Here you go, a new Open Thread. The BBC disgusts me at the best of times BUT last night (Friday) on it’s 10PM BBC1 news, it chose to entirely ignore the Jihad killings in Finland. What an abhorrence of a broadcaster.

The Left’s intention is to destroy the Western world and remake it as utopian multicultural paradise.  What the Left seems to miss is that the West is, for all its faults, the best of all possible worlds and that when they destroy it the world doesn’t get better it gets much, much worse and descends into third world squalor, poverty and violence as those wonderful multicultural Western paradises turn out to have become the realms of warlords, criminal gangs and tyrants, Somalia writ large….and with no West to help ‘police’ the world, to spread and encourage democracy, the whole world gets even darker.

Who are the real fascists…those who defend Western values creating an environment where free speech, tolerance, and human rights are developed and preserved, acting as a beacon for the whole world or those on the Left whose anti-Western rhetoric mirrors that used by the Nazis?….

If enough Americans can be persuaded of all of that — that America is inherently racist, that America is and has been a lie — then it’s over. That is the objective, and we are in the midst of it. Sometimes you’re so close to the forest you don’t see the trees. That’s what we are in the midst of here: An ongoing effort to erase America by discrediting the entire premise of our culture, our history, our founding. The objective is to create in as many American minds as possible that America as founded is not worth defending. Serious times.

US commentator Rush Limbaugh spells out who is the real threat to America whilst in Britain we have the BBC….The BBC which peddles its anti-Christian, anti-White, anti-Israel, anti-West, anti-Capitalism (except when the big companies support the EU or at least the freedom to import cheap wage slaves), pro-IRA, pro-Islamist terrorism, pro-Muslim, pro-EU, pro-the ‘West must pay for its sins’, pro-mass immigration and pro-climate change alarmism, is as much to blame for driving this narrative of destroying the West as the likes of Soros or Corbyn or indeed Ralph Miliband, the man who really did hate Britain and all it stood for…….

Friday on his nationally syndicated radio show, conservative talker Rush Limbaugh said given the state of affairs in the country, particularly in the wake of last week’s events in Charlottesville, VA, it could be said the country was on the cusp of a second civil war.

Limbaugh insisted much of the angst was being driven by forces from the outside wanting to see the United States cease being a “super powerful nation.”

Partial transcript as follows (courtesy of RushLimbaugh.com):

America is under attack from within. Our culture, our history, our founding are under the most direct assault I have seen in my life. And I’m sure it’s the same with you. We haven’t seen anything like this. You might even get away with saying that we are on the cusp of a second civil war. Some of you might say that we are already into it, that it has already begun. However you characterize it, though, we are under attack from within. And it’s being bought and paid for by people from outside America, in addition to inside.

I’m thinking of people like George Soros and any other number of international financiers whose objective it is to take the United States out and down as a superpower, to literally erase the United States as a powerful or super powerful nation.

Now, folks, in order to defend America, which I believe is incumbent upon all of us, in order to defend America, you have to begin knowing our history. If you’re gonna defend the United States of America, you have to know our history. You have to know the purpose of the United States of America. You have to know unequivocally and proudly the United States’ place in history. And that is why erasing and distorting our history is crucial for the left to succeed.

None of this that is happening on the left is random. None of the riots, none of the protests. They are not the result of the left being offended by individual acts. Antifa didn’t show up in Charlottesville because they found out something was going to happen that offended them. They showed up in Charlottesville to create mayhem and cause hell. They showed up in Ferguson, Missouri, to do the same thing.

They showed up in Baltimore to do the same thing — and wherever they show up today and tomorrow and next week, it’s by design, on purpose, has an objective and an agenda. And that agenda is to erase American history. That agenda is to distort, erase, and impugn our history. It is crucial if they are to succeed. Because, you see, if enough Americans can be persuaded that America, as founded, is unjust — if enough Americans can be persuaded that America as founded is inherently racist and immoral and illegitimate — then it will be all that much easier to erase America as founded.

The two go hand in hand, which is the objective of all of these groups on the left. Whatever they’re called and wherever they go and however they organize and whatever their day-to-day purpose, their objective is to erase the history of America. It’s to restate it, to recharacterize it in such a way as to convince a majority of Americans that their country is illegitimate and has been from the get-go — is unjust and racist and bigoted and has been from the get-go.

