The National Trussed
When will people learn that when you are launching a coup you need to secure the ground troops? The highly-woke board of directors at the National Trust failed to educate/vet/suspend their more conservative members before they spoke at a virtual AGM and the awful facists who show people round and sell jam in the shop went on to criticise the Trust’s obsession with slavery. John from Wareham gave them an earful when he said: “Your members wish to enjoy the properties gifted in good faith without having to endure the unfortunate woke agenda of the modern Trust management.” Carole from Boston asked the board: “Why doesn’t the Trust concentrate on their upkeep and stop being political? History is history – you will lose members and waste money. We intend stopping our membership.” Let’s hope she does. But the wider point here is that the NT should not be dealing with their problematic buildings until they start dealing with the problematic membership.

IngSoc
How did Cornell University go for so long with a racist departmental name? Thankfully the department in question has renamed itself and attempted to purge the white supremacy oozing from their title. But the internet never forgets and nor should we. The new name is “The department of literatures in English” but the old name deserves to be mentioned here, only as a horrible warning from history that must not be repeated. Look away now if you are not comfortable with confronting racist tropes and KKK propaganda:

The Department of English

Home of Privilege
Employees of Barnardo’s, the children’s home founded by Thomas Barnardo in 1866, have started lecturing us all on white privilege which is a far more productive use of time and energy than helping white kids from broken homes who, let’s be honest, can fend for themselves thanks to their superior skin colour. But they made a mistake in their 1700-word-blog post by acknowledging that some people disagree with using the term “white privilege”. If the Covid pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that we should absolutely not tolerate people hearing alternative points of view, unless and until they become official policy. Remember when England’s deputy chief medical officer Jonathan Van Tam announced that face masks don’t work? Of course you don’t because since the government made them compulsory, you’ve burned that memory out of your brain with a cauterising iron, and now I’ve mentioned it you’ll have to do so again.

No Justice
Just get a load of this tweet from Richard Atkins QC:

Twitter users could tell that “look like a barrister” meant a straight, white, middle aged man and launched a righteous tirade of abuse against him until he was forced to apologise, but sadly not forced into jail. Small mercy that he’s not been on Twitter since.

Whitewashing
The surest sign a society is getting better is when it starts banning books, which is why the news coming from California is so positive. Until further notice, teachers will not be able to include on their curriculum Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Theodore Taylor’s The Cay and Mildred D. Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. About time. All the racist intentions of all these authors have been hidden in plain sight. Do you think when Tom Sawyer tricked his friends into painting the fence that the colour choice was an accident?