#tom slater

[sockstwinksncock]

Photo Source/Credit: Tom “Slates” Slater

Sexy bike 🔥

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

This isn’t a ‘young men’ problem. This is a class problem

The ‘crisis’ among men and boys is another symptom of the elite’s neglect of the working class.

By: Tom Slater

Published: Mar 27, 2025

Male privilege. Toxic masculinity. Smash the patriarchy. A thousand dumb slogans have shaped our debate about the respective lot of men and women for the past decade or more. But this past week, the agreed-upon narrative – that essentially nothing has changed since Victoria was on the throne; that women remain as stifled and disenfranchised as ever, while men continue to lord it over them – has begun to collide with reality.

While we were all arguing over Adolescence and Andrew Tate, a report compiled by the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) has quietly laid waste to the prevailing orthodoxy. Lost Boys: State of the Nation makes brutally clear that a lot of young British men have very little privilege to check. Males lag behind females at every stage of education, from nursery to university – in higher education, women now outnumber men by three to two. That gender pay gap you’ve heard so much about? It’s now been reversed among the young, with women out-earning men. Young men are much more likely to be unemployed, too. To those who have been paying attention, none of this will come as a surprise. But rarely has it been spelled out in such compendious, stark and irrefutable detail.

Of course, a big part of the picture here is the history-making strides made by women in education and the workforce. If, as victim-feminists have so often told us, young women still have the deck stacked so mercilessly against them, young women certainly haven’t got the memo. But these emerging gaps aren’t just about historical wrongs being righted – a new equilibrium being reached. Going by the report, this shift has at least as much to do with men falling backwards as it does women pushing ahead. Since the pandemic, for one thing, the number of men aged 16 to 24 not in education, employment or training has increased by 40 per cent, compared with seven per cent for women.

The chattering classes have long struggled to compute such facts. It upsets the hierarchy of victimhood. It grates against the notion that men are only ever the oppressors, the beneficiaries of ‘structural sexism’. To talk about the challenges faced by young men and boys will often see you smeared as anti-women, or some crybaby men’s rights activist – desperate to insist that men are the real victims, thwarted by the girls. Wokeness, it seems, is a zero-sum game. You couldn’t possibly care about, say, the barriers to re-entering the workforce women experience after having children and the barriers many young men face to finding gainful employment at all.

This has always struck me as bizarre. Not least because many of the struggles many young men face today have little to do with their sex and everything to do with their social class. Indeed, when we talk about the issues confronting men and boys, we’re usually talking about working-class men and boys. Just as it is ridiculous to pretend that women in boardrooms and women in call centres share identical challenges and interests, so it is also ridiculous to suggest that the prospects of an unemployed 21-year-old lad, yet to break out from his council-estate boxroom, is intimately connected with those of a Russell Group Hooray Henry, slogging away at grad-scheme applications.

While young women are pulling ahead of young men even among university graduates, the so-called lost boys are really to be found among the poor and working class. Over recent decades, radical shifts in society and the economy have corroded many of the old certainties working-class men once relied upon. Manufacturing, agriculture and construction – industries that used to provide secure, decently paid jobs to young men who weren’t destined for, or couldn’t afford to go to, university – have withered on the vine. In 1970, the CSJ notes, these sectors collectively made up more than 40 per cent of UK GDP. By 2023, this stood at just 16 per cent. Fatherlessness has also exploded among lower-income groups. ‘One of the most stark inequalities in Britain’, Fraser Nelson notes, ‘is the unequal distribution of fathers: 95 per cent there for those at the top, 60 per cent absent for those at the bottom.’ And while this can be tragic for boys and girls alike, it is particularly perilous for boys growing up in neighbourhoods where trouble isn’t hard to come by. Indeed, a full three-quarters of children in custody report having an absent father.

Just as class explains many of these problems, it also explains the blindness to them. While the media and politics have become more superficially ‘diverse’ in recent years, working-class ‘representation’ – if we must use the r-word – has actually gone in the other direction. And so, those charged with discussing and addressing the issues confronting working-class people are more detached from them than in decades past, when a less thoroughly bourgeois Labour Party brought manual workers into parliament and local newspapers, long since disappeared, offered a trade to bright kids who lacked the connections and expensive educations that have now become all but obligatory in mediaworld.