If enough Americans can be persuaded of all of that — that America is inherently racist, that America is and has been a lie — then it’s over. That is the objective, and we are in the midst of it. Sometimes you’re so close to the forest you don’t see the trees. That’s what we are in the midst of here: An ongoing effort to erase America by discrediting the entire premise of our culture, our history, our founding. The objective is to create in as many American minds as possible that America as founded is not worth defending. Serious times.

This is a very, very serious effort that is underway. Sadly, it has a lot of allies. It has a lot of people helping it that ought to be opposing it, but they are choosing what they think is the path of least resistance, which is defined by the media. You’ve got several Republicans who I believe are unwittingly participating in the effort to cast America as indefensible, particularly with Donald Trump as president. Trump as president is, in their view…

The attacks on Trump, the characterization of his presidency, is designed to show how really flawed America is. That somebody like this could be elected, that means it’s time to get rid of the Constitution. That means it’s time to get… Whatever made Trump possible, it’s time to change it and get rid of it. This is very, very serious stuff happening here, and it has the aid and support of the media, which means it has the aid and support of the worldwide left and the Democrat Party.

America’s profound morality, kindness, widespread prosperity, and design for equal opportunity should be self-evident. But that assumes that factual, historically accurate reporting in education is taking place, and we know that it isn’t. It is a shame and a near crime that the profound morality and greatness and kindness and widespread prosperity and equal opportunity that is America isn’t known. It is a crime that those characteristics of our country are in the process being recast and erased. We are getting hysterically inaccurate reporting.

We have been in the midst of hysterically inaccurate education for generations. America is unique. America copied no other country. Every other country was a copycat of others, with governments that denied individual freedom, denied opportunity, denied sovereignty. That’s what was copied. Tyranny was copied, nation to nation, people to people. That is the history of humanity: Living in tyranny, living under authoritarianism, living in poverty, living in sickness — until the United States came along, which copied nothing.

The United States and its founders rejected all of that tyranny, oppression, poverty. In America, the individual was the supreme power. That is being erased under the premise that the individual is corrupt. The individual is likely a racist or a transphobe or a homophobe or some other ill-prepared sack of humanity, and so we need to overcome the corruption that is the individual, that incomparable embrace of humanity that is the United States of America.

There’s no place on this planet that human beings would rather be than the United States of America. And yet people born and raised in this country have been persuaded that America is a sinkhole, a hellhole, a sewer, a garbage dump, or a dungeon, and they’re in the process of actually creating all of that — under the guise that civil rights, equality, and liberty. The incomparable embrace of humanity that is the United States is under attack. Leftists, Democrats seek control over 100% of the population. They accomplish this with lies, such as the Affordable Health Care Act.

They accomplish it with one lie after another. The lies being told today are the lies designed to convince people their country is not worth maintaining as it is, their country is not worth maintaining as founded because it was founded as racist, sexist, bigoted, homophobic (you know the drill), immoral and illegitimate. Ignorant people will not remain free for very long. The media is working on a path parallel with school systems to actively and passively distort information to wipe out from the vestiges of our history and our memory any collection of stories that testify to the greatness of America and her people.

Sarah Brett on 5 Live asserted as fact that Breitbart was a Far-Right publication and that its readership was mainly white supremacists.  Perhaps Breitbart should get the lawyers in.

The BBC has also been snearing at Trump all day for his latest comments about the destruction or removal of Confederate statues…

US President Donald Trump has denounced the removal of “beautiful” Confederate statues amid a heated national debate about US race relations.

“Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments,” he tweeted.

“You can’t change history, but you can learn from it,” he continued.

Mr Trump drew outrage by defending organisers of a white supremacist rally that left a woman dead and dozens hurt.

Did Trump ‘defend the organisers of a white supremacist rally’ or did he correctly point out that there was violence on both sides?….and it is only the violence from the Right that the BBC et al focus on and denounce.

As for tearing down statues of Confederates because they fought to keep slavery going…on that logic Mount Rushmore would have to be blown up as two of its Presidential heads were slave owners…George Washington and Thomas Jefferson….founding fathers of the nation…they’ll have to go!….

