I attempted to criticize the “hate group” concept on Wikipedia, by adding a section doing just that to its “hate group” article. The top editors over there would have none of it. Wikipedia’s editors are so left-wing, they think the SPLC is a neutral, apolitical organization, if you can believe it. Wikipedia, a supposedly unbiased and independent online encyclopedia and information source, has unfortunately become a mouthpiece for the Cultural Marxist US power class.

Here is what I wrote, and what they subsequently scrubbed from the internet:

==Criticism of the hate group concept==

            The “hate group” concept has come under fire in recent years from academics and intellectuals on both sides of the political spectrum, but especially the political right. Like “hate speech”, “hate group” is a concept not traditionally recognized by American courts and the American legal system.[i] Nevertheless, outside of the American legal context, the concept is widely accepted and employed.

Many critics of the term argue that the demographic divisions (racial groups, whole religions) the term attempts to insulate from group criticism are arbitrarily or ideologically selected. For example, why aren’t lesser political groups (atheist organizations, for example) or smaller religious denominations (scientologists, for example) equally protected by the label and the stigma surrounding it? Thus, instead of protecting the powerless, the term seems to insulate from criticism those populations with sufficient numbers, power and prominence to command protection. After all, any number of randomly selected demographic categories could be deemed above group criticism or political opposition, yet few are. Why do certain groups seem to be so much more worthy of the term’s protections? In sum, the term appears to place arbitrary or ideology-laden restrictions on speech and activism, in defiance of the liberal democratic tradition, which asserts that all ideologies, movements, groups, and religions are fair game for philosophical critique and peaceful opposition.[ii] [iii] [iv]

Other critics of the term argue that the label is not only arbitrary, but selectively applied.[v] Some well-known champions of the term are even on record admitting as such. Mark Potok, former senior fellow at the SPLC, the organization that basically invented the term “hate group”, conceded this years ago. In a 2009 interview, he stated that the “hate group” label is not uniformly applied, because the SPLC is by no means apolitical, but is instead a fundamentally leftist organization that does battle with radical groups on the political right in an effort to “destroy them” (his words), and that it is sometimes very much guilty of focusing on the political right, while roundly ignoring bad actors on the political left which engage in the self-same tactics and employ the self-same incendiary language as supposed “hate groups”.[vi] Some believe this political bias is driven partly by perverse economic incentives, that the SPLC chooses to focus its ire and its activism on right-wing groups and activities because that is how it appeals to its donor base and funds its massive war chest, which totaled upwards of half a billion dollars in 2018.[vii] Nevertheless, many believe that an anti-right bias is not something unique to the SPLC’s hate monitoring and classification system, but instead something that inheres in the term itself, which is to say the very concept of “hate group” is rooted in, steeped in, and defined by the ideals of the political left, and is thus partisan by nature and design.

Some have argued that virtually any political organization could potentially meet the standard definition of the term, given its breadth.[viii] For example, a cadre of left-leaning academics that regularly publishes papers criticizing “White privilege” or “White fragility”, could easily be understood to be expressing hatred toward, exhibiting animus toward, or even dehumanizing Whites, as a race. Likewise, a feminist activist organization that regularly criticizes the putative prevailing culture of the patriarchy or the toxicity of masculinity, might also be said to be a “hate group”, according to the accepted definition of the term, given its willingness to insult an entire sex. Occupy Wall Street might also have been labeled a “hate group” on account of its open disdain for financial executives and oligarchs, who its members so endearingly labeled “banksters”. Unsurprisingly, however, Occupy Wall Street was never labeled a “hate group” by the pundit class or society at large, and none of the hypothetical groups would be labeled as such, because groups like these—that is those with the “right” values, residing on the “correct” side of the political spectrum—are rarely, if ever, described this way by the press or the powers that be. Read more

Churchill’s Headmaster: The ‘Sadist’ who Nearly Saved the British Empire
By Edward Dutton
Melbourne: Manticore Press, 2019

There will never be enough men of outstanding virtue to satisfy the human need for heroes, and one fertile source of the counterfeits necessary to make up the difference, as Ed Dutton points out, is wartime leaders:

There is a tendency to make sense of a devastated world by hero-worshipping the leader and also by finding some means of justifying all of the suffering, meaning that it was essential that the prosecutor of the war was beyond reproach. It has been found that the more people invest in something, the more they need to convince themselves that they have done the right thing. This is why people can react in such an irrational way if it is demonstrated to them that someone whom they admire — who is central, to some degree, to the way in which they structure the world — is simply not who they thought they were. They cannot cope with the fact that they have been duped.

In my youth, Winston Churchill regularly alternated with Jesus Christ as winner of an annual poll concerning the ‘greatest man who ever lived.’ We had a bust of him in our home. He is England’s national hero, and as Ed Dutton writes, many of the countless biographies of him ‘are nothing more than hagiographies that rehash and exaggerate the adulation for him in earlier hagiographies.’

Yet for those willing to listen, it is not hard to collect damning evidence against Churchill. As First Lord of the Admiralty during World War I, he was in charge of the disastrous Gallipoli Campaign, which led to 140,000 unnecessary allied deaths. As Chancellor of the Exchequer, he kept Britain on the Gold Standard, making industry uncompetitive and prolonging the Depression. Most seriously, he did not ‘stand up to Nazi aggression’ in 1940 as the usual story goes, but did all he could to force Hitler into a war with Britain that Hitler wished to avoid. It was Churchill who ordered the bombing of nonmilitary targets in Germany—including Dresden—merely to kill as many German civilians as possible and demoralize the survivors. At war’s end, he agreed not only to hand Eastern Europe over to Stalin but also to the forcible repatriation of all Soviet citizens who managed to escape to the West: the shameful episode known as ‘Operation Keelhaul.’

Much of Churchill’s voluminous writing amounted to attempts to justify or downplay his mistakes, something he acknowledged himself with the famous quip: ‘History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.’ His personal shortcomings were also considerable, including alcoholism, chronic gambling and a constant tendency to live beyond his means and scrounge off others. Dutton writes of Churchill as having

a fantastic sense of entitlement, dishonesty, untrustworthiness, and not caring about the suffering of others. [He] took his country into an avoidable war, bankrupted it, and so lost that country its Empire and left it too exhausted to defend itself. This commenced the process of mass immigration from developing countries which … led to many difficulties, such as rising distrust, Islamic terrorism, and the destruction of other traditions vital to holding the country together.

In the present work, Dutton focuses on one relatively minor biographical myth about Churchill, but the result is a useful illustration of how such myths begin, spread, and are gradually embellished until they entirely overwhelm the historical reality. Read more

George Orwell wasn’t a saint and wasn’t infallible. But he got some big things right. Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) are classics of political satire, analysis and prophecy. Orwell also got some small things right. For example, in his pioneering essay on “Boys’ Weeklies,” he said that a magazine called The Magnet had “a really first-rate character in the fat boy, Billy Bunter.”

Myopic and mocked

Billy Bunter is indeed one of the great comic characters of English literature. He was launched in 1908 by an astonishingly prolific author called Charles Hamilton (1876-1961) (writing as Frank Richards), but today his stories have something that his creator and early readers could never have foreseen: a thrill of the forbidden. The stories are very politically incorrect. Bunter is a myopic, morbidly obese schoolboy who is mocked for his greed, dishonesty, selfishness, stupidity and sloth. And worse than mocked: as Orwell said, “boots and canes are constantly thudding” against “his tight trousers.” Here is a typical encounter between Bunter and his fellow schoolboys:

[A]t that moment Nugent opened the cupboard to lift out the cake. There was no cake to be lifted out. Nugent stared at the spot where a cake had been, and where now only a sea of crumbs met the view. …

“Bunter, you podgy pirate!” exclaimed Harry Wharton. … “Where’s that cake?”

“How should I know? I never even looked into the cupboard, and I never saw any cake when I looked in, either—”

“Scrag him!”

“Boot him!”

“I-I-I say, you fellows, it wasn’t me,” yelled Bunter. “I-I expect you put it somewhere else. It wasn’t there when I ate it—I mean, when I didn’t eat it—If you think I scoffed that cake, I can jolly well say—whoooop! Whoooop! Yarooooh!” (Bunter Comes for Christmas, 1959)

Frank Richards’ “first rate character” Billy Bunter

It’s not sophisticated humour, but Charles Hamilton was a skilful writer and entertained millions of readers for many decades. I particularly like Bunter’s self-refuting denials: “The cake wasn’t there when I ate it.” Bunter is stupid, so he exposes himself even as he indignantly exculpates himself.

A newspaper that refutes itself

But you don’t need to go to old children’s literature to find self-refuting denials and self-exposing exculpators. The British newspaper known as the Guardian supposedly exists on a far higher intellectual and literary plane than the Magnet, but its pages are full of Bunteresque self-exposure. For example, in May 2019 it ran an indignant story about Black criminals being deported to Jamaica. I think the headline was Bunteresque: “‘Things are so bad even the police are scared’: deportees live in fear in Jamaica.”

The Guardian knows that its good-thinking readers will not draw any heretical conclusions from that self-accusing headline. Instead, they will feel angry and dismayed that vulnerable Blacks are being deported from the magic dirt of Britain to the tragic dirt of Jamaica. However, I’m a bad-thinker, so I’ll point out the obvious. If Jamaica is such a violent and lawless country, how can immigration from Jamaica be good for Britain? It can’t be, and it’s inevitable that Jamaican immigrants and their descendants will be over-represented as violent criminals in Britain. That story in the Guardian is full of Black criminals complaining about being deported to live among their own kind in a nation governed by their own culture. Read more