The British newspaper the Scottish Sun reports on a recent pronouncement from an “Instagram Influencer.” I know what Instagram is, but I had not been aware that it had “influencers.” I also had not really been aware that British millennials successfully rivaling ours in deficient masculinity. Wow!

Freddie Bentley, 22, said he thought the schools’ curriculum on the devastating conflict should be cut back because it was “so intense”.

Bentley, who appeared on The Circle, told Good Morning Britain today: “It was a hard situation, World War 2, I don’t want anyone to think I’m being disrespectful.”

He added: “I remember learning it as a child thinking ‘Oh my God it’s so intense’.”

He thought that any mental health issues a youngster may have could be worsened by learning about the war that saw the Allied forces defeat Nazi Germany.

He told the show’s presenters Ben Shephard and Kate Garraway: “’I don’t think encouraging death or telling people how many people died in the world war is going to make it better.”

Instead of youngsters learning about the horrendous war that claimed at least 70million lives, Bentley suggested schools could instruct pupils in topics such as understanding Brexit and how to get a mortgage.

He said: “There’s so many problems going on in the world, like Brexit, that’s not taught in schools.

“When I left school it hit me like a ton of bricks – I didn’t know anything to do with life.”

Currently, Key Stage 3 pupils learn about about the war, covering areas such as the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, the Battle of Dunkirk and Winston Churchill’s leadership.

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Daily Wire:

On Tuesday, a British [employment tribunal] ruled that belief in the Bible was “incompatible with human dignity.”

That statement came in a case involving Dr. David Mackereth, a devout Christian who had worked as an emergency doctor for the National Health Service for 26 years. He said he was fired from his job because he refused to call a biological man a woman. The court’s ruling stated: “Belief in Genesis 1:27, lack of belief in transgenderism and conscientious objection to transgenderism in our judgment are incompatible with human dignity and conflict with the fundamental rights of others, specifically here, transgender individuals.” The court added. “… in so far as those beliefs form part of his wider faith, his wider faith also does not satisfy the requirement of being worthy of respect in a democratic society, not incompatible with human dignity and not in conflict with the fundamental rights of others.”

Also reported by the Independent and by the BBC:

The hearing was told he would refuse to refer to “any 6ft-tall bearded man” as “madam” following a conversation with a manager at an assessment centre and later left his role.

The tribunal panel – sitting in Birmingham – found the [Department for Work and Pensions] DWP had not breached the Equality Act. It stated there was no contravention and dismissed the complaints.

“A lack of belief in transgenderism and conscientious objection to transgenderism in our judgment are incompatible with human dignity and conflict with the fundamental rights of others,” the judgement said.

Dr Mackereth, 56, said he was “deeply concerned” by the ruling.

“Without intellectual and moral integrity, medicine cannot function and my 30 years as a doctor are now considered irrelevant compared to the risk that someone else might be offended,” he said.

“I believe that I have to appeal in order to fight for the freedom of Christians to speak the truth. If they cannot, then freedom of speech has died in this country, with serious ramifications for the practise of medicine in the UK.”

The Regents Park Police recently proudly posted a photograph of the arms cache collected from a local charity shop, and destined for destruction so that they will not fall into the wrong hands.

I see a large number of undoubtedly dull used paring knives, a few old and cheap chef’s knives, a lowest quality used carving knife, several bread knives, two sharpening steels, two carving forks, a letter opener, a cheap tourist-trade replica barong, a cheap and inaccurate tourist version of a tanto, one fencing foil (these are all blunt), a cake frosting spreader, and a spoon (!).

Now, thank goodness, with that deadly spoon safely off the street, citizens of Regents Park can sleep safe in their beds.

Lady Butler, Floreat Etona!, 1882, private collection. The work depicts Lieutenant Robert Elwes of the Grenadier Guards, who was killed at the Battle of Laing’s Nek on 28 January 1881, during the First Boer War.

In the Spectator, James Delingpole complains that Oxbridge Colleges are these days making a point of discriminating against graduates of famous Public Schools, and that the rot has so far set in that Bolshie dons are giving Eton boys “gratitude lessons” and lectures about Sexism (!).

