Americans were growing increasingly discontent. They were expecting that equal opportunities would “produce roughly equal results, as compared with other groups,” but, added Moynihan, “This is not going to happen.” Nor did he think it ever would happen “unless a new and special effort is made.”

Nearly sixty years later Moynihan’s warning seems all the more prophetic. Herculean efforts have been made over the years to  achieve “equal results,” but none has addressed the core issue. Wrote Moynihan:

The fundamental problem, in which this is most clearly the case, is that of family structure. The evidence— not final, but powerfully persuasive—is that the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling. A middle class group has managed to save itself, but for vast numbers of the unskilled, poorly educated city working class the fabric of conventional social relationships has all but disintegrated.

In a Father’s Day speech in 2008 then candidate Barack Obama affirmed Moynihan’s worst fears. “Of all the rocks upon which we build our lives, we are reminded today that family is the most important,” Obama told the congregation at a Chicago church.

Here, Obama spoke with a candor not heard since Lyndon Johnson threw Moynihan under the bus. “But if we are honest with ourselves,” he continued, “we’ll admit that what too many fathers also are is missing—missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it.”

A Heretic’s Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable Brendan O’Neill

https://www.amazon.com/Heretics-Manifesto-Essays-Unsayable/dp/1913019861/ref=sr_1_1?crid=DN5PRJGF07PR&keywords=
Brendan O’Neill is the chief political writer for spiked magazine, based in London. He was spiked’s editor from 2007 to 2021.

Can a woman have a penis? Is the West forever stained by racism? Are we all going to die from climate change? To the liberal establishment of London, New York or Sydney, the answer to all of these questions is ‘Yes’. And anyone who disagrees is a racist, climate-denying transphobe.”

Our elites have become convinced of some very strange and extreme ideas. And yet there is precious little pushback against them. Critics are cowed by the threat of shaming, cancellation, even arrest. The new orthodoxies of our age are risible, and yet the space for dissent is shrinking.

We need more heretics. Throughout history, it has been those brave enough to puncture the prevailing groupthink who have propelled society forward. But they are in shockingly short supply today. In this collection of original essays, Brendan O’Neill remakes the case for heresy – and commits a few heresies of his own along the way.

‘Pageboy: A Memoir’ by Elliot Page The former Ellen Page tells her trans tale. by Danusha V. Goska

https://www.frontpagemag.com/pageboy-a-memoir-by-elliot-page/

Back in February, 2019, an actress named Ellen Page appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Page had made a big splash in the 2007 film Juno. Page played a pregnant teen. Teen pregnancy among unmarried girls is usually a catastrophe for the mother, the child, and the wider community; see for example here, here, here, and here. Juno sold unmarried teen pregnancy as a warm and cozy laugh riot. Juno, the main character, is a sixteen-year-old who is more mature than the adults around her; she must be the adult in her interaction with Mark, a childlike adult man. Juno is Johnny Carson on Dexedrine: she makes with nonstop wisecracks and educates her elders. The worldly-wise child is a variation on the Noble Savage theme.

Juno was written by Diablo Cody, a stripper and phone sex worker. “I am here to make money,” Cody told the New York Times. “Everything is prostitution,” Cody told David Letterman.

A month before Page’s Late Show appearance, white supremacist Trump supporters had attacked beloved black, gay actor Jussie Smollett in downtown Chicago in the early hours of the morning on a polar vortex night of record low temperatures. They poured bleach on him, put a noose around his neck, and hurled racist and homophobic slurs. Page was on Colbert to add her nasal whine to the national cry of righteous outrage, inspired by what was obviously a race-mongering hoax.

Watching that YouTube clip, I noticed immediately how tiny Page was. She stands five feet one, and she appeared to weigh less than one hundred pounds. Her features are classically girlish: tiny nose, bee-stung lips, perfect teeth, clean jawline, large eyes, long, shiny hair. The only discordant note was a large forehead. Page looked 17 or 18, much younger than her 32 years. Page was clearly a favorite of men who like ’em barely legal.

Page didn’t appear to be wearing much makeup, and her baggy clothes were thrift-store casual. Page won the genetic lottery. She could roll out of bed, and be more attractive than many women after an hour at the salon. Thanks to those genes, she was an international star.

As soon as Page sat down, Colbert reached behind his desk and pulled out a large photo. This was Page and her wife, Emma Portner. Portner and Page look enough alike to be sisters; both even have a high forehead. The audience applauded wildly. The applause lasted almost as long as the marriage. Page and Portner were wife and wife between 2018 and 2021.

Colbert, an impresario of Woke, used Page to signal his own virtue.

The Sunset of the West, or the Dawn of Recovery? Bruce Thornton’s new pamphlet outlines the dire crisis that America and Western Civilization face today.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-sunset-of-the-west-or-the-dawn-of-recovery/

Our new pamphlet, The Sunset of the West, or the Dawn of Recovery?, authored by Bruce Thornton, a classical scholar and Freedom Center Shillman Fellow, is a brilliant piece outlining the dire crisis that America and Western Civilization face today.