CNN has published a hitlist…don’t see Mount Rushmore on it oddly enough….

Hit List: CNN Publishes Map of Confederate Monuments in U.S.

I can see a time when most decent folk in the US will become sick of being called racist just because of the colour of their skin and looking on as the liberal establishment seems intent on wiping out white people and their culture…they will become ‘radicalised’.

The so-called rise of the Far-Right is in fact the fault, ironically, of the self-same liberal establishment that so hates it…the liberal policies that are forced upon everyone using the threat of being publicly labelled a racist are themselves so extreme that it forces people nto the streets to protest and oppose them.

The German reaction is particularly strong – they know what they're talking about. https://t.co/OlySc6mhCs

— Katty Kay (@KattyKayBBC) August 16, 2017

Shouldn’t the Far-Left also be confronted?…surely Germany knows all about them as well having been under the communist jackboot for half a century, never mind all those millions imprisoned, tortured and killed by Socialists across the world.  Maybe that’s just too sophisticated an argument for poor old Katty Kay to get her little head around….best stick to ‘overheated rhetoric and oversimplification’ as well as an egregious display of liberal sanctimony for the benefit of her pals in order to burnish her oh so liberal credentials.

Remarkable hypocrisy as always from the BBC and its fellow travellers as they attack Trump for not singling out extremists on the Right for condemnation..he chose instead, quite rightly, to condemn all those who were violent in Charlottesville.  Seems the BBC [h/t Guest Who] thinks he is wrong…they are obviously quite happy to ignore left-wing violence…

My take after returning from a few weeks away. America – diminished and dismissed – BBC News https://t.co/RMGQjbSwKV

— Katty Kay (@KattyKayBBC) August 16, 2017

The BBC brings on dyed-in-the-wool anti-Trump voices to give us a balanced and impartial comment on events in America, such as a Demcorat ex-Mayor of Charlottesville…wonder what he would say.  The BBC totally fails to bring any perspective or context to the attacks on Trump…such as the fact that it was the hard left Antifa extremists who instigated the violence…they came well prepared and armed….wearing helmets, masks, carrying sticks, mace, pepper spray and tasers…they threw balloons full of urine, paint and mace at the people in the march.

The BBC tells us that Trump does not want to upset his ‘Base’ by denouncing Nazis, thus dismissing all those who vote for him as extremist racists…no such comments about those British politicians who turned a blind eye to events in Rotherham and Rochdale because they didn’t want to anger their ‘Base’…ie Muslim voters.  Similarly with terrorism….they refuse to denounce terrorism and the real roots of that terror, Islam, because they want the Muslim vote….case in point…

Sarah Champion forced out of Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet after warning Pakistani men are raping white girls

Trevor Phillips says about this….

“We shouldn’t have to have an argument about free speech, what this feels like is what we used to call democratic centralism in the Labour party, in other words Stalinism”.

But of course the likes of Corbyn, the Far Left and the BBC have no problem with Stalinism…just ‘fascism’.

Obama was the same as he refused to talk of Islamic terror in relation to, erm, Islamic terror, not only censoring his own speech but forcing the whole government to do so as well, scrubbing the word ‘Islamic’ from the record.

Then look at this speech following the murder of police officers by Blacks in Dallas…note how there is little condemnation of the killers and indeed there is excuses and explanation…..an astonishing amount of a speech about five murdered policemen devoted to explaining away their killers’ reasons…..

We’re here to honor the memory and mourn the loss of five fellow Americans, to grieve with their loved ones, to support this community, and pray for the wounded, and to try and find some meaning amidst our sorrow.

Like police officers across the country, these men and their families shared a commitment to something larger than themselves. They weren’t looking for their names to be up in lights……No. The reward comes in knowing that our entire way of life in America depends on the rule of law, that the maintenance of that law is a hard and daily labor, that in this country we don’t have soldiers in the streets or militias setting the rules.

Faced with this violence, we wonder if the divides of race in America can ever be bridged. We wonder if an African American community that feels unfairly targeted by police and police departments that feel unfairly maligned for doing their jobs, can ever understand each other’s experience.

I see people who mourn for the five officers we lost, but also weep for the families of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. In this audience, I see what’s possible.

We also know that centuries of racial discrimination, of slavery, and subjugation, and Jim Crow; they didn’t simply vanish with the law against segregation. They didn’t necessarily stop when a Dr. King speech, or when the civil rights act or voting rights act were signed. Race relations have improved dramatically in my lifetime. Those who deny it are dishonoring the struggles that helped us achieve that progress. But we know…

But America, we know that bias remains. We know it, whether you are black, or white, or Hispanic, or Asian, or native American, or of Middle Eastern descent, we have all seen this bigotry in our own lives at some point. We’ve heard it at times in our own homes. If we’re honest, perhaps we’ve heard prejudice in our own heads and felt it in our own hearts. We know that. And while some suffer far more under racism’s burden, some feel to a far greater extent discrimination’s stain. Although most of us do our best to guard against it and teach our children better, none of us is entirely innocent. No institution is entirely immune, and that includes our police departments. We know this.

And so when African-Americans from all walks of life, from different communities across the country, voice a growing despair over what they perceive to be unequal treatment, when study after study shows that whites and people of color experience the criminal justice system differently. So that if you’re black, you’re more likely to be pulled over or searched or arrested; more likely to get longer sentences; more likely to get the death penalty for the same crime. When mothers and fathers raised their kids right, and have the talk about how to respond if stopped by a police officer — yes, sir; no, sir — but still fear that something terrible may happen when their child walks out the door; still fear that kids being stupid and not quite doing things right might end in tragedy.

When all this takes place, more than 50 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, we cannot simply turn away and dismiss those in peaceful protest as troublemakers or paranoid.

Perhaps the BBC should take Obama’s advice and stop using ‘overheated rhetoric and oversimplification’ demonising all on the Right as the ‘enemy’ and failng to properly report on the issues….

With an open heart, we can abandon the overheated rhetoric and the oversimplification that reduces whole categories of our fellow Americans, not just opponents, but to enemies.

R4 has a series on the Internet and its creation and development….Aleks in Wonderland: The Story of the Internet:

Just how did the Internet become the most powerful communications medium on the planet, and why does it seem to be an uncontrollable medium for good and bad?
With no cross border regulation the internet can act as an incredible force for connecting people and supporting human rights and yet at the same time convey the most offensive material imaginable.

What was striking was the resemblance of actions and consequences in the Internet to what happens in the real, physical world….no coincidence that the programme talks of ‘cross border regulation’ in the internet.

The Internet was pretty much a closed club, a mini society in which the rules could be enforced and membership regulated in an orderly fashion.  Then came along AOL, an early pioneer of Internet services, which destroyed that ‘society’ and its stability and respect for ‘netiquette’, the social order was torn apart as AOL opened the ‘borders’ of the internet to absolutely everyone…an ‘everyone’ which didn’t care about rules and structure and order and so we get the wild west on the web now with uncontrollable downsides along with the good.

This pretty much mirrors what happens to a nation state that opens its borders to uncontrolled mass immigration…society is fractured and the social order destroyed as wave after wave of immigrants force their way in without having the slightest intention of following the ‘rules’ of that society as so many European countries are finding out.

It was an irony that we then learnt on the programme that it was an immigration lawyer who then added to the destructive forces by inventing ‘spam’, internet marketing inflicting upon us a daily torrent of rubbish filling our inboxes not to mention the intrusive and relentless data mining that goes with that in order to target and tailor the adverts to our apparent likes and desires.

Just a shame the BBC fails to recognise the connection with actual immigration just as it reports on ‘touristophobia’ as many mass tourist destinations start to protest and object to the numbers of visitors which crowd out the locals and overload the facilities…no BBC connection to immigration here either.  Note the paradox that it is ‘lefties’ who are objecting the loudest…

‘Tourists go home’: Leftists resist Spain’s influx

Youths in Catalonia and the Basque Country have daubed the slogan “tourists go home” on some buildings – just as foreigners flock to Spain on holiday, spending millions of euros.

A spokesperson for leftist Catalans behind the protests said today’s model of mass tourism was impoverishing working-class people.

Leftist Basques plan to stage an anti-tourism march on 17 August in San Sebastian, during a major festival.

In one dramatic incident, several masked assailants attacked a tourist bus in Barcelona, near the football stadium.

The slogan “tourism is killing neighbourhoods” was daubed on the bus and one of its tyres was punctured. None of the passengers were injured.

The attack was claimed by Arran Jovent, a leftist youth movement linked to Popular Unity Candidacy (CUP), an anti-capitalist party campaigning for Catalan independence.

Temporary mayor Gerardo Pisarello dismissed talk of “touristophobia”. “I don’t believe that Barcelona’s residents reject tourism – rather they want it regulated,” he said.

Is there any official sympathy?

Yes, some. But it is tempered by exhortations to keep welcoming tourists, because of their economic value.

All very familiar in relation to actual immigration…and there’s  more from the BBC…

Cruise tourists overwhelm Europe’s ancient resorts

There are places where the surge of global tourism is starting to feel like a tidal wave.

Ancient cities around the shores of the Mediterranean and Adriatic are on the front line, their stone streets squeezed full of summer visitors as budget airlines and giant cruise ships unload ever-growing armies of tourists.

The overall effect is Disneylandish – a sense that you meet no-one but other tourists or ice-cream sellers, tour guides, waiters, reception clerks and buskers who are there to keep the tourist wheels turning.

It will fall to local governments in places like Dubrovnik and Capri and Venice to find a way of reducing those growing pressures.

For now, ideas like installing turnstiles on ancient squares and pedestrian traffic lights on crowded streets may sound rather fanciful.

But if that tourist tide keeps rising they might start to seem a little more tempting.

You won’t find the BBC talking like this about mass immigration…no ‘surge of global immigration’, no ‘tidal wave’, no ‘tide that keeps rising’.  In fact we know that the BBC et al shout very loudly when such language is used about the ‘flood’ of migrants into Europe ‘swamping’ us.  No ‘This is not immigration it’s an invasion’ protest photos.

As always with the BBC it will admit that something, like massive overcrowding, can cause huge problems, but only when discussing non controversial subjects…as soon as we get onto the ‘taboo’ subjects such as immigration or Islam the willingness to admit to problems is suspended and we get news that is censored and shaped to push a message.

Here you go, a brand new Open Thread. BBC anti-Trump derangement syndrome currently severe!

Muslim fundamentalists set off bombs in the UK killing and injuring hundreds, Muslim fundamentalists launch attacks on British citizens driving vehicles into them killing and injuring them, Muslim fundamentalists attack British citizens with knives in the street, Muslim fundamentalists impose their religion upon schools using intimidation and deception, Muslim fundamentalists use the race card to ‘blackmail’ government and institutions to bow to their demands, Muslims who see them as prostitutes and trash target white girls on an industrial scale for abuse…and who is to blame?  Us, the non-Muslims.

Of course non-Muslims are to blame….for hasn’t it always been thus as the BBC frequently tells us?

Take Partition in India and the creation of Pakistan and Bangladesh.  The mass murder of maybe one million people and the mass forced migration of 10 million people as they ran for their lives….again…the fault of the British.

We know this because the BBC tells us this is the way it was as it reinvents the history of Partition.  This is a classic BBC revisionist programme but with a twist…not only do we get the usual ‘white guilt’ BBC institutional anti-British prejudice we get the ‘history’ as interpreted by non-British reporters, or reporters of Asian ethnicity, who add their own anti-British tinge to the narrative….so we get a double dose of bashing Britain.

The BBC does that BBC thing…giving us facts on the one hand but totally ignoring them in its conclusions on the other as it spins the real message it wants you to ingest.  It will tell us Muslims and Hindus were bashing the hell out of each other before Partition but then tell us all communities lived in splendid harmony together until the British forced Partition upon them.  The BBC can tell us that both Hindus and Muslims wanted the British to exit India as soon as possible and to divide up the country…then they will tell us the British prematurely abandoned India and left it to its fate as it was in their interest to do so thus causing the mass murder as law and order broke down…then telling us that there was already mass murder going on before Partition.  The BBC will tell us that poor old Cyril Radcliffe was to blame as he carved up India with a careless flick of his pencil across the map…and yet they will also tell us that he was handed a poisoned chalice…a task that the demands of the various parties made impossible….and of course completely ignoring the fact that no border can possibly allow for all the competing demands of each community…if they want and demand a border then compromises have to be made…or other solutions adopted…such as mass murder and ethnic cleansing.  The BBC thinks a chat over a bit of tiffin and a handshake would have sorted all the nastiness out…as usual ignoring the reality of human nature and geopolitics….the problem was not the actual route of the line but the idea of Partition itself and the creation of a Muslim state…and who was it that demanded that?

The BBC portrays the British Empire in India as pretty malign, indeed one of their favourite India ‘experts’ is William Dalrymple…a man who can’t find anything good to say about the British and has essentially ‘gone native’.  His latest comments are that the arrival of British traders in India was very, very sinister…a rogue multi-national corporation [how very BBC] conquered India….well not without the collusion and collaboration of the various rulers of India….the British Establishment in India was tiny…maybe around 760 civil servants ruling over 400 million.  They could in no way have controlled India without the willing help of the locals……for example Afghanistan proved impossible to tame because the locals put up a fight whereas in India the local rulers thought the British could benefit them as allies against their own enemies.

Ahh… actually it was Churchill who was to blame.  Kipling was a racist…in fact all Brits were very, very racist….their failure and refusal to understand and love brown faced people condemned so many Indians to a grisly death.  Or was it Queen Victoria rising from her grave and personally stabbing all those Indians to death, or maybe the sinister East India Company mowing them down in order to sell more bullets?  Maybe it was the wicked Daily Mail….what a grand wheeze….partition India, massacre a million and put 10 million refugees on the road in order to sell a few more papers!

Let’s admit who is really to blame, ultimately and predominantly.  Go on BBC, admit it! The Muslim separatists who agitated and fought to get a separate Muslim state.  They caused the violence and upheaval by demanding Partition…the British may not have administered the process perfectly but who could?  Staggering bloody clashes were inevitable whatever the process…it was the idea not the process that was the real cause of the death and suffering.

A lesson there for anyone who advocates multi-cultural societies in which certain groups refuse to integrate whilst growing exponentially in number until they feel strong and confident enough to make demands along the lines of a separate state for themselves.  It’s a classic ‘trojan horse’ tactic used by many throughout history…Hitler used German populations in other countries as an excuse to invade in order to ‘protect’ them just as Putin does now in the Crimea and Ukraine, annexing off part of another country or taking over the whole country.  What the BBC doesn’t tell you about the fighting in Burma is that it is caused by Muslims trying to annex part of Burma to set up their own state…the BBC just tells us it is racist Buddhists attacking Muslims.

‘Mini-Pakistans’ dotted around the UK are possibly not a good idea.

Some perspective on the ever rising tide of hate crime #duetoTrump…much if it seems fabricated…..

There Is No Violent Hate-Crimewave in ‘Trump’s America’

Let’s get this out of the way: there’s no doubt that Donald Trump’s policies may pose a direct threat to certain classes of American people. But in the wake of his Tuesday night election as president of the United States, there has been a wave of people worrying for the physical safety of Mexicans, Muslims, and anyone else who isn’t white, male, and gender-conforming. The fear seems to legitimately be that there are would-be perpetrators of sexual assault and race-based violence that have been well-behaved so far but will now, emboldened by a President-elect Trump, suddenly go wild with the raping and the hate crimes.

Implausible? I think so. But the narrative has been bolstered by a few high-profile incidents of alleged aggression in Trump’s America.

The first one to really go viral involved a Muslim female student at the University of Louisiana who claimed to have had her hijab ripped off and her wallet stolen the day after Trump’s election by two white men wearing Trump hats. But on Thursday, local police announced that the young woman had admitted she fabricated the story. “This incident is no longer under investigation,” the Lafayette Police Department said in a press release.

In another incident, this one in San Diego, a young Muslim woman’s purse and car were stolen by one white male and one Hispanic male. While the men allegedly made negative comments about Muslims, it seems car stealing was more their motivation than harassment or intimidation—which is obviously shitty, but not necessarily a Trump-inspired act of bigotry.

And an alleged incident of a gay man named Chris Ball getting beaten up by Trump supporters in Santa Monica on election night seems to have not happened the way it was initially recounted, if the incident even happened at all. The Santa Monica Police Department posted a message to Facebook Thursday saying that neither the department nor city officials had “received any information indicating this crime occurred in the City of Santa Monica” and “a check of local hospitals revealed there was no victim of any such incident admitted or treated.”

Other instances of “Trump inspired” violence and vandalism have also turned out to be hoaxes or misinterpretations. An alleged Ku Klux Klan rally in honor of Trump’s victory turned out to be an old photo of conservatives carrying U.S., Gadsden, and Christian flags that were billowing out in a manner mistaken in a grainy photo for Klan robes. There were no Southern Illinois University students posting blackface selfies to social media after Trump’s win.

A Nazi flag that went up over a home in San Francisco Wednesday wasn’t a show of support for anti-Jewish sentiment but “a comment on our new president-elect,” according to the anti-Trump resident who put it up. “I am hoping people get that this is a political statement, and that I’m not a Nazi supporter.”

Other anti-Semitic imagery—such as “Sieg Heil 2016” spray-painted on an abandoned store front in Philadelphia—may have been legit expressions of bigotry or may have been similar attempts at commentary on Trump’s election; it’s unclear because no one is taking credit for them. The bulk of racist graffiti incidents appear to have happened around middle- and high-schools, which doesn’t make their messages any less hurtful, I’m sure, but does suggest a phenomenon driven by mean and immature kids rather than rogue bands of serious neo-Nazis.

And while all sorts of horrible incidents are being reported on Twitter and Facebook… well, anyone can say anything on Twitter and Facebook. The bulk of these stories are “friend of a friend” told me types. But if men were really going around pulling knives on Muslim women on public buses in Trump’s name, there would at least be local or campus news reports of it. Same, too, for the alleged wave of transgender teen suicides which keep getting mentioned in media but for which no one can offer any evidence. (Update: more on the alleged suicides here.)

I point all of this out not to mock or attempt to diminish the fear or dismay any individuals feel right now but to put things in perspective. The “hate acts reported across the country” in the wake of Trump’s victory seem mostly relegated to graffiti at a few schools and one carjacking which may or may not have had anything to do with racial or religious prejudice.

Less dramatic acts of racism—name calling, derogatory comments made in passing, etc.—do seem to be bubbling up more frequently this week, if the sheer number of such anecdotes shared online means anything. But while that’s a shame in and of itself, it’s also a world apart from the wave of “hate crimes” and violent attacks that many are conjuring up right now.

Pushers of this “rampant racist crimewave” in Trump’s America story will dismiss posts like this one, and anyone who challenges their narrative, as naive, enabling of racists, or unconscionably non-empathetic to non-straight, white, Christian Americans. But I’m not the one trying to stoke false terror in vulnerable people or over-hype America’s levels of hate for pageviews and Twitter faves.

Update, November 12: Two more tales of race-based and Trump-inspired harassment have begun to unravel…

In one of the widely-shared stories, a black woman claimed that four white men had threatened her while she was pumping gas at a Smyrna, Delaware, gas station Wednesday. After talking about things would change now that Trump was president, one of the men allegedly approached her and asked, “How scared are you, black bitch?” before saying “I should kill you right now. You’re a waste of air.” Another of the men allegedly flashed a gun and said, “You’re lucky there’s witnesses or else I’d shoot you right here.”

The woman, Ashley Boyer, posted about this awful incident on Facebook in an update that was since deleted; on Thursday, she followed up by noting that “charges were filed, fugitives were caught.” But when PhillyVoice contacted Smyrna police Thursday, the department said no report about such an incident had been filed and no one had contacted them about anything similar. So PhillyVoice reached out to Delaware State Police… who reported that no neighboring police agencies had received any such reports either, and there was no record of any local 911 calls about such an incident. “There is no record of this occurring in Smyrna, if at all,” said Corporal Brian Donner of the Delaware State Police.

The second alleged incident, out of Minnesota, involved an Asian college student named Kathy Mirah Tu who said she was accosted by a white man while crossing a bridge on the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities campus. “I was stop in my tracked by a white male, who yelled at me to ‘Go back to Asia,'” Tu posted to Facebook, in an update that had received more than 17,000 shares as of Thursday evening. “I pretended to not hear any thing and continue on walking since I didn’t want to create conflict. Shortly after that moment, I was stopped by that same man who told me ‘Don’t you know it’s disrespectful to walk away from someone when they are talking to you?” After that, the man grabbed Tu’s wrist and threatened to hit her so she punched him, according to her post. “His friends who were watching the entire situation go down saw that I was going to the win fight and came over to his rescue and accused me of assaulting him and called the police.”

According to Tu, the police arrived and handcuffed her but eventually let her off with a warning. Yet neither the campus police nor the Minneapolis Police Department have any record of the incident Tu describes. “We heard complaint from student related 2 Wash bridge yestdy, UMPD didnt respond to bridge or make an arrest,” the University of Minnesota Police Department tweeted Thursday, also asking Tu or anyone who did know about the alleged incident to come forward. Here was the response from the city police:

The hypocrisy flooding out of the media in torrents concerning Trump and his wide ranging condemnation of bigotry, hatred and racism on all sides is a wonder to behold…utter shamelessness of the left-wing media including our own sainted BBC which has declared that the Far Right are ‘Trump’s shock troops’ and today told us that Trump had signed a ‘Faustian pact’ with the white supremacists….they are apparently his base voters whom he cannot offend…so the BBC dismisses all those who vote for Trump as Far Right racists….heard that before in relation to Brexit…the BBC is far more of a hate monger than Trump as it demonises anyone who doesn’t submit to its extremist views on immigration as racists and Nazis.

The KKK as most probably know, except those at the BBC, is a Democratic Party creation…but what of say The Nation of Islam…what does the Southern Law Poverty Centre say about the NOI?

David Cameron tells Russian hosts: KGB tried to recruit me but I failed the test

On a visit to Moscow, he joked that he apparently failed to pass the “interview” during the bizarre incident on a gap-year trip to the Black Sea coast in 1985.

When told of the incident, President Dmitry Medvedev said that Mr Cameron would have made a “very good KGB agent”.

“David would have been a very good KGB agent, but in this case he would never have become a Prime Minister of the UK,” the Russian President said at a press conference in the Kremlin.

Peter Hitchens seems to have the same opinion of Tony Blair that I do…that he was not at all centrist or taking the Labour Party to the Right…he was in fact a hard core left winger who did incredible damage to the democratic infrastructure of this country…Cameron said he was approached by the Soviets at university but he snubbed them, Blair?  Not so sure.  He was on the same march as his other fellow travellers to take over the institutions…so many of them still in the BBC…..

Corbyn or Blair? Guess which one’s the real Marxist menace

Now, years after it is too late to help us, we learn that Anthony Blair was a student Marxist, an admirer of the bloodthirsty advocate of Red Terror, Leon Trotsky. When did he stop thinking this? We don’t really know.

But isn’t it interesting that all those who faint like shocked maiden ladies at the bearded Leftism of Jeremy Corbyn still fawn over the supposed ‘moderation’ of Blair? 

Yet Blair was the man who smiled sweetly as he tried to abolish sterling, surrendered to the IRA, wrecked our economy, our constitution, our civil service, our defences and much of our education system, and wounded the monarchy, too.

The disclosure reminded me of the recent unwise boast by Blair’s one-time close aide, Peter Hyman, who blurted out that the New Labour ‘project’ was ‘infinitely more revolutionary than anything proposed by Jeremy Corbyn’. The plan, Hyman disclosed, was to lock out the Tories to ensure that ‘the 21st Century was a Labour century’. Not very democratic.

One day, and I hope it is soon, people will grasp that Mr Blair was not the pseudo-Tory ‘moderate’ we were sold (and some of you bought) in 1997. He was the most radical political leader this country has had since Oliver Cromwell.

Mr Blair was the figurehead of all the many thousands of Sixties and Seventies campus revolutionaries who, by 1997, had quietly clawed their way into positions of influence in politics, the Civil Service, the law, the BBC and schools. And he did his damage all the more effectively because neither his enemies nor his supporters ever fully understood what he was and still, in a way, is – a smiling menace.