The world has been turned upside down and shaken around with such brutal force and dizzying pace in the few weeks since the start of this year it is hard to know how to start writing about any aspect of public life without the beginning being out of date by the time one has penned the end.

Not that this writer uses a pen, but the blogger who favours the longform essay does sometimes feel like a time-traveller from the quill pen age when all the “thinking” and change is being driven by the ultra shortform communicators of X and Truth Social, even though the only significant user of the latter is its owner, Donald Trump.

Trump, of course, since his return to office as US president on January 20, has been in the driving seat of this helter-skelter revolution, kicking ass everywhere from Greenland to Gaza while bizarrely licking one ass that truly needs a good kicking: Putin’s.

The “shock and awful” tactics have not been confined to Trump himself, though. His vice-president, J.D. Vance, is the latest to weigh in, with the infamous Munich speech in which he had the audacity and hypocrisy to take the EU to task for its alleged lack of freedom of speech and democracy – against a background in which his own president has bullied and threatened his critics in the media and attempted to overthrow democracy by force four years ago following his false claims of a stolen election, while more recently attempting to subvert international law by authorising economic sanctions against the international criminal court (ICC) – a court which could potentially see him indicted for complicity in war crimes by Israel.

What does all this mean for MAP radicals and for progressive politics?

Most obviously, and I hate to say I told you so (well, no, in all honesty I feel quite smug about it), we need to face the fact that Vance’s big speech must have been cheered to the rafters back home thanks to its core anti-woke message. In my last two blogs I gently pointed out (gently compared to Trump and his enforcers at least), that some aspects of woke ideology, not least the transgender activist’s insistence that “transwomen are women”, are demonstrably false and for that reason can only be imposed coercively (through “cancelling” etc.), with the inevitable result that most people are alienated.

Some skepticism was expressed here when I suggested that public discontent (not just among the MAGA masses but sensible moderates too) may have cost Kamala Harris the election. I gave some polling evidence in support of this claim, and recently we learned that Trump’s executive order excluding transwomen from female sport was probably the most popular thing he has ever done, gaining the approval of 67% of Democrat voters. Yes, that’s fully two thirds of Democrat voters, and a whopping 94% of Republican ones. We should of course support trans people against unfair discrimination in employment and other aspects of daily life, but the American electorate has overwhelmingly recognised that there are some fair and reasonable limits to the contexts in which transwomen can be considered women.

Fairness, alas, has been conspicuous by its absence from other aspects of the Trump revolution. It will help to focus on the manoeuvrings of Elon Musk, who now figures as the third great ass kicker of the new administration, ensconced in the White House as the boss of DOGE (best pronounced “dodgy”), which gives the richest man in the world the task of being as mean as possible, his brief allowing him to nix money going to everything from international aid to welfare payments for poor and vulnerable Americans. One might think this wide-ranging mission would keep him fully occupied, along with his multiple other jobs (including Tesla, xAI, SpaceX, social media X, and being dad to his eXotically named son X Æ A-Xii plus a soccer-team’s worth of siblings); but, no, back in the distant days of last month, before landing his dodgy DOGE gig, he somehow found time not just to pick a fight with the Labour government in the UK , but to conduct this campaign which such relentless ferocity that prime minister Keir Starmer and co were left reeling and soon bending to his will – with big implications  for policy towards MAPs and child protection.

Having such a big family, Musk might be thought to know a thing or two about the latter, but outward appearances can be deceptive. He has certainly gone out of his way to look the part lately, carrying his cute little kids on his shoulders to a string of high-profile political events and letting them play around the president’s Oval Office desk – possibly to the Donald’s irritation! But is he just cynically using his kids as props for a string of photo opportunities?

That has to be the suspicion when we factor in the manically workaholic drive that took him to the top. Work-life balance? Ha! Just like his factory production, his reproduction can only have been fucking fast and efficient, with not a second wasted on idle canoodling and sweet nothings! As for quality time with the kids, no chance! Musk’s family-man image is a lie, as exposed last year when his now adult transgender daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson gave her first interview, saying he that he had been an absent father who was cruel to her as a child for being queer and feminine.