This ‘crisis’ among men and boys, then, is another symptom of the neglect of the working classes. Of the indifference to the decay of blue-collar communities, and the industries that once sustained them. Of the total capture of almost every institution, even those explicitly founded to represent workers’ interests (I’m looking at you, Labour), by the metropolitan middle classes. As class politics has given way to identity politics, the lives of ordinary men – and women – have become ever more inscrutable to those in positions of power and influence. There’s a lesson in this, perhaps, for the few who might be lured by the mirror-image victimhood of the ‘manosphere’. Identitarianism – whether of the left-wing or right-wing variety – is forever a deadend.

--

At the Centre for Social Justice, we have always asked: what is really going on in our homes and communities, and where can we make a difference? We listen to those working on the frontline - the teachers, youth workers, charities, and parents who see, day in and day out, the struggles playing out in the lives of young people. And in recent years, they’ve been telling us the same thing: something is going on with our boys.

Lost Boys is our attempt to find out what that is.

What we have uncovered is stark. Boys are struggling in education, more likely to take their own lives, less likely to get into stable work, and far more likely to be caught up in crime. The numbers don’t lie - something has shifted, and we cannot ignore it any longer. It’s not just about Andrew Tate or online influencers; they are the symptoms, not the cause. The deeper truth is that too many boys are growing up without the guidance, discipline, and purpose they need to thrive.

But let me be clear - this is not a message of despair. Boys and young men have enormous potential. They always have, and they always will. We must stop seeing masculinity as a problem to be solved and start seeing it as a strength to be nurtured. Strength, resilience, responsibility - these are not traits to be suppressed but harnessed for good.

This report, Lost Boys, is not just an exploration of the challenges young men face but the beginning of a journey to offer a hopeful, positive vision for masculinity in Britain. We need strong fathers, mentors, and role models. We need a culture that values the unique contributions of men and supports boys to grow into good, responsible adults.

This is just the first step, but it’s an important one. It sets the scene for the next stage of our work where we will begin to offer solutions to the challenges outlined below.

We must be willing to listen, to act, and to restore hope for the next generation. Because when boys thrive, our whole society benefits.

==

The left - my left - used to be about workers and the lower class. Now they're about elites with the right identity markers, and large tech and media corporations which endorse the same view.

[jerseydeanne]

Tom Slater, editor of Spiked, says Meghan Markle and Prince Harry have become woke mascots for corporate firms

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

They aren’t revolutionaries. They’re bigoted brats

The Columbia cranks rant about killing Zionists one minute and demand hot meals the next.

By: Tom Slater

Published: May 1, 2024

The Columbia cranks rant about killing Zionists one minute and demand hot meals the next.

If you want to know what’s driving the Israelophobic protests and occupations at New York’s Columbia University – and many more elite campuses across America – get a load of this clip that has been doing the rounds on social media over the past 24 hours.

In it, one Johannah King-Slutzky – spokesperson for the occupation of Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, which was forcibly ended by the New York City Police Department last night, with around 100 arrests – issues her and her comrades’ demands. On top of Columbia ‘divesting’ from Israel and such, King-Slutzky also demanded meals and water.

Apparently, Columbia was refusing to allow the students who were then breaking windows and barricading themselves inside Hamilton Hall to access their usual canteen grub. ‘We’re saying that [Columbia is] obligated to provide food to students who have paid for a meal plan here’, King-Slutzky told a sceptical press conference.

When pushed, she said they were only asking that supplies be allowed to be brought in:

‘Do you want students to die of dehydration and starvation or get severely ill, even if they disagree with you?… I mean, it’s crazy to say because we are on an Ivy League campus, but this is like basic humanitarian aid we’re asking for. Like, could people please have a glass of water?’

It’s all there. The whinging cadence, the ‘like’-strewn patter, the obligatory keffiyeh, the industrial-strength victimhood, the bloke in a crop top stood behind her… King-Slutzky and Co are the picture of trustafarians in revolt. Their anti-Israel bigotry is matched only by their profound sense of entitlement. How dare the university not provide adequate refreshments while we are smashing shit up?