Across the country, private school parents who have scrimped and saved about £40,000 a year for fees are increasingly finding that their sacrifice is being rewarded by near-automatic Oxbridge rejection for their blameless offspring.

And who is speaking out against this class war-driven injustice? Almost no one. Which is why Anthony Wallersteiner, headmaster of Stowe, took so much flak for telling it like it is. ‘The rise of populists and polemicists has created a micro-industry in bashing private schools,’ he told the Times. ‘There’s a much more concerted effort by [Oxbridge] admissions tutors to drive down the number of places given to independent schools,’ he went on — to a deafening chorus of near silence from his fellow public school heads.

Wallersteiner is dead right but the reason he won’t get much support from his peers is because most of them, deep down, agree on private education: that it’s a bastion of unearned privilege, that it needs shaking up in order to accommodate itself to the modern world and that one really mustn’t grumble if its boys and girls are penalised by the system because, hey, maybe that’s only fair.

How do I know this? Because I’m just coming to the end of more than a decade of putting my kids through private school and what I’ve witnessed is a creeping malaise not dissimilar to the one afflicting the Conservative party: institutions that no longer believe in their own brand, that are desperate to pretend they are something they are not (and never should be) in order to impress the kind of people who are always going to hate them anyway.

Take those ‘gratitude’ lessons at Eton. These have been launched, apparently, ‘after a review of teachers and staff found that they felt gratitude was an important trait which was not promoted by the school’. Classes may teach things like how to ‘write thank-you cards for everyday acts of kindness: “Thank you for taking time to talk to me today.”’ Can the school really not see what a massive own goal this is?

First, it plays into the hands of all those who think that Eton boys are a bunch of pampered, arrogant, entitled, snooty toffs. But the vast majority in my experience are supremely well-mannered, considerate and modest. And also fully conscious of their duty to give something back.

When Boy was there, for example, he gave up an afternoon every week to visit a local comprehensive school to help mentor a boy and a girl through their English Literature GCSEs. It wasn’t compulsory — simply a reflection of the Eton public service ethos that is instilled in the boys from the moment they arrive. Often the formative work is done by their house ‘dame’ — the mother substitute who teaches them everything from how to dress properly to the importance of thank-you letters. These ‘gratitude’ classes are fixing a problem that never existed.

Second, it is deeply off-putting to the kind of parents who should be sending their children to Eton: not ones who want it to be like every other touchy-feely progressive institution but ones who appreciate that its idiosyncrasies and traditions and archaisms are what make it so great. There was terrifying talk at the beginning of the new Head Man’s tenure that the school’s penguin uniform might be abolished. Happily, this got a lot of resistance, not least from the boys. But it’s a measure of just how much madness there is abroad in the private education sector right now that serious consideration was given to destroying, on some trendy whim, arguably Eton’s most distinctive selling point.

Boy had a fantastic education at Eton. But almost everything that was good about it, from the arcane terminology to the kit to the remarkable independence the boys enjoy, was the result of the accumulated values of its first 550 years of existence. It was not the result of any measures that modernisers have introduced in the past decade or so.

Here are a couple of things that particularly irked me: one or two bolshie beaks palpably not giving a toss about the massive increase in Oxbridge rejections because, hey, this actually gelled quite nicely with their own lefty prejudices; and the lecture — which an entire year group was forced to attend — by Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism Project.

Eton attracts some incredibly high–powered speakers from all manner of fields: world leaders, explorers, entrepreneurs, you name it. But all these talks are voluntary, because that’s how Eton rolls: right from the start you are expected to forge your own intellectual destiny.

Apparently, though, it was deemed so important the boys should be lectured by a third-wave feminist on entrenched male privilege, gender injustice, and the inner rapist just waiting to burst out of every young man given half the chance, that this particular lecture was made compulsory. Apart from bespeaking a terrible lack of faith in the boys’ manners and sense of sexual propriety, it represented a de facto endorsement of the kind of culturally divisive, hard-left identity politics which schools like Eton ought to be resisting at all costs, not glibly endorsing.

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Heathrow Airport Concourse.

The Zman is not a big admirer of “diversity” and “inclusion.”