It urgently needs to be read; its message needs to be urgently heeded.

Order your copy now: https://horowitzfreedomcenterstore.org/products/the-sunset-of-the-west-or-the-dawn-of-recovery

The Soros Agenda by Alex Grobman

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/372753

Who is George Soros? Why does the mere mention of his name provoke a torrent of pejorative comments including many expletives? Antisemites are accused of using his name to foster hatred against Jews in the same way they used to invoke the Rothschilds. Soros is an easy target not only because he is Jewish, but more importantly because of what he does to undermine the West and specifically the US, which he calls “the main obstacle to a stable and just world.”

Attempt to Transform America

To learn more about Soros’ plan to transform the US, I turned to Rachel Ehrenfeld’s latest work The Soros Agenda. (Rachel Ehrenfeld, The Soros Agenda, New York: Republic Book Publishers, 2023 ISBN: 978-1645720478). Ehrenfeld is the director of the American Center for Democracy and its Economic Warfare Institute, and an expert on terrorism and corruption, including terror financing, economic warfare, and narcoterrorism.

She exposes his strategy to advance radical causes by supporting Left-wing public figures, groups and politicians that have significantly increased the violence and sown discord and division in the country, while “weakening” the nation from within and reducing its prestige and influence throughout the world. By identifying his modus operandi and his “tenuous” direct and indirect links that effect domestic and international affairs, Ehrenfeld hopes to thwart them from implementing his “full-scale revolution.”

Soros’ objective is to liberate the US “from the restraints of constitutionalism, American exceptionalism, free-market capitalism, and other obsolete isms,” according to the late journalist Stefan Kanfer, whom Ehrenfeld quotes.

Through his myriad of nonprofit organizations and foundations, Soros and his family fund the elections of Democrat candidates on the local, state and presidential level and district attorney campaigns, providing him with enormous influence. The media documented his very significant support of the elections of Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and others, although the amount of his direct and indirect contributions is by design not made available.

In Loco Parentis Gone Loco Peachy Keenan

https://americanmind.org/salvo/in-loco-parentis-gone-loco/

The American Mind is pleased to publish the following excerpt from Domestic Extremist: A Practical Guide to Winning the Culture War, by contributing editor Peachy Keenan. The book is available today from Regnery.

You had a baby? Look at you—you’re the captain now!

Or are you?

The words on a poster taped to a teacher’s classroom door at a New Jersey public school expose the precarious corner American parents have been painted into. “If your parents aren’t accepting of your identity, I’m your mom now.” The poster featured a drawing of a mama bear tending to her bear cubs, who are each painted the color of a different LGBTQ flag.

Parents, I have bad news. You’ve got competition. Someone posted a job listing looking for a new authority figure in your house, and they hired everyone who applied. Lots of other adults, most of them unpleasant strangers, would like to raise your children for you—or at least get your children to hate you.

This may already be happening—and you’ll be the last to know! All your hard work to keep creeps, perverts, and kiddie-sniffers away from your kids may get reversed in an instant when you’re not looking.

Some parents are okay with this. They can barely handle “adulting” themselves and are thrilled not to make any tough parental decisions. Abdicating their natural role as master and commander of the household is lazy, but it’s a defensive posture. They live in terror of accusations from other parents of “closed-mindedness,” or worse, being a prude.

New Book Available for Pre-Order The definitive account of America’s cultural revolution, from 1968 to the present. Christopher Rufo

Now available for pre-order on Amazon.

Here’s the synopsis from the book jacket:

For decades, left-wing radicals patiently built a revolution in the shadows. Then suddenly, after the death of George Floyd, their ideas exploded into American life.

Corporations denounced the United States as a “system of white supremacy.” Universities pushed racially segregated programs that forced students to address their racial and sexual “privilege.” And schools injected critical race theory in the classroom, dividing children into “oppressor” and “oppressed.”

In this stunning new book, Christopher F. Rufo exposes the inner history of the left-wing intellectuals and militants who slowly and methodically captured America’s institutions, with the goal of subverting them from within. With profiles of Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Paulo Freire, and Derrick Bell, Rufo shows how activists have profoundly influenced American culture with an insidious mix of Marxism and racialist ideology. They’ve replaced “equality” with “equity,” subverted individual rights in favor of group identity, and convinced millions of Americans that racism is endemic in all of society. Their ultimate goal? To replace the constitution with a race-based redistribution regime, administered by “diversity and inclusion” commissars within the bureaucracy.

America’s Cultural Revolution is the definitive account of the radical Left’s long march through the institutions. Through deep historical research, Rufo shows how the ideas first formulated in the pamphlets of the Weather Underground, Black Panther Party, and Black Liberation Army have been sanitized and adopted as the official ideology of America’s prestige institutions, from the Ivy League universities to the boardrooms of Wal-Mart, Disney, and Bank of America. But his book is not just an exposé. It is a meticulously-researched and passionate refutation of the arguments of CRT—and a roadmap for the counter-revolution to come.