There are plenty of people today likening the Columbia meal-planners to their Sixties forebears – in particular, to the Columbia radicals who mounted their own disruptive demos in 1968. Sadly, even some veterans of Sixties activism are flattering today’s privileged brats with the comparison.

But it’s bollocks. When Columbia students occupied Hamilton Hall and other buildings in April 1968, they did so to oppose the Vietnam War and university plans to build a gymnasium in nearby Harlem, which students argued would effectively be segregated. After a week, police moved in and arrested 700 students.

Today, Columbia students and their off-campus heavies aren’t opposing war exactly. Yes, they oppose Israel’s assault on the genocidal lunatics of Hamas, following the Islamist terrorists’ vicious pogrom on 7 October. But they seem pretty relaxed about warfare against the state of Israel. ‘We don’t want no two states / We want all of it!’, they chant. ‘Never forget 7 October… 7 October is about to be every fucking day for you. You ready?’, screeched one racist cunt outside the gates.

Therein lies another crucial difference between ’68 and today. Today’s students aren’t fighting racism, they are luxuriating in it. Khymani James, a leader of the Columbia protests, posted a video to social media the other week saying ‘Zionists don’t deserve to live’. ‘I don’t fight to injure or for there to be a winner or a loser, I fight to kill’, he said, fantasising about having a scrap with one of those awful Jews. (Given the vast, vast majority of Jews are Zionists, that’s really not overegging it.)

Elsewhere, we’ve seen protesters chant ‘Go back to Poland’ at Jewish Columbians and hold up homemade signs, stating ‘Al-Qasam’s [sic] next targets’, pointing to a group of Israeli-flag-waving students. The Al-Qassam Brigades being Hamas’s military wing. An Arab Israeli was also punched outside Columbia recently, by activists brandishing the pro-Hamas triangle symbol.

I’m willing to concede that some of this unvarnished, violent hatred is being carried out by off-campus antifa types, as is routinely alleged by the protesters’ apologists. Not least because King-Slutzky and yer man in his crop top look like they couldn’t fight their way out of a ball pit. But activists’ alarmingly high tolerance for virulent anti-Semitism, their total lack of condemnation of Hamas or its many campus fanboys, speaks volumes.

As does their expectation of water and spag bol and their apparent shock and horror when the police were called in. The Columbia protesters and their supporters are now trying to portray the clearance of Hamilton Hall as an affront to freedom of speech. Free speech is ‘supposed to be prized’ on campus, one student told Al Jazeera last night.

Being concerned about a heavy-handed response to these demos is one thing. The governor-ordered crackdown on protests at University of Texas at Austin, for example, has been nakedly authoritarian and censorious. But there is no inalienable right to break into and occupy university buildings. (Nor is there an inalienable right to constantly harass Jewish students as they try to move around campus.)

As the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) points out, civil disobedience is not the same as expressing an opinion or engaging in peaceful protest. The whole point of it is to break the rules. Indeed, it ‘derives expressive power from the willingness of participants to accept the consequences of breaking the rules’. That these students and junior academics are shocked to be handcuffed for breaking the law reveals a profound sense of entitlement among young ‘radicals’.

We shouldn’t be surprised. FIRE president Greg Lukianoff has pointed to two dispiriting, parallel trends in American universities: a willingness to curtail free speech, all while giving a green light to violent, intolerant protests. At the University of California, Berkeley, where students rioted in 2017 because that tiresome weirdo Milo Yiannopoulous was speaking, the university ‘showed cowardice in its unwillingness to punish the rioters’, writes Lukianoff and Angel Eduardo in a recent op-ed. We saw a similarly rank capitulation at Evergreen State that same year, where marauding students were effectively allowed to chase professors Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying off of campus. Since then, ‘shutdowns and shout-downs have become commonplace’, they write.