The first leg of my journey was a stop in London. When booking the trip, the cheapest flight took me through Heathrow, with a half day layover. I hate having to run to make connections, as that often ends in me missing my connection, so I don’t mind a few hour gap between flights. Having almost a full day between flights was not ideal, but it beat the alternatives when I was booking the flight. My plan was to leave the airport and do a quick tour of London, but that plan got scuttled by British security.

When leaving the airport’s secure area, I was pulled aside for the rubber glove treatment by whatever they call their security forces. I was taken to a room and asked the usual questions. Then they asked to examine my phone, which got them upset, as there is nothing on it other than some classical music I loaded for the trip. I keep nothing on my phone as a rule. This one is brand new, so the browser does not even have some history on it. That lack of a information seemed to upset them.

That led them to ask to look at my laptop. I use a travel laptop, so if something happens, I’m not missing important parts of my life. This one I just setup with Linux and a new solid state drive. This only increased their anxiety, so we spent an hour or so playing Petrovich and Raskolnikov. My Russian visa did not help matters. I’ve gone through this a couple of times in American airports, but this seemed different. Maybe I’m imagining things, but I got the strong sense of being on a list. Maybe it was just the culture gap.

You see, that’s the other thing. The British Starsky and Hutch were Apu and Mustafa, two brown guys from over the rainbow. Their English was fine, but it had the hint of the exotic, suggesting they grew up speaking something other than English at home. They also had the narrowness that is typical of the South Asian. There’s always a barrier that exists between the Occidental and the Oriental, despite the degree of shared experience. There is an inscrutableness there that always leaves a degree of uncertainty between us…

After getting sprung from gaol, I was free to explore the giant shopping mall that is the Heathrow airport. The best I could tell, all of the employees were either brown people from over the horizon or Eastern Europeans. I got something to eat and all of the wait staff was not British. Given the international flavor of the passengers, you would be hard pressed to know you were in the heart of Britain. They don’t even have televisions playing the BBC or local sporting events. Heathrow is a foreign country disguised as an airport…

I’ve been in a great many airports in my life and I have a weird fascination for them. Most airports serving big cities are really just complex systems that have evolved over many years to solve evolving problems of air travel. An airport is a solution for a problem of modern life. As a result, you can learn a lot about the evolution of human organization by observing what happens at the big airports. Their design is similar everywhere, but everywhere is not the same, so the airport says something about the local culture. …

On the fight from Lagos to London, a couple of Africans were across the aisle, one row up, from where I was sitting. Both were dressed up in what Hollywood tells us is traditional African dress for African royalty. Their accents suggested Ghana to me. At some point, the male got very agitated at the person in front of him, who had reclined her chair. He started violently shaking her chair-back and hollering something. Two stewards came over and gave him a lecture about his behavior and airplane etiquette.

Watching the two of them struggle to understand how to be passengers on an airplane, I realized what it would be like to bring Stone Age people into this age. The two of them were just too dumb to navigate plane transport. They were frustrated by the food service process. They struggled to understand simple directions. When the plane landed, they got up and started walking down the aisle, while the plane was still taxiing to the gate. They are primitives incapable of existing in a modern society, without constant supervision…

Walking around Heathrow, it is easy to see why our rulers love multiculturalism. They look at the diversity you see at a big intentional airport and they think of it as the Casablanca of this age. It makes them feel worldly and sophisticated. That brown guy in their department with the perfect continental English is not just a colleague. He is a symbol of what makes them special. They are not provincials. They are worldly cosmopolitans. They never see the other side of it. They just see the good part of the transaction.

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This kind of building would produce that kind of decision.

The Independent:

The Home Office has refused asylum to a Christian convert by quoting Bible passages which it says prove Christianity is not a peaceful religion.

The Iranian national, who claimed asylum in 2016, was told passages in the Bible were “inconsistent” with his claim to have converted to Christianity after discovering it was a “peaceful” faith.

The refusal letter from the department states the book of Revelations – the final book of the Bible – is “filled with imagery of revenge, destruction, death and violence”, and cites six excerpts from it.

It then states: “These examples are inconsistent with your claim that you converted to Christianity after discovering it is a ‘peaceful’ religion, as opposed to Islam which contains violence, rage and revenge.”

When contacted by The Independent, the Home Office said the letter was “not in accordance” with its policy approach to claims based on religious persecution, and said it was working to improve the training provided to decision-makers on religious conversion.