But putting his little kids in front of the cameras to soften his image and falsely make him appear to be a great dad is the least of Musk’s media sins. Remember that amazing cave rescue in Thailand a few years back? When one of the British divers who played a heroic part in getting young boys to safety was trashed by Musk as a “pedo guy”? The diver lost a libel case after the tycoon’s outrageously baseless remark was presented in court as just a joke, although it had apparently been made in revenge because the diver had rejected Musk’s proposed rescue method. After that, Musk knew he could get away with saying anything about anyone, an understanding he has exploited most spectacularly against key political figures in Britain – his animus latterly driven by the fact that the UK has played a prominent role in attempting to regulate his social media platform.

It all kicked off last year with the horrific slaughter in Southport of three little girls at a Taylor Swift dance class – quickly rumoured on Musk’s by-this-time unmoderated X and elsewhere to have been committed by an illegal immigrant Islamist. Unsurprisingly, the country was soon ablaze with anti-Muslim riots, focused dramatically at times on accommodation for asylum seekers. It now appears the perpetrator, Axel Rudakubana, was actually a home-grown madman from Cardiff, with Christian parents originally from Rwanda.

But the facts were never going to matter to Musk, who notoriously gave a Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration and whose enthusiasm for Far Right extremism has been further signalled by his support for jailed street thug Tommy Robinson in the UK and the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in Germany, which alarmingly doubled its vote share in Sunday’s election to become the country’s second biggest party. Ignoring the facts, Musk disparaged the prime minister as “two-tier Keir” for allegedly protecting the interests of immigrants in Britain over those of native-born citizens. He even stirred things up by saying civil war in Britain was “inevitable”.

That was bad enough, but early last month saw a relentless mass strike from his intercontinental ballistic media missiles, even before Trump’s inauguration. It was the anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant theme again, this time focusing on what he called “the Pakistani-ancestry grooming gangs” scandal in a number of towns some years ago. On January 3, Musk posted: “Starmer was responsible for the RAPE OF BRITAIN when he was head of Crown Prosecution for 6 years. Starmer must go and he must face charges for his complicity in the worst mass crime in the history of Britain.”

Wow! I am no Starmer fan, but this is one helluva pork pie. It was actually Starmer, as Director of Public Prosecutions, who launched a big crackdown on the “grooming gangs”, which certainly included some genuinely nasty men who exercised coercive control over girls, a theme I explored in a blog at the time. My piece was called “Street grooming: a nut to be cracked?” and I concluded that action was needed but that the state was using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. It was a view I expanded on some years later when giving evidence to the IICSA. See paragraphs 64-71, under the subheading “Localised grooming”.

Musk’s totally baseless attack on Starmer wasn’t even the wildest or most vicious of his allegations. He also lashed out at Jess Phillips, the minister for “safeguarding and violence against women and girls” after she declined a request from Oldham Council for a government-led inquiry into “child sexual abuse” (CSA) in the town. He said she “deserves to be in prison” and called her a “rape genocide apologist”. She told the BBC that the lies spread by Musk (though she reportedly used the polite word “disinformation”) was putting her life in danger – which in my view was not an exaggeration when we remember that two MPs have been assassinated in recent years. Tempting as it is to rub our hands in glee at the likes of Starmer and Phillips getting a taste of their own frequent hate speech (towards MAPs), Musk’s irresponsible style is not the answer.

The immediate consequence of his outrageous “disinformation” was less dramatic than bloodshed but more ominous for the quality of our political life, and potentially for the future of democracy. There was panic at the heart of government. Their confidence already shaken after many months of bad press following a faltering start to their new administration six months earlier, the leading figures in Labour must have thought this sustained barrage of abuse from mighty Musk could truly cripple them, driving their traditional supporters in droves towards the populist Right.

So, when Musk said “Jump!”, it was inevitable they would soon answer, “How high?” He repeatedly called for a fresh national statutory inquiry into child sexual exploitation. The government resisted for a nanosecond but then announced a nationwide review of grooming gang evidence and five government-backed local inquiries. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has announced a new £10m fund, split into two parts, to tackle grooming gangs and CSA. A three-month national audit led by Baroness Louise Casey would examine gang demographics, their victims, and the “cultural drivers” of the crimes. Secondly, a judge, Tom Crowther KC, would assist in the development of several local reviews.

But there have already been many such reviews in quite recent times, including the IICSA one mentioned earlier, costing a vast amount of money to address largely imaginary problems and achieving nothing. As Boris Johnson put it, in one of his rare truthful utterances, it was all money “spaffed up the wall”. Instead of being knocked off course by a malignant psychopath like Musk, Labour would do better to focus on its more thought-out policies, such as the long-overdue attempt to reduce Britain’s massively excessive prison population, through more rehabilitative alternatives. Even this government’s often misplaced impulse to “protect” youth, who actually need more freedom and decent job prospects, will be better served by its new bill to “target people who groom children into criminal activity, including county lines drug dealing or organised robbery” than by raking through the tired old stuff Musk is so exercised over.

The bottom line is that in this country and America the real “protection” we all need is against the likes of Musk and Trump, not by them. Their idea is not democracy as Abraham Lincoln famously proposed it – government of the people, by the people, for the people – but government of the powerful, by the powerful, for the powerful. Note all those billionaires at Trump’s inauguration, the new oligarchs, or plutocrats: Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, now worth the thick end of $1 trillion between them and licking their lips at the fat government contracts and sweetheart deals that are bound to be coming their way, along with others for Trump himself: real estate in Gaza, rare earths in Ukraine. Welcome to the new age of robber barons, the new Gilded Age!

BREAKING NEWS: Like I said, things are moving very fast. Late news coming in after writing the last paragraph above: Trump shares “what’s next?” for Gaza AI video on Truth Social. Also: Ukraine official says minerals deal agreed with US.

DAMP SQUIB, OR STRAW IN THE WIND?

BBC Radio 4’s In Dark Corners, series two, focused on a membership list of the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE), which was brought to the attention of journalist and broadcaster Alex Renton after being held by the police for some years, but later passed into private hands.

Renton had hoped his investigation of names and addresses on the list would expose previously undetected “scandal”, but from his point of view the trail disappointingly led nowhere, as he admitted in his final episode.

By that time, there had already been a discussion about the series in the comments here, in which I had said it looked like being a “damp squib”. I was angered to hear Renton unfairly traducing some fine old friends from the 1970s and 80s, but with many of them now dead this was little more than a private concern for me personally.

The only really interesting revelation, for me, was about PIE members I had not known about, who had kept in the background and maybe joined with assumed names. The addresses alone would not have meant much to those of us who were running PIE. We just used them as a mailing list for our publications.

It was only through the media that we discovered ambassador Sir Peter Hayman had been a member, or the spy Geoffrey Prime. And now, from Renton, I found that Viscount Mersey, a hereditary peer, had been another Establishment figure in our ranks, and there was an unnamed former chaplain to the royal household.

Other members, we were told, included authors, academics, musicians, plus distinguished nature film-maker and TV presenter, Christopher Mylne, who worked with David Attenborough among others. Many of the rest had contributed solidly to society, with over 30 teachers, plus social workers, youth workers, military officers, psychologists and doctors – all of whom Renton had given himself the difficult task of presenting as evil, disgusting, horrible people!

Another point of interest is that Renton ended up giving a plug for Heretic TOC, which he described as a busy forum, ominously adding it was a space where, “In some ways PIE, and its ideas, live on”. So, a space he would clearly love to silence – as would Julie Bindel: see below.

But this is not the only MAP-friendly online space, is it? There are quite a lot of others these days, including Mu, where you can find an excellent episode-by-episode summary and critique of In Dark Corners.

IT’S CATCHING: JULIE PLUGS HTOC TOO

The lovely Julie Bindel has given a surprise plug on her substack for Heretic TOC. Thanks, sweetheart!

In an item quite rightly slagging off so-called national hero Peter Tatchell (about whom I blogged), she has graciously given me full credit for my assistance and even given a link to HTOC.

She says that in 2015 she was asked by The Times to interview me. I accepted her offer to chat over a very nice nosh in a posh Mayfair brasserie, during which Tatchell’s name came up. She now reports that in a follow-up email I gave her some useful lowdown about his early work, which included public support for child-adult sexual relations that he later denied, along with treacherous denunciation of MAPs, including me. She said her readers might wish to read a news report she co-wrote for the Telegraph newspaper, “which should give you a clear a picture of Tatchell’s child abuse apologism”. Then she puzzlingly added, “I thought it was worth pondering, however, (which is why I am posting a copy of his email [TOC: mine, not Tatchell’s] to me as well as his blog), why it is that Tatchell gets away with espousing these views?”

Why she thinks adding my email and blog details add anything that will help her readers to “ponder” Tatchell’s dodging of cancellation is a mystery. