Baker - I Thought Better of You!

The brain-frying hijack of decency What if the England squad had given the Black Power salute as a protest against racism? Melanie Phillips Jul 14 Demonstration in support of Marcus Rashford after his mural was defaced in Withington, Manchester Even more chilling than the way in which brains are being fried by evil dogma that appropriates the language of virtue is that so many in public life are falling into line with it. Thus the influential Conservative MP Steve Baker says the Tories should rethink their opposition to “taking the knee” and “get alongside” the England football team that performed this gesture in the Euro matches. As the Guardian reported: “Much as we can’t be associated with calls to defund the police, we urgently need to challenge our own attitude to people taking a knee,” Baker wrote in a message to MPs on the Conservatives Against Racism, For Equality group. “I fear we are in danger of misrepresenting our own heart for those who suffer injustice.” On BBC Radio’s Today, Baker said further:   It is one thing to boo the referee with a marginal decision, but it is another to boo brave, black players who are saying no to racism and bravely going out on the field to take a knee and say we are expressing our solidarity with those who are suffering racism. Baker has lost the moral plot big time.  A grave injustice is indeed being done — but not to the genuflecting footballers. It’s being done to those who are now being defamed as “racist” for opposing taking the knee — or even for failing to condemn those who have opposed it.  Thus the Home Secretary Priti Patel — herself a woman of Indian descent who has been regularly subjected to racial abuse — is being monstered as a racist for refusing to condemn those who booed the England players for taking the knee. The Times reported: One member of the England squad, Tyrone Mings, said of Patel: “You don’t get to stoke the fire at the beginning of the tournament by labelling our anti-racism message as ‘Gesture Politics’ & then pretend to be disgusted when the very thing we’re campaigning against, happens.” The allegation that Patel stoked a racist fire is disgusting and unjust. All booing is bad form. But while some of those booing the England squad at the Euros may have been bigots, the players weren’t being booed because of their skin colour but because taking the knee is rightly understood to be in itself a viciously bigoted gesture.   As Mings fails to appreciate, it’s not just consistent but morally imperative both to oppose racist bigotry against the players, which has been appalling (although much of it after Sunday’s final was said to have come from abroad), and oppose the racist bigotry behind the gesture of taking the knee.  As I wrote here for my premium subscribers, taking the knee originated in 2016 with an American football player, Colin Kaepernick. He said he wouldn’t rise to his feet to show pride in the flag of a country that oppressed black people. So instead of standing to respect the US national anthem, he and fellow sportsmen sank to one knee.  It was thus a deliberate insult to their country and its culture. Taking the knee then became the symbolic gesture of Black Lives Matter, a violent, insurrectionary movement that is anti-white, anti-west and anti-Jew. And so the claim that adopting its iconic gesture is merely a protest against racism is the very opposite of the truth.  For these activists and the agenda they promote denounce all of white society as inherently, systemically racist. That’s why the wave of activism provoked by last year’s Black Lives Matter demonstrations following the death of George Floyd in the US has involved the toppling of historic statues, the defamation of Britain and the west as inherently colonialist and racist, and the harassment, cancelling and attempted reprogramming of people who are being required to confess to their original sin of white supremacism. Baker and others, however, say the England players were simply making a protest against racism. The revolutionary Marxist agenda of Black Lives Matter is irrelevant, they say, since the players clearly don’t subscribe to it.  Indeed, there’s no reason to doubt that by taking the knee the footballers intended only to show solidarity against racism. But that doesn’t meet the objection. For the gesture has become as emblematic of Black Lives Matter, and the agenda it promotes, as is the raised clenched fist of the Black Power movement, the secret handshake of the Freemasons or the outstretched arm of German Nazism. Taking the knee inescapably lines up the genuflecting footballers and their supporters with an agenda that is anti-white, anti-west, anti-capitalist, anti-police and anti-Jew.  Those doubting the association of the footballers’ gesture with Black Lives Matter should just look at the picture above of those who were rightly appalled at the defacing of the mural of the England squad’s Marcus Rashford — but who rallied behind a forest of Black Lives Matter placards. Some or most of those demonstrators, like the England footballers themselves, may believe they are merely protesting against racism. But people with good intentions often support really bad causes. Social policies such as sexual lifestyle choice, elective lone parenthood or cultural relativism have been promoted by idealistic liberals — usually on the grounds of “human rights” — but nevertheless derive from the revolutionary movement to suborn and destroy western culture through the “long march through the institutions”. Many if not most of the people who demonstrate against Israel on the streets of London behind the flags of Hamas believe they are supporting Palestinian rights — but in fact they are lending their endorsement to an agenda of deranged antisemitism and intended genocide.  