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Victoria Smith at The Critic on Malcolm Gladwell:

Until this issue arose, I had no idea how many self-styled “good” people will support bad things on the basis that other, less important people can take all the hits. Maybe I was incredibly naïve, but I thought of my political opponents as people who believed different things to me, not people who believed the exact same things but considered themselves much more special and exempt from responsibility than their fellow believers. 

Gladwell now admits that when he participated in a 2022 discussion on male people participating in women’s sports, “I heard that and thought, ‘This is nuts,’ and yet I didn’t say anything”. He claims to have been “cowed”. I get that. Everyone has something to fear in a world where you can be torn to pieces for simply saying sex matters. But this world only came into being because people who agreed with feminists spent years refusing to say so. We were scared, too, and we would have had far less to be afraid of had we had some support.

Like many a terf, I have had years of people mistakenly believing that they can “support” me by telling me in private that they agree with me, even if in public they say the opposite. This is not support. While I can empathise with being afraid, all too often the reasons given for “not being able” to speak up rest on the assumption that those of us who do are blessed with some form of inferiority which mitigates the costs. Unlike people who have reputations to protect, friends they don’t wish to offend, concerns about playing into the hands of the far-right, women like me are apparently unimportant, insensitive and politically reckless. It’s only right that we should serve as cannon fodder in the gender wars, clearing the way for the “good” people to breeze in later.

As recent books such as Hounded, TERF Island and The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht have made clear, the impact of the ‘gender wars’ on those who spoke out has been profound. Even if tomorrow every single person were to say “yes, you were right”, it won’t restore the loss of trust. Because we know that you knew we were right all along. You just didn’t think we mattered enough to say so. Instead of telling us how scared you were, why not think about what this has felt like for us?

At bottom these people – like Gladwell, like Jon Ronson (mentioned earlier in the article, and a particular bête noire of Graham Linehan) – have shown themselves to be cowards. But it does demonstrate, in extreme form, how strong the pressure is to toe the line, not rock the boat, keep in with the in-crowd.

In extreme form because, as Gladwell now admits, trans ideology is completely off-the-wall nuts. It requires an extraordinary suspension of critical thinking to believe any of it. Yet here we are…

Eddie Doyle is the BBC commissioner involved

‘Miya underwent gender confirmation surgery and has now blossomed into the person she always wanted to be…After hearing Miya’s incredible story, Ryan wants to host a rooftop reception that celebrates transgender visibility’ https://t.co/FrmAmQlIrE

— SEEN in Journalism (@JournalismSEEN) September 8, 2025

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Absolutely incredible. 🔥

Peter Beinart just got intellectually destroyed by college student Shabbos Kestenbaum. And not with slogans or vibes, but with cold, historical reality.

Beinart: “If we just give them a vote, peace will come. Violence will stop.”

Shabbos: “That was… pic.twitter.com/5bEzKAsuIN

— Jews Fight Back 🇺🇸🇮🇱 (@JewsFightBack) September 7, 2025

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Shabbos: “That was literally the rationale for Gaza withdrawal in 2005 when they gave Gaza to the Palestinians and Gaza elected Hamas. The results? October 7th.”

An old, pie-in-the-sky idealist vs. a young Jew with both feet in reality. And reality won.

adding-left: 40px”>Dozens of calls in the early hours, including seven times on Christmas Day.

Photos of my children being shared.

Men turning up at my events to scream abuse at me.

Threats that I would be attacked, terrified, and made to pay.

A wish that I had been attacked with acid.

This is not online trolling. This is calculated harassment, designed to frighten me and to reach into my family life. It has gone on so long and so relentlessly that I no longer even answer the phone normally, I pick it up and wait in silence until I hear a voice, because so many of the calls are him.

Him? Yes, him. One man.

The police have taken my statements. They have seen the calls with their own eyes. They have confirmed his address. And yet, instead of arresting him, they have passed my case back and forth between Wiltshire Police, Avon & Somerset, and now possibly the Metropolitan Police. Each force shrugs, says it belongs elsewhere, and in the meantime the harassment continues.

And here is the bitter truth: when this same individual accused Graham Linehan, the system acted with speed and force. Linehan was arrested, hauled into court, and even met by five armed officers at the airport. So why is it that when women come forward with years of evidence, we are told to wait? Why is our terror treated as less urgent?

And why are the police so determined to do the bidding of a deranged trans activist, while ignoring the people he targets?

font-size: 8pt”>[Photo: Shorpy/Detroit Photographic Company]

z’s inclusion on the team, Madison says she was benched outright, despite being one of the most experienced players on the roster. Gracie and Brielle saw their positions reassigned, and their opportunities to develop as freshmen undercut. By August 22 and 23, when the season opened, they were reduced to staging a symbolic sit-down protest from the bench while Gomez played in their place.

