Saturday Roundup: The Madness of Jordan Peterson, Invading Greenland, Fighting Republicans, and Jan. 6th Remembered
In case you missed it.
In case you missed it, here’s what we covered on The Banter this past week!:
My piece on the sad, but shocking descent of Jordan Peterson (Members):
Bob Cesca on why we shouldn’t listen to Trump’s rhetoric but rather pay attention to what he does instead:
Julie Roginsky on why Democrats need to learn how to fight, and why building a movement is the best way to beat Republicans:
My piece on The Free Press’s extraordinary attack on British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and why Bari Weiss’s publication is utterly awful:
And finally the F**king Monday column on talking to Trump voters, Elon’s disdain for free speech, and remembering Jan. 6th:
If you would like to support The Banter and our mission, you can get 50% off a membership here:
Brendan O'Neill on the UK rape gangs:
>There’s historical erasure at play here. Mr Musk, and others, might have first heard about the ‘grooming gangs’ scandal in 2025, but Brits have been aware of it for years. It was the mainstream media that uncovered it. For years The Times was all over this story. Julie Bindel wrote about it as far back as 2007. spiked has covered it in depth for more than a decade. The idea that we need a rich rabble-rouser in America to pry open our eyes to our nation’s legion crimes and failures is ridiculous. Here’s my question for those feverishly tweeting about these ‘grooming gangs’ they’ve just discovered – where have you been?
I'm sue Ben approves of that paragraph! But O'Neill continues:
>This horror hasn’t been ‘hidden’. It’s been the subject of much media scrutiny and righteous public fury. But here’s the curious thing, the worrying thing: while there’s been a great deal of reportage on ‘grooming gangs’, there hasn’t been the reckoning we really need. While there have been numerous local inquiries – all cataloguing the gross failures of officials who showed more concern for communal peace than female safety – still the scandal rarely troubles the broader political conscience. Everyone knows about it, but few dwell on it. In polite society it is the great unmentionable, the atrocity that dare not speak its name. You wring your hands over it, and nothing more. You agree it was bad, and you move on.
>It’s not hard to see why a culture of cowardice still clings to this scandal more than any other – it’s because the questions it raises about 21st-century Britain are legion, profound and terrifying. Thousands of girls subjected to vile abuse while officialdom, the police, the left and even many feminists looked the other way because they value communal calm more than working-class life and dignity? No wonder they wish this scandal would go away. No wonder they’re content to acknowledge it but never interrogate it. No wonder they’re more comfortable talking about a Tory MP putting his hand on a middle-class journalist’s knee. They simply lack the psychological and moral resources to reflect on what it says about their rule that thousands of poor and working-class girls were raped right under the nose of their bureacracy.
>It isn’t because they think the ‘grooming gangs’ scandal is insignificant that they avoid dwelling on it. On the contrary, it is precisely the mammoth nature of the scandal, the vast and swirling questions it raises, that makes them so allergic to grappling with it. This is without question one of the great outrages of the postwar period. It is the moment the state failed, catastrophically, in its most basic duty: to protect its citizens from harm. It’s the scandal that exposes the sinister self-preserving instincts of the bureaucratic elites, who we now know will do anything to protect their ideology and influence, including turning a blind eye to the rape of destitute girls. They shout ‘racist!’ at anyone who talks about ‘grooming gangs’ because they know our pesky questions threaten to unravel their moral pretensions and shatter their political authority. They know what’s at stake.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/01/04/when-working-class-girls-were-sacrificed-to-ideology/
Thanks, Ben, for your review of the week, and what a Week!!😲