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

[mantaraya]

Apparently identity politics is silly and divisive. According to Ash, oppression is not a competition and the left is eating itself up accommodating to "woke" victimhood. Any quotes that sound like she has been pushing this line of thinking have been taken out of context.

On trans - this is very unlikely to be in anyone's top 3 issues politically so we should all just shut up about it and focus on the real problems (please ignore the fact that Ash has been banging this drum for years). Oh and the reason the left (i.e. Ash) has supported (ridiculous) things like transwomen in women's sports is because there aren't enough trans political organisations leading the way so they're just trying to do the right thing and defend vulnerable trans people. Ahem.

Quite amusing to listen to just for the various attempts at arse covering. I only wish I could have been the interviewer!

https://open.spotify.com/episode/2tdUDCkv3oc3kBjN9VkzGI

I listened to it yesterday and found it hard to keep up to be honest. She's such a twerp. And yes, the arse covering was quite something

Shame Lewis Goodall was fanboying all the way through

Started listening she made me feel slightly sick.

Brendan O'Neill has some thoughts

https://archive.ph/P53Bq

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/02/23/we-must-never-forget-the-cruelty-of-wokeness/

Oh and the reason the left (i.e. Ash) has supported (ridiculous) things like transwomen in women's sports is because there aren't enough trans political organisations leading the way so they're just trying to do the right thing and defend vulnerable trans people.

Hilarious. I did laugh at this on Twitter

x.com/roseveniceallan/status/1893614072228172249

"She would describe herself as X, but I would say she's Y"

Can she really not see it, or is this a very tedious form of trolling?
The dishonesty is appalling with this woman!

Good article. I guess all the grifters will soon be popping up with the same talking points as Ash.

I always enjoy Brendan O'Neill's writing

I guess all the grifters will soon be popping up with the same talking points as Ash

Honestly that's a great outcome. We all knew this would end with "of course we didn't mean all the batshit stuff we said, we were just trying to protect poor trans people from those nasty terfs". The quicker we can get there the better. Anyone with half a brain cell understands what's really going on.

Ash Sarkar has got a considerable back catalogue of actively pushing genderism, she wasn't merely saying what other people were saying to #bekind. It wasn't just "everyone's home has a gender neutral toilet":

https://x.com/JohnJamesNI/status/1893085467236602026

Original here: https://x.com/AyoCaesar/status/1587465669787910145

Is her best defence' really, 'I didn't actually believe what I was saying, my motivation for saying it was to shut (nasty) people up'?

People do not like being lied to, so this isn't going to go down well with anyone who knows what she was saying - and that goes for people on 'both sides'.

If the only way she felt able to challenge 'nasty people' was to lie, it is plain to see that she wasn't able to provide sufficient challenge to substantive arguments.

Is her best defence' really, 'I didn't actually believe what I was saying, my motivation for saying it was to shut (nasty) people up'?

So specifically she said that she believes the issue was that there were lots of trans NGOs and support groups but no trans political organisations. Because of the lack of trans political organisations there were no clear boundaries drawn (e.g. yes to gender affirming care, no to transwomen in women's sports). Meanwhile trans people were being attacked left right and centre so the non-trans-good-people-of-the-left (i.e. Ash, OJ and co) did the right thing by just being fully pro trans and supportive of everything.

It obviously makes no sense and apparently she only thought of this argument after she wrote her book so she's had to add it in a later version. It's clearly just the best reason she's managed to come up with for the rapid backpedal.

Ash can write a book if she likes, but she can't rewrite history.

Witty. But as I gnash my teeth, I'm going to make two predictions. One) the turnaround crowd will make themselves a lot of money out of their books & podcasts. Two) no responsibility will be taken. It will [somehow] all be the fault of the evil terfs who made them do it.

Both of these piss me off big time.

I've just read this article and he's put together a short piece that has been one of my overriding feelings about 'Woke'. The awful snobbery and nasty superiority of the 'educated' left. The idiotic philosophies that appear to have been superficially studied (I use the word studied very broadly) without reason or thought. I hope at some point they will realise the harm they have done but I very much doubt it.

I find the depiction of Ash sneering at the 17 year old boy in the West Ham top so upsetting in the Spike article, represents everything I loathe about identity politics.

Two) no responsibility will be taken. It will [somehow] all be the fault of the evil terfs who made them do it.

Absolutely guaranteed. People said the same of the suffragettes - "we would have given them the vote if they just asked nicely, they didn't need to be so hysterical about it". History will tell a different story though.

I heard some of her interview with Bastani, and it was painful. And I kept thinking, "She's just wibbling on about herself and then extrapolating from herself to pretend she's got some understanding of society. But really it's all about her."

And I wondered why that seemed familiar... and then I remembered that Laurie Penny used to be a thing.

Once I got past the cringe of AS’s unapologetic hypocrisy I quite enjoyed this interview. It’s satisfying to see it beginning to dawn on the likes of AS the harm that idpol has done to left wing movements when she was so invested in promulgating it.

Does she accept that she has any accountability in the interview? I watched the Politics JOE one (she's doing the rounds to promote her book) and didn't notice her doing it there.

No.

One of my objections to people like Ash Sarkar is that they have no real political principles. They wear whatever political position which suits their purposes at any given time - socialist, progressive, activist, whatever - but they do not assume these positions with any real feeling, or with any understanding as to why people might have a serious investment in these positions. This makes it easy to change opinions if necessary, and to deny that they ever argued anything other than what they claim to believe at the present time. And, of course, people wonder why progressive politics achieves so little...

So I suppose Ash Sarkar's real position is that if you present genderism and all the rest to the electorate, they'll reject it, so what the "progressive left" needs to do is to hide it away, campaign on stuff that appeals to the electorate, and then once elected use that power to implement all of the crazy stuff.

Yes, me too.

These people talking so much about empathy seem totally divorced from being able to connect with people in a human way.

Her view on trans is essentially that it's a fabricated culture war issue. Starting point is that TWAW, that TW in sports (or wherever) only affects a handful of people, that voters don't really care about it as an issue and that it gets far more press attention, proportionally, than it should.

Until Ash Sarkar comes straight out with, "Yes, I did push for the acceptance of males in women's spaces, and I was wrong, and it wasn't anyone else's fault, and I have changed my mind," she's just a piece of straw blowing around in the breeze.

It's funny but if you look at her Twitter history she's actually voiced her criticism of "idpol" for years. Is the hypocrisy deliberate? She's certainly gained a lot of attention when she's attempting to promote her book. Although probably mostly from people going WTAF.