The women say they felt isolated by their coaches, alienated from teammates, and constantly under surveillance. Madison in particular reported that the stress left her drained, forcing her to quit the team altogether on September 2.

Perhaps Malcolm Gladwell could be persuaded to say a few words.

From the JC:

The BBC has continued to use a contributor even after it emerged he had repeatedly incited violence against Jews, including saying he would burn them “as Hitler did”.

Samer Elzaenen, who has appeared on the BBC’s Arabic channel more than a dozen times since the October 7 atrocities, was most recently used in July as an eyewitness to describe the hunger in Gaza, under the headline “Starvation as a ‘weapon of war’: What does it mean and when was it used in history?”

His July appearance came despite several reports in April – including in the JC – that he had posted extremist slogans including “#WeAreAllHamas You Son of a Jewess”.

In July 2022, a post on his Facebook read: “When things go awry for us, shoot the Jews, it fixes everything,” the Telegraph reported.

Are we surprised? No, we are not surprised.

From my earlier post:

Upon being told that some analysts in South Korea believe that Kim Ju Ae will be the successor to her father, a high-ranking source in North Korea told Daily NK on Nov. 11 that “I don’t understand why they say that. If you let a woman take power in the fourth generation, the last name of the fifth-generation leader will be different. That doesn’t make sense. When you name a successor, you think of the future. Succession is establishing the fourth generation to serve as a basis for the fifth generation.”

In short, the source argued that Kim Ju Ae’s descendants would have a family name other than Kim, a family name associated with the country’s so-called Paekdu Bloodline, and that this would make a fifth generation succession impossible to achieve. The source’s argument puts on display the power of patriarchal beliefs in North Korean society; namely, that children must take their father’s last name and only sons may become successors to keep familial lines going.

Related to this is the question of mystique. Exposing his daughter so frequently to the public eye is largely about showing her as a symbol of the next generation, of which he's the father. But she's just a side-show. She just stands in the background: no power of her own, no mystique. There are rumoured to be three children, with an older brother and a younger brother. These – presumably the older, at least – will be kept hidden: only revealed when the time is right, as next in line in the sacred Paekdu Bloodline, and firmly in the context of power and authority – perhaps even, like his father before him, ascending holy Mt Paektu on a white horse. 

Recognition of a Palestinian state is now the position of almost all Western countries bar America. It is, of course, an entirely cynical position, designed to blame Israel and appease domestic opposition while rewarding Hamas for its uncompromising dedication to violence. In reality though Palestinians have never wanted a two-state solution – just the disappearance of Israel along with every single Jew. That's after all what they've been taught by generations of UNRWA teachers, well-versed in jihad and the glories of martyrdom.

Elliott Abrams has a long article on the subject at Mosaic – There Never Will Be a Palestinian State. So What’s Next?. Needs to be read in full, but here's his conclusion:

A Palestinian state living in peace and security side by side with Israel is a mirage: despite all the claims that we are getting closer to it, it always recedes. Perhaps someday the Islamic Republic of Iran will fall, and a new government there will stop supporting every terrorist group that wishes to destroy Israel. Perhaps someday leaders of the major democracies will treat Israel with fairness and justice, and will demand and enforce fundamental changes in Palestinian society that root out the disastrous effects of a century of murderous anti-Semitism and efforts to destroy Israel. Perhaps Palestinians will someday find and support a national leader who, unlike Husseini or Arafat, truly wishes to build a decent society rather than attacking the one next door. But until such things happen, Palestinian statehood must remain an impossibility.

The most apt metaphor for Palestinian life today is the Gaza cityscape as it existed on October 6: behind and beneath the facades of homes, hospitals, schools, and mosques lay a vast network of terror tunnels and weapons storehouses. And underlying that physical network lay, and lies still, an intellectual and ideological network of beliefs—beliefs that lead to such widespread support for Hamas even today, and that lead the Palestinian Authority to name schools and plazas after the terrorist murderers of children, and to pay salaries and bounties to terrorists in Israeli prisons.

Israel has done a great deal toward eliminating the physical infrastructure of terror, but there cannot be a Palestinian state unless and until the intellectual network that prizes “armed struggle” against the Jewish state above building a normal life for Palestinians ends as well. That is a task for Palestinians, not Israelis, and it is a task that Palestinians will not take up while international organizations and leaders of important nations assure them that statehood will come to them soon and without conditions.

ing and refused to leave or to let us in). There have been cases where activists have repeatedly made disruptive noise outside, banged on windows, let off smoke bombs, released insects inside the building, and followed women to a pub and surrounded the building etc. As far as I know, no arrests were made. You just have to look at how the Police in Scotland failed to stop a trans activist with a sound system from drowning out the speeches made by women outside the Scottish Parliament last week. Huge double standards. I've certainly lost much trust in the Police.