Some critics of campus cancel culture have been caught off guard by the pro-Hamas protests. Almost a decade ago, they observe, we were all gawping at the ‘Yale Snowflakes’, those absurd Ivy Leaguers who went into open, teary-eyed revolt because academic Erika Christakis sent them an email saying they should chill out about offensive Halloween costumes. How did babyish offence-taking give way to open support for anti-Semitic terrorists?

But it all makes a perverse kind of sense. Students taught that freedom of speech is a form of violence have begun to see violence as a form of free speech. Young radicals reared on a crude, conspiratorial racial identity politics have begun to apply it to geopolitics, with predictably anti-Semitic results. A new generation of elite youth, overprotected and indulged in equal measure, have come to think they can do no wrong.

So let’s retire the Sixties comparisons. In 1964, when Mario Savio – civil-rights activist and student leader of the Free Speech Movement – was leading a campaign of civil disobedience, aimed at liberating Berkeley students from censorship, his cause was just and he was happy to suffer the consequences of his methods. ‘There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious’, he famously said, ‘you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels… you’ve got to make it stop!’. Meal plans did not get a mention.

At the same time, let’s not pretend that today’s revolting students just appeared, fully formed, from the womb. They are the products of an academic and upper-class culture that has kindled their prejudices and inflamed their intolerance. They aren’t revolutionaries. They’re bigoted brats. And they’ve been pandered to for far too long.

==

Students taught that freedom of speech is a form of violence have begun to see violence as a form of free speech.

This is an important point. The people who insisted that "words are violence" and that "misgendering" someone is as good as murdering them, are busy trying to pretend that their violence and destruction is merely a form of protected free speech and opinion expression.

It's not. They're trying to gaslight society.

If you're too stupid or too ideologically compromised to stand up and go get a glass of water, you probably should remove yourself from the gene pool.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Batley, blasphemy and the price of cowardice

Three years on, we need a reckoning with Islamic zealotry.

By: Tom Slater

Published: Mar 30, 2024

‘Forte non Ignave’, ‘Bravely not cowardly’, is the motto of Batley Grammar, a free school in West Yorkshire, founded in 1612. How grimly ironic, then, that three years ago, it became the site of one of the most craven capitulations to religious bigotry Britain has seen since the Satanic Verses controversy.

On Monday 22 March 2021, a religious-studies teacher at Batley Grammar showed his pupils cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, as part of a lesson on blasphemy. The cartoons were from Charlie Hebdo, the satirical French magazine whose staff paid the ultimate price for their supposed blasphemy in 2015, when two al-Qaeda gunmen showed up at their offices.

The cartoons had been on the syllabus for at least two years, and no one had batted an eyelid. Up to that point, Batley Grammar – a secular state school – had no reason to suspect it should have to respect Islamic blasphemy codes, especially when teaching about religion, free speech and blasphemy. It was in for a rude awakening.

‘The lesson descended into chaos as pupils took out their phones and attempted to film the teacher’, according to one report. The teacher, according to another, had a heated phone call with the father of one Muslim pupil. Then things spun out of control. Word got out online. Protesters – a mix of parents and activists from Leeds, Rochdale and beyond – pitched up outside the school gates, shutting down the school for a number of days.

All the while, the teacher was menaced by death threats. A local Islamic charity, Purpose of Life, published a statement, outing the teacher and comparing his indiscretion – bizarrely – to the brutalisation of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. A group called Muslim Action Forum also published his name, alongside more lurid libels, accusing the teacher of ‘inciting hatred’ and accusing his supporters of ‘blind hatred of the Muslim community’. These groups were, in effect, putting a target on the back of a man they had likely never met. Young men were spotted knocking at the door and trying the handle of the teacher’s house, where he lived with his wife and their children.

The bigoted caricature bore no relationship to reality, of course. According to the teacher’s Muslim neighbour, his was a nice family, who bought cards and sweets for the Muslim kids in the neighbourhood during Eid. Even so, no one should be expected to go through what this teacher went through – facing all the violent intolerance and hysteria of a medieval village, only spread far and wide by social media. He spoke to Dame Sara Khan, for her new report on modern-day mob censorship, which was published by the UK government this week. His treatment, Khan writes, left the teacher feeling suicidal.

