Ash Sarkar on the News Agents - the backpedaling continues...

I agree but I’m so disappointed in her. When I first came across her, she seemed young, articulate and informed.

I'm listening to it, giving it a fair hearing. Just got to the bit where 'can a woman have a penis?' is being discussed as a political gotcha question of a couple of years ago and yeah, they really don't understand where that came from or why it was being asked. This discussion also appears to have zero to do with her book, so it's her and LG having a good laugh at what clever clogs they are for spotting that it was a loaded question designed to make the interviewee look silly. Lots of sweeping statements about the right, no examples given other than something about Thatcher.

I've started so I'll finish but so far it seems she has got half of a good idea for a book.

There are parts of the left activist world that have this chronic issue with rape apologism, when they're not actively covering up rape. I could write a book about all the right-on lefty men who turned out to be rapey as fuck once you got a close look at them.

Peter Hitchens is a gent, by the way. I don't always agree with him, but I find it a bit sweet that he didn't just stop being a Trot, he's spent 40 odd years explaining why he's no longer a Trot. A large part of which is the really awful people he met in "the movement".

Ash Sarkar will never be that transparent. She'll spend the rest of her life saying that what she believes now is exactly the same as what she's always believed.

I always thought Sarkar was most likely to bail out of the Novara self described clique of coke raddled hip young gunslingers advocating Luxury Communism and fins herseld like other one time trots Janet Daly or Peter Hitchens writing for the Telegraph.

Bit obscure, this, but in their pomp on Twitter, Novara were aspiring to be a Corbyn governments ' think tank. Their group mentality suddenly got exposed, (before #MeToo, summer 2017) when they decided to host rape apologist George Galloway on as a guest and it sparked a boycott, including an account of an attempted rape by one of Novaras' hangers-on

There are references to it here

https://libcom.org/forums/general/novara-who-are-they-who-are-you-04102013

"the boycott was started after Aaron Bastani appeared on George Galloway's radio show. People objected to this because George Galloway has described rape as "bad sexual etiquette", and denied that it was rape.
that wouldn't be enough for people to call for a boycott normally but novara has several times hosted content by or done interviews with people where are rape apologists, or abusers. so when bastani said "sorry i didn't know" noone really thought he was taking things seriously or that novara wasn't going to carry on as before in this regard, especially since he has previously mentioned that galloway was no platformed *via
so #BoycottNovara was started by some who is a survive and is sick of the left not dealing wit this shit
about a week after this Bastani made this apology statement and then Novara relised a complaints procedure and a code of conduct
and that would most likely have been the end of it except novara people posted pictures of Bastani and James Butler wearing tshirts with "problematic" stickers on them, which came across as mocking survives, and Bastani made a facebook post complaining about how unfairly a group of saboteurs called the Bloomsbury 10, or B10, had been treated. B10 sabotaged a accountability process against a serial abuser, some infor about that in this thread by the person who initiated the process
so noone is calling for a boycot right now, but its hard to belive that novara actually wants to deal with this shit..."

Love it

She certainly wasn't aware of Julie Bindel's campaigning and I suspect she wouldn't know about Anya Palmer's legal work for Stonewall, working on test cases establishing equal rights for gay men and lesbians. (Particularly given her claims that Stonewall isn't capable of strategy)

Her knowledge seems very patchy.

It's just that once you notice it, you can't help noticing that she's always circling back to US black radicalism of the 1970s. Which is an interesting subject but:

• It doesn't tell you very much about the UK working class
• It doesn't even tell you very much about UK race relations, because we've got a very different history
• I'm sceptical that Ash even has more than a surface level knowledge of the subject, and suspect she's just name dropping
• It's very weird that our current Voice of Youth, who loves to pour scorn on those older than herself, is trying to find solutions to modern day problems in the politics of a time when Michael Jackson was black and Elton John was straight.

You want to know about Ash Sarkar's knowledge of contemporary political issues?

Remember the time was Sarkar crowed about the fact that Bindel had no knowledge of women in prisons because that's what Twitter told her?

x.com/AyoCaesar/status/1053248532377976832

I'd be mildly interested - though not interested enough to read her book - whether Sarkar has any sense of British labour history. The trade union movement, the match girls' strike, Keir Hardie and the founding of the Labour Party, the Jarrow March, Nye Bevan and the founding of the NHS, the Dagenham workers' strike - all that kind of thing. Does anyone know?