Winston Churchill wrote, in The River War (1899), his account of Kitchener’s campaign against the jihadists of that day, about Islam:

How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property — either as a child, a wife, or a concubine — must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.

Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen; all know how to die; but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science — the science against which it had vainly struggled — the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.

And, today, in 2018, the Daily Mail reports:

A candidate in the European elections was arrested on suspicion of racial harrassment after quoting a passage about Islam, written by Winston Churchill, during a campaign speech.

Paul Weston, chairman of the party Liberty GB, made the address on the steps of Winchester Guildhall, in Hampshire on Saturday.

A member of the public took offence at the quote, taken from Churchill’s The River War and called police.

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Quote Winston Churchill in today’s England and you go to jail!

It’s only funny when the loser geeks at a provincial Sci Fi Convention have a hissy fit and ban somebody, but, as is happening in Europe today, even in Britain, both Free Speech and Freedom of the Press are becoming dead letters in the face of legally-enforced political correctness.

Bruce Bawer reports on a truly frightening example of PC tyranny that happened in Britain just a few days ago.

On Friday, British free-speech activist and Islam critic Tommy Robinson was acting as a responsible citizen journalist — reporting live on camera from outside a Leeds courtroom where several Muslims were being tried for child rape — when he was set upon by several police officers. In the space of the next few hours, a judge tried, convicted, and sentenced him to 13 months in jail — and also issued a gag order, demanding a total news blackout on the case in the British news media. Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, was immediately taken to Hull Prison.

Hull Prison, in Kingston upon Hull, England, where Tommy Robinson was taken to serve a 13-month prison sentence just hours after his arrest on Friday, May 25.

Most media outlets were remarkably compliant. News stories that had already been posted online after Robinson’s arrest at the Scottish Daily Record, Birmingham Live, The Mirror, RT, and Breitbart News were promptly pulled down, although, curiously, a report remained up at the Independent, a left-wing broadsheet that can be counted on to view Robinson as a hooligan. Indeed, the Independent’s article described Robinson as “far-right” and, in explaining what he was doing outside the courthouse, used scare quotes around the word “reporting”; it then summed up the least appealing episodes in his career and blamed him for an attack on the Finsbury Park Mosque last January. Somehow, the Independent also got away with publishing a report on London’s Saturday rally in support of Robinson.

Also on Saturday, Breitbart UK posted a copy of the gag order, but redacted it as required. The resulting document proved to be a perfect illustration of Western Europe’s encroaching tyranny.

Were all the articles in the British media pulled down “voluntarily”? There is no way to know for sure. On Sunday, at about noon Central European Time, one of my Facebook friends posted a link to what was apparently a new story at Breitbart UK, about Robinson’s imprisonment in Hull. Three hours later, however, the story was no longer there. Shortly afterward, I clicked on a link to an article at the Hull Daily Mail that Google summed up as follows: “Supporters of former EDL leader Tommy Robinson are urging people to write to him in Hull Prison — where they say he is in ‘grave danger.’” When I clicked on the link, however, the story had been pulled.

Carl Benjamin, who produces video commentary under the name “Sargon of Akkad,” is a popular British YouTuber who has somewhere around a million subscribers, and who routinely criticizes Islam, identity politics, and political correctness with wit and panache. He is generally a lively, free-wheeling, sardonic fellow, but in the two-hour-plus video he posted on Saturday about the Robinson case, he was uncharacteristically sober, exceedingly cautious, and at times even sounded mournful.

“I did tell you that Britain isn’t a free country, didn’t I?” he said a minute or so into his video. “I’ve been saying it for ages… and nobody listens.” He made it clear he was not about to violate the gag order — not, as he put it, about to “blunder into the jaws of the beast, in much the same way as I guess Tommy has,” and thus “deliberately put myself in the line of fire with the UK government, giving them just cause to arrest me.”

Benjamin is a gutsy guy, so it was unsettling to hear him speak this way. The look on his face somehow brought home the dark reality underlying Robinson’s fast-track arrest, trial, conviction and incarceration. Benjamin emphasized that the most “sensible” thing for someone like himself [Benjamin] to do right now — he used that word, “sensible,” repeatedly — is to do his best to stay out of jail so that he can continue to speak up. “I am in a country that is not free,” he repeated gravely. “My options are limited… I feel jealous as hell of you guys in America. You don’t know how lucky you are.”