He feared for his life, and with good reason. Five months before that fateful religious-studies class in West Yorkshire, French teacher Samuel Paty was beheaded in a Paris suburb by an Islamic extremist. Paty’s ‘crime’ was almost identical: showing Charlie Hebdo cartoons to his pupils in a lesson on freedom of expression. Adil Shahzad, an imam from Bradford who shot straight to Batley to lead the protests, warned darkly at the time that Britain risked ‘becoming like France’. Shahzad insisted Muslims should make their feelings known in the ‘democratic way’. But it turns out he has a history of praising murderous anti-blasphemy groups in Pakistan.

Where Britain after Batley certainly differed from France after Paty was in the reaction. Thousands took to the streets in France, in solidarity with the slain teacher and in support of free expression. The murder inspired President Emmanuel Macron to mount a personal crusade against Islamist extremism. In Britain, there was just capitulation. The school suspended the teacher and penned a grovelling apology. For some reason, a West Yorkshire Police officer was enlisted to read it out to the protesters. All this was welcomed heartily by Labour’s Tracy Brabin, then MP for Batley and Spen. She said she was ‘pleased that the school has recognised it was inappropriate and apologised’. After an investigation, the teacher was cleared of any personal wrongdoing, but the cartoons were removed from the syllabus. The mob won. And the teacher is still in hiding.

None of this has calmed tensions, of course. It has only emboldened the hardliners. Capitulation always does. There’s been a string of similar blasphemy scandals since. In 2022, Sunni Muslim protesters managed to get Cineworld to pull screenings of The Lady of Heaven, a Shia-made film they deemed to be blasphemous. In 2023, another school, less than 10 miles from Batley Grammar, this time in Wakefield, found itself in the zealots’ crosshairs, after a schoolboy brought a Koran to school and accidentally scuffed it. He too was bombarded with death threats. In the end, the police took no action against those trying to intimidate a child. A child who also happened to be autistic. But they did record a ‘non-crime hate incident’ against him.

A hardworking teacher forever looking over his shoulder. Shias censored at the behest of sectarians. A schoolboy threatened with death and arson. This is the cost of our cowardice, of our institutions’ inability to make clear that no one can expect to have their views forcefielded from criticism and that a free society cannot tolerate violence and threats in response to mere speech, words, cartoons. Blasphemy trials are back – only they are conducted by the mob, rather than a court. We’ve sent out a signal – loud and clear – that threats and violence and intimidation work.

And we’ve done so due to some genuinely bigoted assumptions about British Muslims. The first is that they are incapable of being citizens of liberal democracies – that, unlike any other religious group, they should expect to have their heretics burned, or at least punished. The second misconception is that the screeching rent-a-mobs that now show up whenever a ‘blasphemy’ scandal erupts are the authentic voice of British Muslims. They’re not. In fact, British Muslims and ex-Muslims are often on the sharp end of anti-blasphemy intolerance. In 2016, Glasgow’s Asad Shah and Rochdale’s Jalal Uddin both lost their lives, within weeks of each other, for their respective ‘blasphemies’. Hatun Tash, an ex-Muslim turned Christian preacher, has been stabbed and been the target of a terror plot for railing against her former faith. Thankfully, she’s still alive.

Three years on from Batley Grammar, we need to fight for the right to blaspheme all over again, before any more Brits – Muslim, non-Muslim or ex-Muslim – pay the price for our cowardice.

==

Said it before and I'll say it again: start revoking citizenship and deporting those who make these threats. They're trying to make our liberal societies into their Islamic hellholes.

[jerseydeanne]

When will Harry and Meghan stop hectoring us?

When will Harry and Meghan stop hectoring us?

