First we got women priests, then women bishops, and now many clergy would accept a woman as the Archbishop of Canterbury.[1] No doubt some people, such as the women priests and bishops, are actively lobbying for it.
This seems to be connected with the way that in 2020 Donald Trump promised to nominate a woman for the next available place on the Supreme Court, Joe Biden vowed to choose a female running-mate, and Boris Johnson indicated that the Conservatives would seek to make half their members of parliament women, an aim later confirmed by the party’s chairman. The principle seems to be women, women, women. If a top position was never occupied by a woman, it must be occupied by one now. If an important job could go to a man or a woman, it must go to a woman. Men must be prevented from standing for election so that women can be elected.
It’s as though someone thinks that with women in charge, everything would be better. The idea is hardly new. I remember that when a letter appeared in the New Statesman in the 1990s saying exactly this, it struck me as unoriginal. Presumably the magazine only printed it to keep a familiar idea in the public mind.
In those days the idea needed an argument to back it up, so the letter writer stated that women were the gentler and more peace-loving sex, therefore a society run by women would be gentler and more peace-loving. He might as well have argued that society should be run by dogs because then it would have a better sense of smell. Not only is there no reason to think that a leader’s attributes will rub off on the rest of the population, or in this case on its rougher and more war-like half; it is unclear that gentleness and a love of peace are the main things to look for in a leader. What about vision, determination and a willingness to work long hours, or indeed an ability to lead? Nor are female leaders likely to be popular. The most well-established finding in the psychology of the workplace is that both sexes prefer a male boss to a female one. There is also the question of how many women want to be leaders.
Putting women in charge because they are women is not recommended by experience. Cressida Dick as Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police from 2017 to 2022 was more interested in hate speech than in crime, nor would she at any point in her career have been able to perform such a basic task of a constable as catching an escaping burglar and wrestling him to the ground. Dany Cotton, a health-and-safety expert who led the London Fire Brigade from 2017 to 2019 without being qualified to drive a fire engine, had to keep popping into a nearby house to use the toilet when she should have been supervising as a tower block burned down.[2]
How is it then that today many people find it obvious that we need women leaders? It is down to what Bertrand Russell called a Sunday truth, by which he meant a notion few believe but that everyone must profess on pain of being cast out of society.[3] Exploiting the tradition of chivalry, early feminists seeded the idea that women were simply better than men in any way that could matter. Their followers cultivated this as a Sunday truth, and now we all accept it. If women are better than men, it follows that we want them running things, which means that when looking for leaders we don’t need to consider men unless no woman can be found. The search for the best candidate becomes a search for the best female candidate.
Another of our Sunday truths is that Black people are better than White people. This was cultivated by anti-racists at the same time as the feminist Sunday truth was cultivated by feminists, where by feminists and anti-racists I don’t just mean activists but also the average journalist, priest or teacher. As with the feminist Sunday truth, the anti-racist one has led to those it champions being given senior positions, as when a young Black man was made president of the Royal Institute of British Architects recently despite being undistinguished as an architect,[4] and when another, also this year, was made a professor at Cambridge despite being mentally retarded.[5]Presumably they weren’t the best candidates but were thought to be the best Black ones.
On the basis that Black people are better than White people, the police have spent forty years coming up with policies aimed at getting more of them into the force or speeding them up the ranks.[6] Various home secretaries have introduced similar schemes.[7] Illustrating the syndrome, in 2021 the then home secretary unveiled a scheme for fast-tracking non-White police inspectors to the rank of superintendent,[8] despite the fact that a Black chief superintendent had not long before been found guilty of handling indecent images of children, a crime no White chief superintendent had been convicted of.[9]At the very moment Priti Patel announced her initiative, the case of another Black superintendent accused of gross misconduct was being heard.[10] Again, no White superintendent had been alleged to have spent £5,000 using someone else’s credit card during a conference where his allowance was £105, putting the spree down as expenses. But nothing a Black police officer does can threaten the Sunday truth that makes home secretaries want them promoted unnaturally fast.