The upside — and the irony — of this case is that the gag order, while silencing the British news media, has caused people around the world to take notice. To be sure, a quick tour of major mainstream newspaper websites in Western Europe, North America and around the Anglosphere turned up nothing. But on alternative news sites around Europe, the story was front and center.

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Imagine what it will be like if Corbyn ever wins.

Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves!
Britons never, never, never shall be slaves.

That prediction proved wrong, of course. After WWII, Labour offered them free health care and they’re slaves now.

Kira Davis explains why Alfie Evans’ parents could not be permitted to take their child to Italy for treatment the British National Health Service could not provide.

Some years ago I watched a documentary on the design and building of the Berlin Wall between East Germany and West Germany. It included extremely rare clips of interviews with the architects (I was shocked to learn there was actually a deliberate design to that monstrosity).

I searched high and low for the film, but was unable to locate it. If any reader has any clue where to find it please do let me know…I’ve been desperate to watch it again.

In one clip, an aging (former) East German Wall architect spoke briskly about the strategy of his designs. Although the interview was conducted during what must have been the last years of his life, he still seemed deeply resentful that he was being asked to defend the wall’s erection even after the fall of the Eastern Bloc. I’ll never forget what he said in that interview – it made the hair stand up on my arms.

With great sincerity – almost pleading with the interviewer – he said, “We had to build the wall. Too many people were leaving for the West and you need people to make socialism work. We had to build the wall to keep them in so they could see how great socialism was, so they could see that it works.”

As I can’t find the clip, you’ll just have to take my word for it (or not). The point is – this man and his comrades felt that the only way to sell people on their socialist vision was to force them to live in it. Those leaving were just too stupid to understand that it was the best thing for them.

This is exactly the point in the ruling by the NHS and the courts to forbid their free citizens from leaving the country. If they are allowed to flee the heart-wrenching consequences of socialism, then others will want to do the same. How can a socialist system work without the cooperation of everyone? And how can you force people to participate in that socialist system when they discover that system may kill them or their loved ones?

You build a wall.

Great Britain doesn’t yet have a wall to keep its citizens in, but the courts have built one with the law. Just as East Germany could not tolerate the massive loss of defectors who were leaving with their training, intellect and tax dollars, Great Britain’s healthcare system cannot tolerate the defection of those who might find better healthcare somewhere else.

After all, how would it look if Alfie were allowed to leave England (allowed to leave a free country! Even to write the words feels absurd!) and then found a successful treatment in another country?

It would be an abject embarrassment to a government that holds up their socialist healthcare as one of the wonders of the Western world. Not only would they be forced to admit that their own doctors and bureaucrats were wrong for denying this baby life-saving measures, but they would then have to deal with hundreds, maybe thousands of other citizens fleeing the bondage of NHS algorithms for a chance at swifter, more modern healthcare.

For some bizarre reason, a nation that boasts figures like Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher, a tiny island nation that was once so powerful and broad it was said that the sun never set on the British empire…for some inexplicable reason that nation has chosen to hang its pride and joy on socialized medicine.

If you think I exaggerate just look up the opening ceremonies of the London Olympics.

To release this child to the care of any other nation would be to admit failure, and heartless bureaucrats who will never have to watch young Alfie struggle for air or dehydrate to death have decided that their misplaced pride is more valuable than the lives of their citizens.

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Little Alfie Evans died yesterday.

They aren’t allowed guns. They aren’t allowed to hunt with hounds. They get tossed in jail if they give the finger to a traffic camera or say something really politically incorrect. Soon, they won’t be allowed to own knives.

I’m buying extra fireworks for the Fourth of July this year.

CNN:

Judges on the UK Court of Appeal once again ruled against 23-month-old Alfie Evans’ family.

Wednesday’s ruling rejected new arguments intended to overturn a decision by the High Court on Tuesday that prevented the terminally ill toddler from leaving Britain for medical treatment, said Roger Kiska, a lawyer with Christian Legal Center and part of the legal team representing Alfie’s parents.