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[emblematik]

[An Agnotology of Welfare Reform

Ever since welfare-to-work programmes became ‘common sense’ among think-tank researchers, journalists, policy elites, and politicians (who, together, have successfully convinced the electorate that their taxes are being used to allow the ‘underclass’ to stay at home watching daytime television with their illegitimate offspring instead of work), a substantial interdisciplinary empirical and theoretical literature has emerged that offers irrefutable evidence that paternalist welfare reforms involving coercion, compulsion, and sanctions do not lift people out of poverty, but rather remove them from welfare rolls, expand dramatically the contingent of the working and non-working poor, and affect their daily existence negatively in almost every way imaginable, aggravating extant class, racial and gender fractures in society. With respect to conditionality, welfare economist Wim van Oorschot has assessed the alleged benefits against the burdens in exhaustive detail and finds no evidence to say that ‘sharp’ incentives have a positive effect amongst those in receipt of welfare. Furthermore, he reports that sanctions actually serve to disrupt any search for meaningful activity, and intensify any adverse attitudes to employment. Furthermore, there is no evidence that vast numbers of people are suffering from a habit of “worklessness”. It almost goes without saying that many of those not in employment work very hard: to care for frail relatives or children, or deal with episodic disabilities. To quote Guy Standing, “building social policy on the basis of a tiny minority being ‘scroungers’ or ‘lazy’ is expensive illiberal folly.”

The existence of this evidence-base (if we must use such a term) raises the critically important question of how successive governments, especially the current UK Coalition, deliberately set aside the evidence that calls into question their proposals for reform, and places those reforms in a different light (in this case: dubious, flawed and damaging). Critical social scientists working in the style of institutional political economy would usually approach such a question about evidence/policy within the analytical register of a ‘politics of knowledge production’, focusing on the circulation of policy knowledges and discourses (‘policy mobilities’) in the neoliberalised context of a marked acceleration in ‘policy transfer’. There have been considerable analytical and political advances along these lines, and I have no wish to offer a critique of such scholarship, much of which is of inestimable value. But as the White Paper discussed above has morphed into a welfare reform bill currently working its way through Parliament, it seems prudent to expose and scrutinise the institutional ignorance that lies at its core; an ignorance that is not one of blissful unawareness or of innocent absence of knowledge, but rather one of rational calculation. This can be achieved not from the starting point of a politics of knowledge production, but rather from what Robert Proctor calls an agnotology, defined as the cultural production of ignorance. The etymological derivation is the Greek word, agn
sis, meaning “not knowing”, which Paul Gilroy draws upon to argue the following:

We need a better understanding of the relationship between information and power... a new corrective disciplinary perspective that interprets the power that arises from the command of not knowing, from the management of forms of ignorance that have been strategically created and deployed, and institutionally amplified.

As Londa Schiebinger has explained, agnotology

serves as a counterweight to more traditional concerns for epistemology, refocusing questions about ‘how we know’ to include questions about what we do not know, and why not. Ignorance is often not merely the absence of knowledge but an outcome of cultural and political struggle.

This is an apt analytical framework to interpret the workings and influence of the CSJ with respect to welfare reform, particularly as that think tank makes claims of “rigorous research by a dedicated Secretariat” that “traveled the length and breadth of the country to speak to as many people as possible.” Duncan-Smith offered these reflections from his own travels:

I was shown....what happens when family life breaks down and when the only male role model for a boy is the drug dealer or the gang leader. Too many of our children are growing up in sad communities where failed education is hereditary and worklessness is a way of life. ...[W]hether you are a single parent or a married couple, the only real way out of poverty for your family is work. As the fabric of society crumbles at the margins what has been left behind is an underclass, where life is characterised by dependency, addiction, debt and family breakdown. ..[T]he inner city wasn’t a place; it was a state of mind - there is a mentality of entrapment, where aspiration and hope are for other people, who live in another place.

Tempting though it is to read this “broken society” narrative as the indignant reflections of a sheltered millionaire politician who has suddenly found a moral conscience on his road to Damascus, such a reading would miss the mark politically and analytically. Viewed through an agnotological lens, the CSJ publications recast the public debate on poverty, welfare and unemployment in three ways. First, they divert attention away from the structural and institutional failures that lie behind poverty (and from the nature and extent of inequality in Britain). Second, they manufacture public doubt with respect to those causal factors (‘not knowing’). Third, they ignore any alternative approaches to the problem of poverty (and welfare) in Britain.

On the question of alternatives, it is instructive to consider what is never considered or mentioned in any of the CSJ publications (all of which boast intellectual rigour and comprehensiveness in their ‘research’ and purport to be “wide-ranging” and “radical” in their policy recommendations). For instance, there is no discussion of the ongoing efforts to secure ‘living wages’ in London and beyond (which both Tory London mayor Boris Johnson and indeed David Cameron himself applauded during the 2010 UK General Election), wages which would provide more of an incentive to work than any reduction in the taper rate or tax reward for marriage.

[...]

The strategic deployment of ignorance is best exemplified by the CSJ’s insistence not on job availability or economic malaise but on family breakdown as the principal root of all poverty in Britain:

If there were less family breakdown and lone parenthood, there would be fewer children taken into care, less homelessness, less drug addiction, less crime, less demand on the health services, less need for remedial teaching in schools, better average educational performance and less unemployment. All of these would save the taxpayer money and some would contribute to better economic performance in the country as a whole.

Correspondingly, it seems as if there is no social problem for which promoting marriage is not the answer. A brief visit to the CSJ website finds the think tank desperate to guard against any views to the contrary [...] Today, the fact that marriage is the official anti-poverty policy recommendation of the CSJ to the Conservative Party speaks volumes about the truncation and distortion of political understanding in respect of the ongoing articulation of poverty, social class and space in British society.]

Tom Slater, "The Myth of 'Broken Britain': Welfare Reform and the Production of Ignorance"

[arcticdementor]

Kyle Rittenhouse and the hysteria of the elites

Under extraordinary pressure, the jurors showed us the quiet wisdom of the people.

America’s liberal elites are broken. They are now totally deranged and detached from reality. That’s become brutally clear in the past 24 hours. While we all knew it was coming, the collective media and political meltdown over the acquittal of 18-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse has revealed a ruling class so warped, so unprincipled, so governed by partisan prejudice, that it essentially lives in a parallel universe.

…

As the trial wore on, it became all the more clear that the narrative cast about Rittenhouse and that night last August was utterly false. A narrative neatly summed up by Democratic congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, who said Rittenhouse was a ‘17-year-old white supremacist domestic terrorist’ who ‘shot and killed two people who had assembled to affirm the value, dignity and worth of black lives’.

There is no evidence that Rittenhouse has white-supremacist leanings. Unless being pro-cop and pro-Trump counts, which apparently it does for many allegedly intelligent people. The idea that he was some out-of-towner who went to Kenosha just to take aim at protesters is also nonsense. While he lives in nearby Antioch, Illinois, his father, grandmother, aunt and uncle live in Kenosha. He also had a job there and was staying with a friend that night. Those he clashed with weren’t all ‘protesters’, either. Joseph Rosenbaum was, by all accounts, a deeply disturbed individual who went downtown that night to look for trouble.

But, with some notable exceptions aside, much of the great and good doubled down on their ridiculous takes even as the trial disproved them. ‘White supremacy maintains its cover’, thundered one MSNBC contributor in the wake of the acquittal. The fact that the three people Rittenhouse shot were white continues to escape the attention of many, including the UK’s Independent newspaper, which told its readers yesterday that Rittenhouse had killed two black men.

…

For much of the American elite, the Rittenhouse trial was not about proving him guilty beyond reasonable doubt. It wasn’t about trying to uncover the truth of what happened that awful night. It was another showdown in some fantasy battle against white supremacy that exists entirely in their imaginations. The jurors were being called on not to weigh the evidence and testimony, but to deliver the ‘right’ verdict and so strike a blow against evil.

The weight of all this on the men and women of the jury must have been immense. According to the New York Times, jurors thanked sheriff’s deputies yesterday for putting up a folding screen that blocked them from public view. ‘It helps calm my nerves’, one said. The ‘media coverage is insane’, said another.

…

In the face of all of this, these 12 men and women did what corporate media and many politicians fundamentally failed to do throughout the Kyle Rittenhouse saga: focus on the facts rather than the narrative. Gun-toting teenagers won’t protect America from the hysteria that is ripping it apart. But the quiet wisdom of ordinary people just might.