The feminist and the anti-racist Sunday truths can’t necessarily both be acted on at once, as seen in the fact that Cressida Dick and Dany Cotton, although female, were White, while Muyiwa Oki (the architect) and Jason Arday (the professor), though Black, are male. We have to live with such anomalies because there simply aren’t enough Black women to fill every important post.
When feminism and anti-racism clash, anti-racism wins because it is higher up the politically-correct pecking order. Thus when a woman was killed by a White policeman in 2021,[11] feminists went on for a month about the danger men pose to women, but when a woman was murdered and her body chopped up by a failed asylum seeker from Iraq a few weeks earlier,[12] they hadn’t said a word.[13] If feminism had been the senior ideology, the fact that the chopper-up was non-White would have been trumped by the fact that the body he chopped up was that of a woman. Nor was the value of the victims of the Muslim rape gangs as girls enough to get them into the papers given that their rapists were non-White. The news Blackout went on for decades, during which probably over a million White girls were victimised.[14] Again feminism deferred to anti-racism.
People have been getting jobs on the basis of Sunday truths since the 1990s, when political correctness first came to us. Janice Fiamengo, a retired English professor from Canada, recalls that when applying for her first university post in 1997 she found herself on two shortlists where every candidate was female.[15]She was later to see application after application from brilliant young men thrown into the bin by selectors. At her university, anyone who hired a White man had to explain themselves to the dean.
Clearly, unless the best candidate happens to be Black or female, selecting only from these privileged classes means picking inferior people. To the examples of Cressida Dick et al can be added that of the female theoretical physicist who was given a job at Padua University in preference to a male one whose papers had been cited in the relevant journals ten times as often as hers.[16]
Another effect of the practice is the normalisation of dishonesty. When in 2018 the rejected physicist, Alessandro Strumia, gave a talk at CERN (the European Council for Nuclear Research) demonstrating the degree to which female physicists’ careers are artificially boosted, feminists did not greet it with contrite promises to mend their ways but by condemning Strumia in the strongest terms. So happy were they with their shady practices that they felt entitled to lambast anyone who exposed them. Janice Fiamengo has discussed the anti-man discrimination that has gone on “at the same time as feminists have been complaining non-stop that more needs to be done to hire women into all academic fields”.
Occasionally, those who intend to take affirmative action do not conceal the fact but trumpet it, as Donald Trump and Joe Biden did. “Look at us!”, they say. “We promise not to look for the best person; we’re going to choose a woman!” Apparently they valued the support of feminists more than that of anyone still attached to the old idea of justice.
This is not the place to undertake a comparison of the sexes or the races to see why White men might beat women and non-Whites in fair competitions, but two comparisons of the sexes undertaken by others can be noted. The Island was an American reality show where a group of women and a group of men were left on an uninhabited island to see how they would cope.[17] A girl who described herself as “all about being independent and not relying on men for anything” had to admit that fire was important. She noted that the men had made a dry storage area for their firewood and had everything they needed to cook, whereas the women had been unable to light a fire. Unfortunately there were things they needed from the men, she said. “It’s just so annoying.” What annoyed the men was the way that whenever the women came to them for something, as they did continually, they acted as though they deserved it. Also, when the women reflected on the fact that they had had no sleep or food and were wet and frozen, they blamed the men. When one of them started rolling logs — their intended firewood — into the sea, a man said: “We’re dealing with hormonal, irrational women. It’s not even worth trying to negotiate at this point.” Rather pathetically, the presenter tried to suggest that the experiment told us nothing about the sexes.[18]
In a similar British programme, some women were dropped off on one island and some men on another.[19] The women stayed at their landing point talking about urination before one suggested having a conference. Eventually they went off to find a better beach until one of them saw a snake, screamed and ran away. “You are not going to die”, another told her firmly. “But it came right towards me!” Not having found a beach by nightfall — it hadn’t occurred to them to follow the coast — they stopped in the jungle, where they saw a spider. Again the would-be organiser suggested a planning session. The next day there was a drama. “Guys, we’ve had a fall!” A woman was writhing on a rock. The aspiring organiser said: “Can we form a circle or something so we can have a chat?” Some of the group set out on another expedition to find a good place for a camp and got lost while the others let the fire it had taken them five hours to make go out when it started raining. The woman who had fallen down had a fit of some kind. “Come and sit in the comfy chair”, said another, guiding her to a fallen tree. A woman noticed how every time her group caught a fish there was a great celebration, whereas the men caught fish every day as though they expected to.
