âKautsky is pursuing a characteristically pettyâbourgeois, philistine policy by pretending (and trying to make the people believe the absurd idea) that putting forward a slogan alters the position. The entire history of bourgeois democracy refutes this illusion; the bourgeois democrats have always advanced all sorts of âslogansâ to deceive the people. The point is to test their sincerity, to compare their words with their deeds, not to be satisfied with idealistic or charlatan phrases, but to get down to class reality.â
- V. I. Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, 1918.
Human rights campaigners are claiming that keeping men out of womenâs sports is an attack on womenâs rights.
By: Andrew Doyle
Published: Mar 19, 2026
Most successful politicians are adept at linguistic sleight-of-hand. I am not talking here about outright lies, but rather the twisting of the truth through wordplay. One of the most striking examples was the US military spokesman during the Vietnam War who described a bombing raid as having âobtained a 100 per cent mortality responseâ. This verbal formulation certainly sounds much more palatable than the reality it describes.
While we might call this rhetorical prestidigitation, there is also another technique â one that is becoming increasingly common in todayâs culture wars â that is best described as rhetorical inversion, or the practice of simply asserting the precise opposite of the truth. We saw an example only this week, when more than eighty human rights and sports advocacy groups responded to the International Olympic Committeeâs plans to ban male athletes from competing in womenâs sports. Andrea Florence, executive director of the Sport & Rights Alliance, argued that such a ban would be a âcatastrophic erosion of womenâs rights and safetyâ.
Florenceâs statement is a clear example of inversion: a policy which preserves the integrity of womenâs sport is recast as a threat to it. Testing an athleteâs sex through a non-invasive cheek swab is hardly a civil rights violation, and keeping men out of womenâs sports should be the bare minimum required for the preservation of âwomenâs rights and safetyâ.
One is reminded of when Humza Yousaf, at the time Justice Secretary of the SNP, introduced his authoritarian Hate Crime and Public Order Bill. Although the bill made it possible for citizens to be prosecuted for speech uttered in the privacy of their own homes, Yousaf claimed that the new legislation âdoes not undermine free speechâ but âprotects itâ. Rather than making a serious case for the bill, he simply pretended that its outcomes would be the opposite of those intended.
All of this makes it look as though these people simply do not care if the public know that they are lying. Yet there are good reasons why identitarian ideologues such as Florence and Yousaf prefer outright inversions of the truth than subtle misrepresentations. Their worldview is rooted in the postmodernist conviction that reality is subordinate to language, rather than the other way around. To make something true, therefore, one need only assert it.
This explains why the likes of Yousaf see censorship as âprogressiveâ, and that the basic human emotion of hatred can be eliminated if its verbal expression is stymied. It also explains why genderists who have been unable to persuade the public that sex is mutable have resorted to fact-free assertions in lieu of actual arguments.
Consider the robotic responses of this UNISON representative when asked a series of perfectly reasonable questions by Connie Shaw for GB News:
âTrans women are womenâ is not a coherent argument; it is a statement of unequivocal untruth. âTrans womenâ, by definition, cannot be women, otherwise they would not be âtransâ. George Orwell might have been describing the individual in this clip when he wrote this passage from his 1945 essay âPolitics and the English Languageâ:
A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church.
The mantra of âtrans women are womenâ is no different from Andrea Florenceâs claim that protecting womenâs rights and safety represents a âcatastrophic erosion of womenâs rights and safetyâ. There is no clever trickery here, just a flagrant reversal of the facts. Orwell encapsulated this technique in the ruling partyâs motto in Nineteen Eighty-Four: âWar is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.â
Tyrants do not persuade, they make demands. It is evidence of their power that they can force or coerce their subjects into asserting untruths as though they were incontestable. The terror that the trans lobby has inspired in the general public has meant that few are willing to state openly the biological facts that we have all known since childhood.
But although many human rights organisations and sporting bodies remain in thrall to this science-defying ideology, it is a sign of progress that the International Olympic Committee is poised to overrule them. With any luck, it will hold its nerve against the will of these activists who can only make sense of the world through mindless slogans.
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I didn't believe in the word magic of transubstantiation when the Catholic Church was telling me, and I don't believe in it when a dude in a dress is telling me.
Not sure what "try being popular" even means. I don't think Reggie ever wins these things.
The execution on "Ballot Boxed", where after seeing how everyone is swayed by Jughead's slogan posters for Archie's candidacy Reggie buys him off and you see the rest here, leaves something to be desired. It needs just a mite better slogans than "Archie By Cracky" for me to suspend disbelief and accept. On the soundness of the premise, I am reminded that in voting for asb positions, having nothing else to go by and no clear idea of what the heck I was voting for besides a good line for the candidates' college applications, I voted for whoever have me the most number of campaign stickers.
