In a 1972 cartoon, graphic novel master Will Eisner satirised the hippy “Underground Comix”, portraying them as a bunch of low-brow, scatological neanderthals, accusing each of other of “Establishment Tendencies”. But, in a corner of the cartoon, one of the drooling Morlocks scrawls, “I have just discovered a horrible thing — we are the Establishment”.
If you have, not just a day or a week, but a whole month of state-sanctioned celebration of you, if no-one can criticise you without being publicly vilified, ostracised, prosecuted and their career destroyed… you’re not oppressed. You are the Establishment.
Imagine there was a political movement so powerful and so intolerant that you might be visited by the cops for making fun of it. A movement so dominant that desecrating its symbols came to be treated as a kind of blasphemy. A movement so fawned over by the elites that any town or village that refused to bow down to it – to wave its flag and shout its slogans – risked being written off as unsafe, and essentially as unclean. A movement so embedded in the ruling class that every wing of the establishment, from the political set to the military to the financial elite, was duty bound to display its insignia.
A movement so powerful, in fact, that even its own putative members cannot publicly dissent without facing ostracism.
We’re living under a tyranny of Pride. Its eyesore rainbow flag dominates every major highway during Pride month. Back in June London looked like a city under occupation, with vast boulevards like Regent Street festooned in this ugly new standard. Scores of them fluttered as far as the eye could see, in perfect and sinister militaristic formation.
As happened under previous totalitarian ideologies, everyone must be seen to be running up its flags, or risk suspicion. Most especially the institutions.
The capitalist class drapes itself in the Pride flag, too […] Even the armed wing of the state now comes in Pride colours. Cop cars have been repainted in the hues of this ideological rainbow. Top officers wear Pride-themed insignias and lanyards. The Ministry of Defence’s vast headquarters in London have been illuminated in the Pride colours. The Royal Air Force even did a flyover of the Pride march in London last year, with 10 fighter jets pumping out rainbow-coloured contrails to the whooping and cheering of the crowd below.
Totalitarian regimes, from the Italian Fascists to the Maoists, were similarly monomaniacal about having their regalia decorating every space as a signal of obedience to the regime. Anyone who demurred came under immediate suspicion. The Nazi regime made greetings of Heil Hitler! mandatory. A 1933 decree ruled that “anyone not wishing to come under suspicion of behaving in a consciously negative fashion will therefore render the Hitler Greeting”. Even foreign officials were beaten up for refusing to render the salute.
And woe betide anyone who refuses to wave the Pride flag or – sin of sins – violates it in some fashion. Ockbrook and Borrowash Parish Council in Derbyshire was branded a sinful backwater when it refused to fly the flag last year. ‘Anger as Pride Month flag snubbed by Derbyshire council…’, reported a horrified BBC. As for profaning Pride and its sacred symbols – that is so serious it can become a police matter. A few weeks ago a man in Hampshire was visited by cops, and put in handcuffs, for the blasphemy of retweeting a meme showing four Pride flags arranged to look like a swastika. The literal speech police who knocked on his door accused him of ‘causing anxiety’.
The left have made an icon of August Landmusser, the German who ostentatiously refused to join in the mass Roman saluting of the Nazis. Yet, much as they might flatter themselves, they’re no Landmussers: they’re the obediently saluting boot-boys.
Remember the storm earlier this year when Idrissa Gueye, a Senegal-born footballer who plays for Paris Saint-German, dropped out of a game because he didn’t want to wear the newly Pride-emblazoned PSG top? Even supporting Gueye became a risky business. Watford winger Ismaila Sarr expressed sympathy for Gueye on his Instagram page and Watford’s response was as swift as it was chilling – all its employees would be ‘offer[ed] further education’, it said.
In Australia, the “Manly Seven” were similarly subjected to a public, pillorying hate campaign for refusing to don “Pride” jerseys. Without a blush of irony, the witch-hunters dubbed them “intolerant”.
The totalitarianism of “Pride” is that it has become so intolerant that it is now actively hostile to gay people themselves.
Pride has completely imbibed the ideology of transgenderism, including the belief that to be attracted to people on the basis of sex, rather than gender identity, is a species of bigotry. So lesbians who refuse to have sex with ‘women with penises’ – ie, men – are looked upon as sexual racists […]
The idea of same-sex attraction runs counter to the post-sex, post-biology lunacy of the Pride religion, and so it is problematised, demonised, even censored. Gay rights? Pride is a threat to them, not the upholder of them.
Lest anyone be in any doubt, lesbians are now forcibly ejected from “Pride” events. Get the L Out is a movement of lesbians repudiating the rainbow. Growing numbers of gay men are joining them, dismayed at the vicious intolerance of “Pride”. Not to mention its oleaginous creepiness: “Gays Against Groomers” are distancing gay rights from an increasingly obvious paedophile wing of the rainbow movement.
Call me old-fashioned, but my view is that when a political movement becomes unquestionable, when the display of its symbols becomes virtually mandatory, and when every institution of power is flying its flag, then we should be worried. Very worried. Especially when that movement is openly hostile to women’s sex-based rights.
Spiked Online
Feminism has made many mistakes over the decades, not least in its odious third wave. Their greatest mistake was encouraging transgender ideology and not calling out Judith Butler’s horse-shit from the very start.
At least some of them are realising their mistake. It would be a mistake on our part to indulge in cheap schadenfreude: if we’ve found something we can stand side by side with the sisterhood on, so much the better.