Such shows don’t prove anything, but they enable one to see how societies could have evolved to be organised and led by men, whose natural competence would only be increased by the knowledge that the women would blame them if anything went wrong.
An anecdote that brings in race as well as sex concerns a recruitment agency’s experiment with “blind recruitment”, where applicants were shortlisted in ignorance of both characteristics.[20]Only their merit was appraised. The agency abandoned the practice when it “selected an all-White, male field of candidates. All the diverse candidates failed to progress to interview”, wrote the company’s managing director.[21] This wasn’t the desired result, so the agency went back to discriminating by race and sex.
It is said that the reason the Ancient Greeks kept women out of politics is that they didn’t want to bring chaos and destruction down on their societies. Apparently the function of figures like Medea and Clytemnestra in their myths was to remind them what could happen if they weren’t careful. Presumably the reason we insist on pushing women into positions of power no matter how unsuitable they may seem to be, and do the same with Black people, is that we have an unconscious desire to destroy our societies.
Some would say that this analysis is wrong. It’s not our doing: feminism and anti-racism were foisted on us by outsiders. It is true that it was Jews who gave us these ideologies, but as Yuri Bezmenov said — a Soviet propagandist who in 1970 defected to the West, which he tried to warn about the trouble that was coming to it — you cannot subvert an enemy who does not want to be subverted.[22] All the Soviets’ efforts to lead the West to ruin would have been to no avail had it not been going in that direction of its own accord. It stands to reason. If someone tells you to jump off the top of a tall building, why would you do it unless you wanted to kill yourself? The best you could call it, if the person telling you to jump had worked on your weaknesses to make it seem like a good idea, would be assisted suicide.
If warnings about feminism and anti-racism were ever sounded, they were silenced by the feminist and anti-racist media thirty years ago as our professional communicators disseminated and then enforced their Sunday truths. It is too late for warnings now. Women are already in charge almost wherever you look, some in the most unexpected places. Recently the School of Engineering Education at Purdue university was being run by a woman, whose main idea was that rigour was overrated. If less emphasis was placed on it, there would be more female engineers, she argued.[23] CERN is run by a woman, as is the United States Soccer Federation. A snooker referee or chess commentator is as likely to be a woman as a man these days. Feminism’s Sunday truth incorporates the idea that women are just as interested in chess and snooker as are men, so with their general superiority it is natural that they should regulate and pass judgement on the men who actually play the games.
Feminism has met with success not only in engineering education and men’s sports, as well as in such fields as academia, journalism and general punditry, but also in the police and armed forces. In 2018, the following top positions connected with the British police were occupied by women: Director General of the National Crime Agency, head of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, chair of the College of Policing, chair of the Independent Police Complaints Commission, and president of the Police Superintendents Association.[24] It must have seemed obvious to those who gave women these posts that they would be more suitable for them than any man could be. In the spring of 2020, England had two female chief constables out of 46; eighteen months later it had fifteen.[25] Of thirteen male chief constables who retired in that period, all were succeeded by women.
Although the British armed forces shrink all the time, the Royal Navy has room for a female rear admiral and half a dozen female commodores, the Royal Air Force has a female air marshal backed up by seven female air vice-marshals, and the Army has a lady lieutenant general, two lady major generals and a dozen lady brigadeers.
