The coming storm, radio 4 - series 2

I listened to the first series and found it very interesting as it related lots of occassions that hadn't made sense to me at the time, but thought overall it wasn't as good as it could have been because it was more about the reporter's journey than proper reporting.

And nearly laughed out loud at the end of the last series when they traced part of the influence of the "disrupters" back to a book written by Rees Moggs father "the Sovereign Individual". ie people who have enough money can operate outside of the system and exploit, particularly if they can break down the normally accept modes of civil behaviour, so exploiting QAnon, PizzaGate to the point where voters no long trust the voting system.

Listening to the 2nd series which started last week, was also interesting as again it showed how easy it is to disrupt the democratic process. Scary.

But what today's episode clearly showed is that those reporting (well it is the BBC) dont recognise or give credibility to those outside of the traditional male concept of society andpolitics. So by just launching into how the chritian right wing are responding to gender identity, without giving any air time to women's concerns is of course insulting.

Although on one level is true about society. How did trans identity take hold? By not listening to women.

But it is worth noting that this is also happening here. That women who raise concerns about Trans ideology being a form of conversion therapy, particularly for children who might be gay or lesbian, is what has led to so many, including other women who say they are feminists, to call gender critical women right wing christians. Because their model of politics is based on the traditional right / left divide. And they dont recognise that women's politics is outside of that.

(re. the figures from the states I thought that was because the only publicly available ones were through insurance companies. Didn't they mention they didn't know how many might have paid privately? even these figures that just report it as a growth industry dont give numbers, just how much money you can make www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/us-sex-reassignment-surgery-market )

Indeed. That Sidhbh Gallagher person boasts that her clinic does 500 double mastectomies per annum.

And if there are 400 clinics....well that figure looks daft.

😄

Why not? It's a fantastic post and should be quoted in its entirety as much as possible!

Sorry didn't mean to quote all of nauticant's post as well.

Boston children's hospital has most certainly been carrying out these operations on minors. Matt Walsh uncovered this.

There are no official statistics on how many minors receive top surgeries each year in the United States. The New York Times surveyed leading pediatric gender clinics across the country: Eleven clinics said they carried out a total of 203 procedures on minors in 2021, and many reported long waiting lists. Another nine clinics declined to respond, and six said that they referred patients to surgeons in private practice.

Dr. Gallagher, whose unusual embrace of platforms like TikTok has made her one of the most visible gender-affirming surgeons in the country, said she performed 13 top surgeries on minors last year, up from a handful a few years ago. One hospital, Kaiser Permanente Oakland, carried out 70 top surgeries in 2019 on teenagers age 13 to 18, up from five in 2013, according to researchers who led a recent study.

www.nytimes.com/2022/09/26/health/top-surgery-transgender-teenagers.html

Good point @GoTeamRocket I'd need to re-listen to get his exact words re the 282 figure. Did he qualify this? Between the ages of, and in what time period? Perhaps he was talking about in the last week? Perhaps in the last 2 days? In what circumstances does he think that it is ok to cut off the breasts of a young girl?

He tried to brush off the whole thing as waffling about very careful consideration, kind, distress etc.

We know that there are over 400 gender clinics for children in the US (gendermapper.org ). How many breast surgeries do each of these carry out, per week, on minors?

Why didn't he talk to Kara Dansky? Matt Walsh?

Sorry how do we know this is a lie? Genuine question,what figures do you have? I imagine the numbers would jump hugely at the 18 to 25 age group, but that is just a guess.

This is the first of a 2 part series, and it felt rushed.

I think the American right I'd genuinely terrifying, but journalists don't help with the good vs bad narrative, they need more nuance. I feel that Biden should have got a he'll of a lot more flack for getting Sunak's name wrong. If Trump had mispronounced it, he would hwve been called a racist from media commentators.

I listened to another short radio article on Radio 4 a few days ago about the ‘coming collapse of democracy’ in America. It was talking about the next presidential elections. One thing that struck me though was at no point did they seem to consider the possibility of a republican win. It wasn’t discussed, it was simply when the democratic president wins then will the institutions manage to hold back the republican onslaught?

I started listening partway through without knowing what it was, and found it interesting.

It was a point of view and part of the history that I didn't know about, so fair enough. But forensic? If Gatehouse cared forensically about "top surgery" he wouldn't just have looked at the tiny numbers right now, he'd have looked at the rate of increase.

Obviously "groomers" is a useful word to smear around all over your enemies, but the right didn't invent the word and they didn't decide what specific behaviour it applies to either. Gatehouse is making a classic mistake of saying "if evil people are accusing their political enemies of doing X, then either their enemies aren't really doing X or else X can't be all that bad". But what if some of them really are doing X and really it is that bad? Gatehouse is contributing to the split between the "two realities" he talked about.

Plus Gatehouse is talking to people who really want to believe "I started it". That's open to question in itself. Maybe the groomer-word guy just got lucky by picking up on something people were already worrying about.

How disappointing.

To put it briefly, the approach in the programme is that the wrong kind of people are criticising something, they're connected to other wrong people and are sharing their criticisms, and so of course all of this must be bad.

(But let's make sure we don't spend any time thinking about the substance of their criticisms.)

What a rubbish program. I gave up after the ' only 282 children have had their breasts removed' lie.

Well that was a disgrace & a disappointment

First 5 minutes. The Right are taking official positions relating to the administration of elections.

Second 5 minutes. The conspiracy theory was that Democrats are controlled by Satanic paedophiles but this has now been replaced with something else.
The programme is about "what happened to QAnon" and the answer put forward is "A new diabolical enemy: Groomers".

School boards. Where you'd want to take back America from the bottom up.
School board meetings have become strange. A woman complained about gender identity. She went a step further and said that if the board didn't ban a book promoting this, many people would consider the school board to be groomers.

Gatehouse is saying that the word "groomer" means "paedophile".

There was a group called "Moms for Liberty" protesting about mask mandates. When that issue disappeared, they started campaigning on the distribution of age inappropriate material, and that's what the MfL mean when they say "grooming".

The term "gender identity" is cropping up all over.

Third 5 minutes. One of the founders of MfL is funded by Republicans and they group has strong ties with Republicans. It might have started as grass roots but has been incorporated into MAGA.

Surprise! James Lindsay interviewed, as the originator of "OK groomer". Discussion of the hoax papers project. Gatehouse seeding comments to suggest Lindsay is a nutter.

Fourth 5 minutes. Lindsay continues, Critical Race Theory. Gatehouse paints this as objection to Marxism. George Floyd is killed and suddenly everyone is talking about race, and the Right focus on CRT, for example in government workplaces. Then MfL get in touch with Lindsay and draw his attention to gender identity and it having Marxist roots. Groomer was born. Gatehouse back to saying that groomer means paedophile.

Gatehouse: Lindsay's world merges with Trump's Right.

Fifth 5 minutes. Lots of people on the Right jump onto the "Groomer bandwagon".

Groomer become a viral weapon in the war waged by the Right.

Gatehouse goes to a Right wing conference and finds a conservative bookstall and mocks some of the stories in the books. Almost everyone he spoke to mentioned the issue of the promotion of gender identity. At least he did acknowledge that the criticisms have a basis in fact, and referred to "top surgey", although Gatehouse points out that it's only affecting a very small percentage of the children in the US. Gatehouse doesn't like the would "mutilated" when referring to radical surgery performed on children.

Sixth 5 minutes. Lia Thomas gets a mention. Gatehouse moves swiftly on. Peter Thiel and the billionaires are funding Right wing candidates.

The glaring omission was: what are these ideas the conservatives are objecting to and is there anything in them that makes the objections justified? (It was lightly touched on in the reference to "top surgery".)

Overall this was an Adam Curtis kind of programme where Gatehouse was focused on the creation of a narrative about the Right and conspiracy theories. He didn't seem all that interested in the substance, it was all about pointing to connections, and trimming his findings so they'd fit under a Right wing conspiracy theory umbrella.

WTF did I just listen to?
That was appalling propaganda.
They made it seem that the concerns about gender ideology came from QAnon.
Where did they get the 282 children stat from? And why did they use just the insurance claims figure, if that is true? We’ve had over 2,000 children a year at GIDS for the last few years. That’s in the Cass report. There’s no way 282 in all of the United States is realistic.
When I’ve recovered, I will be writing a very long complaint to the BBC. That was shocking.

Was just coming on to see if there was a thread about this.

it is really messing with my head I I don’t know what to think tbh

Write-off serious concerns as conspiracy theories.

Very similar to people who had legitimate concerns over the Covid vaccine as believing in 5g nanobot nonsense.

People who are worried about the unnecessary medicalisation of children are not QAnon believers.

The Mid-Terms 1. Groomers

As America goes out to vote for the first time since the tumultuous aftermath of the 2020 election, Gabriel Gatehouse is back in the deep undergrowth of the US political scene, in a bid to understand where the dark energy underpinning the January 6 assault on the Capitol is going now.

Some of the energy from the QAnon conspiracy theory about a satanic cabal of paedophiles is morphing into a grassroots political movement against ‘groomers’ – the idea that LGBTQI+ sex educators and trans healthcare advocates are indoctrinating young people into a sexualised culture.

The battleground is America’s school boards and the prize could be a galvanised Republican base with a new crusade. At a conference in Miami of thinkers shaping the future ideas of the right, Gabriel finds the issue top of the agenda.

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001dxt0

Sounds very interesting, I thought the first series was good. Thanks for flagging up.

It's on after the news. Let's see what we get.