If the England squad had chosen to raise their fists in the Black Power salute, claiming that of course they didn’t support the Black Power agenda of black supremacism and violent revolt against white society but were merely showing solidarity with the  victims of racist abuse, would anyone have taken such a protestation remotely seriously — or would there have been a horrified outcry against such a display? I think we all know the answer to that one. As you can see from the video posted below, I posed this very question today on BBC TV’s Politics Live to the Liberal Democrat Layla Moran, who supported the England players’ gesture. Would she similarly have approved if they had raised their fists in the Black Power salute, I asked her. She dodged the question, claiming she was born after the Black Power movement (!) But she also said taking the knee was a protest against Britain’s “systemic racism”. So she supports that gesture because she openly parrots the racially bigoted libel against Britain for which the gesture stands, and thus insults every white person in the country including her own constituents.   Also on the show was Albie Amankona, a co-founder of Conservatives Against Racism, For Equality, who had written to all Conservative MPs: Too many of us have fundamentally misunderstood the gesture of taking the knee, and we have not listened when those who support the gesture have explained why.  Really? On Politics Live, he came out with an absolute marmalade-dropper. When I pointed out that taking the knee had originated with the American footballer Colin Kaepernick, he riposted that it had actually originated with Martin Luther King — because he would take the knee to pray and reflect on the peaceful protests during the civil rights movement. But that wasn’t “taking the knee”. It was kneeling to pray. Martin Luther King would undoubtedly be turning in his grave at what’s happening now. For his inspiring message was that people should be judged not by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character — the very opposite of Black Lives Matter and the whole current “anti-racist” circus which damns every member of western culture on the basis of the colour of their skin.  And now — to take the proverbial biscuit — those resisting this racially bigoted libel are being accused by those who are promoting it of stoking a culture war. This is yet another Orwellian inversion. The culture war has been stoked through identity politics, under which dogma the left has sought to destroy western culture and remake it in another image altogether.  Yet the absurd claim that it was opponents of the culture war who started it has become a new meme. The Fabian Society has actually accused the Conservatives of fomenting it. In The Times, the authors of a new Fabian pamphlet on the subject, Kirsty McNeill and Roger Harding, write: We find that culture war fights — those associated with values and identity — are often discussed as if they represent genuine divides in society rather than being, in reality, fringe issues that are magnified strategically (or made-up entirely) by those looking to benefit from anger and make it look like people who believe in equality are somehow extreme… The question on the right is whether Conservatives want the character of their party changed fundamentally by this sort of strategy. This despicable argument was used today in the Commons by none other than the “decent man” himself, the Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, who sniped at both Boris Johnson and Priti Patel for refusing to condemn the fans who had booed the England squad for taking the knee. Johnson responded by feebly claiming he had never condoned the booing, and repeating that he utterly condemned and abhorred the “racist outpourings” against the England players. As the Guardian reports, Starmer replied:  We can all see what’s happened here. The government has been trying to stoke a culture war, and they’ve realised they are on the wrong side, now they hope that nobody has noticed. It was all-too revealing that Johnson dodged this odious bullet. He should have fought back strongly, and told Starmer that the Labour leader was a disgrace to have taken the knee himself, as he did with his deputy during the Black Lives Matter disturbances last year. Alas for Britain. The Labour party is in moral free-fall. The Tories, who have never understood the power and dynamic of ideological dogma and who are currently led by a man who flinches from taking any position which will alienate any part of the electorate, are now split — between those who have convinced themselves that genuflecting to anti-white racial bigotry is anti-racist, and those who are too terrified to say that it is terribly wrong. Either way, the Conservatives are showing once again that they no longer have the slightest understanding of what they have a political and civic duty to conserve.  But every decent person of whatever skin colour or creed has a duty to stand shoulder to shoulder against the bullying, intimidation and moral bankruptcy of what can only be described once again as the cultural totalitarianism that is now all but submerging Britain and America.  Recent posts Premium subscribers can read my most recent exclusive post, on how the implications of Sunday’s shattering defeat for the England squad go much deeper than football, if you click here. And you can read my most recent post that’s available to everyone, on how corrupted journalism helps incite murderous hysteria against Israel and the west, by clicking here.