It is only a matter of time before an episcopal cat fight breaks out over the appointment of the first female Archbishop of Canterbury.
[1] The New Culture Forum, Sept. 2nd 2023, “ULEZ: Punishing the Poor. Time for Notting Hill Carnival to End? Is Britain a Christian Nation?”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrIG3F9_cFM.
[2] See Dany Cotton’s statement to the Grenfell Tower inquiry: “Statement of: COTTON, DANY”, Feb. 21st 2018, https://grenfellactiongroup.files.wordpress.com/2019/11/witness-statement-lfb-dany-cotton-met00012492-.pdf, p. 27: “I recall that a very nice couple let me use their loo a few times. … Although there were toilet facilities in the ‘Rest Centre’ it was just too far to keep going backwards and forwards”.
[3] Bertrand Russell, 1950, Unpopular Essays, London: George Allen & Unwin, p. 107, in “An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish”.
[4] History Debunked, Sept. 1st 2023, “Why it is trendy in the modern world to have people of colour in prominent positions”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hquq7mDRgU0. Muyiwa Oki is already calling for more “diversity” in architecture. The industry is far from representative, he finds, and has “significant ethnicity gaps”. He will champion measures to make architecture “fairer, more welcoming and inclusive”.
[5] Jason Arday, a sociologist, didn’t speak until he was eleven and was illiterate until he was eighteen. He has still not attained full literacy. Summarising one of his articles, he wrote: “This paper employs a Critical Race Theory (CRT) a storytelling method, which operates as a counter-narrative in attempting to conceptualise my own professional experiences of negotiating normative Whiteness, diversifying Eurocentric curricula and conceptualising the racial mirco-aggression”. The first few words contain one mistake of grammar and two of punctuation. The sentence makes no sense. How can a theory attempt to conceptualise a person’s experience of conceptualising something? What is “the racial mirco-aggression”? Arday claims that his life was profoundly affected by the news that Nelson Mandela had been released from prison, which happened when he was four. (History Debunked, Feb. 24th 2023, “A boy who could not read and write until he was 18 becomes a professor at Cambridge University”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYwkgmJtBeE.)
[6] In the 1980s they lowered their admission standards for non-Whites after the Scarman report told them to acquire more Black officers (Lord Scarman, 1982 [1981], The Scarman Report: The Brixton Disorders, 10-12 April 1981, Harmondsworth: Pelican-Penguin, Paragraph 5.13. Several officers express their disapproval of the resulting racial discrimination in Roger Graef, 1989, Talking Blues: The Police in Their Own Words, London: Collins Harvill, pp. 134-38.) In 1996 they offered sub-standard young Black men a free ten-week course to help them pass the recruitment tests (Telegraph, Feb. 26th 1996, “Police woo unemployed Blacks”). In 1998 they launched a scheme to “attract, develop and retain minority ethnic recruits, particularly at a senior level” (Metropolitan Police, March 15th 1999, A Police Service for All the People).
[7] For example, Jack Straw in 1999.
[8] History Debunked, Nov. 3rd 2021, “Home Secretary Priti Patel wants police officers promoted for skin colour, rather than aptitude”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDsBRxlVX54.
[9] Robyn Williams (a woman) was convicted in 2019.
[10] In due course Chief Superintendent Paul Martin was found guilty of this and other offences. Non-White police officers have always been investigated for misconduct at a higher rate than Whites, as have non-White solicitors and doctors. (Police: BBC, June 30th 2020, “My 30-year struggle with racism in the Metropolitan police”, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-53224394; solicitors: History Debunked, Dec. 4th 2021, “How increasing diversity and inclusion in professions can lead to undesirable consequences”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BVr8VqDjJE; doctors: Telegraph, Feb. 23rd 1999, “NHS stands guilty of racism too, say doctors”, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/htmlContent.jhtml?html=/archive/1999/02/23/ncon423.html.
[11] Sarah Everard by Wayne Cozens.
[12] Lorraine Cox by Azam Mangori.
[13] Nigel Farage, March 17th 2021, “Why won’t mainstream media talk about this?”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFpQqdfiChE.
[14] When in 2016 Telford joined the list of towns where Muslim rape gangs had been identified, it had 155,000 inhabitants, of whom under two per cent were Muslims. There were thought to be 1,500 victims or ex-victims there at this point. If Telford had an average total population of 150,000 in the conservatively estimated 35 years during which the gangs operated (not that they are likely to have stopped), and had an average Muslim population of 1.4 per cent in that period, then in those years it acquired victims at the rate of 54 for every hundred Muslims. Assuming, as seems to be the case, that Muslim rape gangs operated in every town with an appreciable Muslim population, then at this rate, with an average of 2.3 million Muslims in Britain during those years, in 2016 there were likely to have been 1.25 million White girls who were being or had been victimised by the gangs.
[15] Studio Brule Archive, June 12th 2020, “Anti-intellectualism in Academia with Janice Fiamengo — Coffee with Steve”, https://odysee.com/@StudioBruleArchive:e/anti-intellectualism-in-academia-with:4.
[16] Studio Brule, Nov. 16th 2018, “Fiamengo File #91: Physics Under SJW Attack: The Case of Alessandro Strumia”, https://odysee.com/@StudioBruleArchive:e/physics-under-sjw-attack-the-case-of:4.
[17] Sambo The Deplorable Coon, Sept. 20th 2018, “Island Competition — Women vs. Men”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2ZFDQiP4jM. (Video no longer available. Some of the same material is at Ace Nate, Jan. 9th 2023, “The Survival Experiment That EXPOSED Female Entitlement”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=073u84xczNI.)
[18] Bear Grylls said meaninglessly: “Image or clothes or makeup, whatever our sort of stuff is, you know what? It’s not what we are. What we are is beyond all of that.” Having set up a battle of the sexes, he said: “I’m being quite careful not to make it a battle of the sexes”. Survival wasn’t gender-specific, he opined. Women might approach stuff differently, but really it was about heart and character.
[19] Carl Wassermann, Jan. 25th 2018, “Women try to Survive on an island without men”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCyWOGg_bik. (Video no longer available. This could refer to the same programme: Think Before You Sleep, Dec. 22nd 2020, “Survival: Men vs Women”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzCO0G8AGLU.)
[20] History Debunked, Dec. 7th 2021, “The great ‘diversity and inclusivity’ in employment and education scam; bait and switch in action”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vQU2bKPAWg.
[21] Peridot, no date (accessed 2022), “Blind recruitment? I don’t see it”, https://www.peridotpartners.co.uk/blind-recruitment-process/.
[22] Amit Sengupta, Jan. 9th 2020, “Understanding the Political Scenario of INDIA,CANADA,JAPAN,CHINA,USA, FRANCE etc.”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9TviIuXPSE&t=16s, recorded approx. 1985.
[23] This was Donna Riley. See video embedded in EEVblog Electronics Community Forum, March 1st 2018, “Topic: Feminist Professor Thinks ‘Rigor’ is Evil”, https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/feminist-professor-thinks-_rigor_-is-evil/.
[24] They were, in that order, Lynne Owens, Sarah Thornton, Shirley Pearce, Anne Owers, Irene Curtis.
[25] History Debunked, July 8th 2021, “Women in command; female leaders in the police and army”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1i6pBj6dYMw. Including Wales, after another six months there were 19 out 49 (Telegraph, Jan. 9th 2023, “Record 40 per cent of chief constables are now women amid anti-misogyny drive”, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/01/09/record-40-per-cent-chief-constables-now-women-amid-anti-misogyny/).