I would actually have a tiny amount of respect for AS if she actually said the movement was well intentioned but misguided (bollocks) but the way she's contorting to frame this as standing up for the underdog is nauseating.
Trans rights were never a victimless pursuit.
I'm not going to click on the Lewis G clip. I liked him on Newsnight but presumably the BBC had some restraining influence then.The News Agents now is just a smug fest. Apparently the whole team were dismayed when Trump won as they were so embedded in their bubble. Maybe if they'd got out of the studio and tried some actual journalism.
AS is a grifter and I really hope this style of journo activism is a short lived phenomenon.

He's currently on a one-man jihad against Israel.

(i.e. Ash, OJ and co)

What happened to OJ? He’s faded away completely

AS on trans issues.

"Oh, it's so annoying. But when you look at the trans rights movement, there are remarkably few political organisations. There are charities and there are figureheads and role models, but there aren't political organisations going, this is what our strategy is going to be"

So who paid for the Denton's strategy document?

Can charities not lobby parliament?

What on earth does she mean?

Whatever degree she has, clearly it only trained her to produce word salad.

I suppose she's less pretentious than Dickie Seymour, but Jesus that's a low bar.

Specks and planks in eyes, innit.

One of the clips being circulated by the newsagents demonstrates exactly where she stands. She hasn't changed at all.

She starts by nutpicking 'somebody who said that Anne Frank had white privilege' to demonstrate that of course she isn't anti-semitic, criticises people who point out that their disabilities mean they rely on home deliveries, and then says what she really means:

AS: But I think some of the examples which are most laughable and I think actually get much less attention in our current media environment is that there is weaponisation of this of this form of identity politics in the interest of pro-Israeli advocacy. So at the Francis Crick Institute, some researchers wanted to put on a bake sail to raise money for medical aid for Palestinians. There was then a flurry of complaints to HR saying that it was an 'allegedly' peaceful bakesahle and it made them feel personally threatened and unsafe. If you feel unsafe around a slice of lemon drizzle cake, that's on you.

LG: I think that's a really interesting point because we often, the way it is often portrayed in the media is, I mean you're alluding to sort of the idea in a sense of snow flakery, right? And that's often used as a term of abuse or an insult from the right to the left. But the truth is, what you're describing, I agree with you, I think it is a really pervasive problem. This kind of cult of brittleness, this cult of endless kind of subjectifying or objectifying your own subjective experience, that's there on the right as well.

I don't know anything about this cake sale, but she is making a partisan political point here. This is not just an example, but the 'most laughable' example. She can't accept that the people who are upset might just be Jewish. She even throws in the trope of blaming the media. For Lewis Goodall to then editorialise that as 'right wing' 'snowflakery' is shameful.

I know that this is the lowest form of criticism, but I loathe AS.
It's not that I disagree with her views (though I do) but she is just SO pleased with herself, when in reality she's utterly vacuous.

Here's the book she's plugging that @nauticant referred to

www.bloomsbury.com/uk/minority-rule-9781526648334/

I used to be a loyal listener to the News Agents. Even sat through the various sycophantic cosy Lewis chats with TRA politicians trotting out all the usual thought-terminating cliches, because I felt it was important to hear a diversity of ideas.

What made me unsubscribe was in the run-up to the 2024 GE, Lewis got into some rant about some policy that the Tories were against. (I can't even remember what the policy was. And despite being politically homeless myself, I was 100% in agreement that the Tories had to go. And that Labour were clearly going to walk it.) But Lewis's OTT self-righteous shouty sneering at his perceived moral/political inferiors completely turned me off. I just stopped the podcast right there and hit "unsubscribe."

Interesting Spiked article.

I think one of the things I dislike most about wokeness is that it totally invalidates the opinions of:

1. middle aged women
2. working class people

These are two groups that it's seen as acceptable to scoff at and dismiss.

I'm sure I have been guilty of similar in the past, and didn't fully realise it until I joined one of those groups.

I think it was Labour politics did it to Lewis. I quite liked his book on Labour - not perfect by any means, but useful insights.

But these days his main function is to tell us what Keir Starmer wants us to think.

I'd assume that by now the News Agents had degenerated into commentators rather than journalists and the show was simply a content generating machine.

But then I've only listened to one episode and wasn't that keen on being lectured at with views from the right side of history.

Lewis hasn't been a journalist for quite a while. Shame, really, because he had the potential to be a good one.

Lewis is a full-on Righteous activist pretending to be a journalist.

I really hate when people are dismissive of 'culture wars' when they were the ones who invaded Poland.

You just know the second being woke makes you popular again Sarkar and her ilk will do another U-turn. It's all about the money and the clicks and having the kind of acceptable views that get you invited on smug-ins like The News Agents.