America’s New Female Right - BBC

Posting a link to her earlier piece, just because it's that rare thing, a trans piece in the Guardian with comments enabled:

Back in 2014, the Guardian enabled comments on almost everything. (Though they did often delete gender-critical ones.) Kath Viner took over as editor in about 2014 or 2015, and then a year or so after that, she made the decision to remove commenting from controversial subjects - anything related to transgender issues, race, feminism or Israel/Palestine, basically.

My next message about Lucy Mangan has been hidden but basically, check out her twitter feed and see who she retweets...

Interesting. I may watch it, but it doesn't sound great. I'm not Lucy Mangan, nor her apologist or agent, and often find her TV reviews for the Guardian particularly anodyne, BUT when I was more on Twitter she's most definitely GC, and has made reference to it in various other TV reviews. Look up her review of the latest series of Sex Education, for example. She now only does TV reviewing for the Guardian, and I think her intro paragraph plus the one I paste below are her saying in a not very coded way, I don't agree that these three women are all 'awful and evil and bad-bad-bad' but Guardian readers, particularly the ones in America, won't even consider questioning it.

"What we get instead is a cheap, shoddy programme apparently thrown together in 10 minutes, presumably on the grounds that everything and everyone is so obviously awful and evil and bad-bad-bad that it is enough just to film them, show Wright’s pained face occasionally and have her lob in a few wet questions to show that she is still listening and still on the side of right (which is, of course, left, not right)."

😂

No wonder the comments were enabled. Full of the most marginalised people ever against the meanie terfs comments including several from one notable trans Guardian staff member. It’d be interesting to know if the BTL comments would be different now?

By the by I’m incredibly disappointed to find out LM is another deluded ally.

Deleted post. I got that wrong.

Further edit: Aargh, no I didn't. I was actually right and shouldn't have deleted.

I'm going for a lie down.

It's dishonest, but PR gonna PR.

But where it goes nuts is when I now call you dishonest for saying that's dishonest, because "that's just what the critic said".

🙄 This obviously does happen, but not in this case. I don't even think you're even arguing that he didn't say "school shootings are a fact of life". He did say those words, and that is what Kamala HQ is pointing to.

But enough of the derail.

What the Harris campaign is doing in this situation is what Hollywood studios do when a critic says "this film is an amazing piece of crap" and the poster quotes the critic saying "amazing".

It's dishonest, but PR gonna PR.

I'm pretty sure I've seen some strong hints of Terfiness from Mangan in the past couple of years. 2014 was a very long time ago and things have changed since then.

But that's not how quotes work. If I say "I don't believe Trump is the best candidate for President " and you quote me as saying "Trump is the best candidate for President " you have quoted my words but misrepresented what I said.

There was a Radio 4 series along the same lines in the last couple of years. I seem to remember it featuring a group of moms against drag queens type thing. Again no real analysis of the situation, just lazy journalism and seeing them as bigots.

It’s about time we had a documentary on why Labour and the Democrats turn away so many people, yet claim to be about inclusion. Or looking at the intolerance of the Green Party. Or groupthink in the arts. With some actual analysis and questioning of views.

I saw Goody Proctor retweeting Megyn Kelly...

So much of this is a gentry left problem, isn't it? If you belong to certain classes - female, working class, LGB, ethnic minority, disabled - they think they own you. They think they're entitled to your support no matter what they do that's against your interests, no matter how much open contempt they have for you. That's where the shaming tactics come in.

But eventually the tactics stop working.

That 2014 piece by Mangan really is a terribly written piece of crap, isn't it? And the comments are 'interesting'. Do Guardian 'staff' routinely join in discussions these days? That's something I'd never noticed before.

That's just what he said though.

Seems a bit odd to object to someone saying something you've said yourself.

I watched it. I felt so sorry for the teenage girl featured.

That was quick.

That's just what he said though.

If you watch Vance's comment about guns he says that he doesn't like that school shootings are a fact of life in America. He goes on to say that in his view one solution is greater security for schools. Kamala HQ in Twitter reframed that as Vance saying that "school shootings are just “a fact of life”". Megyn Kelly's point that such a reframing is not honest.

The original UK version on BBC was called Travels in Trumpland, tempest

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0bdpvh5/episodes/guide

but they changed the name for the North American / overseas market.

https://www.bbcselect.com/watch/ed-balls-trumps-america/

I'll have to look that program up; thank you. I'm interested to see if they mention influential broadcasters such as Megyn Kelly and Candace Owens. (Also interesting to note, Megyn is frequently retweeted by Posie Parker - even just a few hours ago.)

Megyn Kelly sent out a tweet 2 days ago saying "My God she is so dishonest," referring to a tweet of Kamala Harris'. Harris was pointing out that JD Vance had said that school shootings are "a fact of life". He had said these words, exactly. I'm mentioning this to highlight Kelly's brand of politics and dishonesty, and wondering why Posie Parker is aligning herself with her.

I think it's been obvious for a while that American voters are becoming less polarised by race and more by education/class. That's not really been explored very much. Steve Bannon has been pushing for it for a long time, but if you can't take Bannon, there are sane lefties like Ruy Teixeira who are making similar points.

The polls this year are consistently showing Trump around 20% of the black vote, which is unheard of for a Republican in the post-civil rights era. I don't think black voters over 50 are moving - it's specifically young black men, who hate the Democrats, don't much like the GOP, and seem to like Trump's disruptive potential.

There's a meme going around TikTok of young black men talking about Trump, saying the guy lives in a golden tower, he shags porn stars, he's in and out of court all day, he's got a mug shot, he's now actually taken a bullet - let's face it, he's a gangsta rapper.

That's the kind of thing that's interesting and worth trying to understand. Unfortunately most Democrats are not only crazy on a range of issues, they've also got that centre left thing that we see with UK Labour - our voters are out of touch, but we can shame them back into line.

If anything I think the Louis Theroux approach of finding some extremist outliers and holding them up to be laughed at is even less productive.

Was the Ed Balls show Trump's America?

Oh, I'll have a look for that, thanks.

There is a film produced by Larry ELder about black conservatives, and particularly Trump supporters - in the US, called Uncle Tom. It's very partisan - kind of a mirror image of Roger Moore film, but I found it extremely interesting in terms of being a window into a group that a lot of left media doesn't want to even acknowledge exists. I didn't make any attempt to challenge them (and why should it really?) but it gave, I think, a really fair look at their views from their own perspective. And it really mirrors a lot of what I am hearing from the black community here, and also indigenous Canadians (and I think this may be more so among indigenous Americans) - at least, the working class people from both of those groups. It made it pretty clear to me that the class/educational divide is probably way more important politically in the US than race, and that's coming more to fruition across demographic groups.