Today in history, on July 16, 1212, an epic battle—which the Islamic State still vows vengeance for—took place between Christians and Muslims, and presaged the demise of Islam in Spain, five hundred years after Muhammad’s followers first invaded and subjugated that nation beginning in 711.
I hope more and more people will find the courage to speak the truth as they see it
I’ve been amazed by the response to my decision to leave my band, Mumford & Sons. The article in which I explained why has now been read 700,000 times and has been republished by newspapers in the UK, the US and Germany. My main hope in publishing it was to restore my own sense of integrity — eroded, I felt, by an apology I made to an extreme but vociferous internet minority who took great exception to what I considered an innocuous tweet to Andy Ngo, the author of a bestselling book about the radicalized far-left. Just as I never anticipated the angry reaction to my unremarkable tweet, I could never have foreseen that my article about the ensuing fuss would have generated so many messages of gratitude. Gratitude for what? Not for leaving the band — although a few people may be glad. It seems as if, in explaining why I felt I could not carry on, I had articulated something that many people feel in their daily lives: self-censorship. In the current febrile political climate, many of us are just too scared to say what we think.
The National Football League (NFL) recently joined virtually every other American institution in lauding — and marketing to — the LGBT community during Pride Month in June. It did so by releasing a new 30-second commercial proudly proclaiming that “football is gay, lesbian, queer, transgender, bisexual and exciting.”
Several participants of the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol have been taking part in one attorney’s re-education program, which involves reading books or watching movies about topics like slavery and the Holocaust, as they face sentencing.
It’s July 13th, 2021, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk wanders nonchalantly from Delaware’s Court of Chancery to his personal Model X. He’s just taken to the stand to defend the EV company’s $2.6 billion acquisition of SolarCity back in 2016, after some of Tesla’s shareholders filed a lawsuit against him.
They claimed the merger possessed major conflicts of interest with the Musk family and that it had failed to deliver the profits Musk had promised.
An Australian artist has accused a group of Conservative councillors of using “bullying strategies” to silence and censor her work after an installation she created to highlight Britain’s “identity as a colonial nuclear state” was removed from a park in Essex.
The councillors threatened to “take action against the work” if it was not removed, according to Metal, the arts organisation that commissioned and then removed the installation from Gunners Park in Southend.
In her column (What does the Chinese military want with your unborn baby’s genetic data?, 10 July), Arwa Mahdawi suggested that the alleged involvement of the People’s Liberation Army (which is directly answerable to the Chinese Communist party) with BGI’s data-gathering (likewise answerable as a China-based company) is essentially equivalent to data-gathering by western companies. To suggest that the former case is worse, she argued, “smacks of Sinophobia”.
As a scholar of China, I cannot agree.
The Andrew Neil-run GB News, which touted itself as the ‘anti-woke’ antidote to the mainstream media, has apologised after one of its presenters took the Black Lives Matter-inspired knee on air in response to racist abuse directed at three black England players on social media after Italy defeated the team in the Euro 2020 finals on Sunday.
Portland Police – what’s left of them – report that eight people were shot overnight in a mass shooting in downtown Portland. Portland Police reported that one of the victims had life-threatening injuries. No one died in the shooting. No arrests have been made.
Antifa defending pedophiles again at Wi spa in Los Angeles. Karma served Instantly. pic.twitter.com/wgTwvBqao2
— Steve Inman (@SteveInmanUIC) July 17, 2021
Regulate business to tackle climate crisis, urges Mark Carney
Governments must step up their regulation of businesses to tackle the climate crisis, the former Bank of England governor Mark Carney has urged, because the financial free markets will not reduce greenhouse gas emissions alone.
Carney, who left the Bank of England last year before the first Covid-19 lockdown, is now one of the most influential figures working on Cop26, the vital UN climate talks to be held in Glasgow in November. He is a UN envoy on climate change and Boris Johnson’s finance adviser on the climate.
He said for the world to meet its climate goals, governments would have to force industries to follow clear rules, on everything from energy generation to construction and transport, and set carbon prices that would drive investment towards green ends and close down fossil fuels.
This latest woke ideological project is especially pernicious.
The nation’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association, held its annual meeting last week, and suffice it to say that the measures the delegates passed were radical.
One measure passed by the delegates warrants special attention.
The measure called on the union to issue a study criticizing “empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society.”
A new study suggests otherwise.
Gun sales in the U.S. exploded last year, first when the Covid-19 pandemic reached our shores and again when the death of George Floyd set off a wave of protests and violence in cities. Some commentators maintain that these sales in fact fueled the violence—a theory that fits nicely with some advocates’ preexisting priorities. President Biden and his team have been especially eager to turn the conversation about the abrupt crime spike into a conversation about guns and gun dealers.
One of the leaders of the NAACP has been spotted outside a Virginia middle school denouncing opponents of critical race theory and saying ‘let them die’.
NAACP Vice President Michelle Leete – who is also a member Virginia state PTA – gave a fiery speech to a crowd outside a school board meeting at Luther Jackson Middle School in Falls Church, Fairfax County.
And she ranted about a separate group of parents who were also at the school protesting over the teaching of CRT.
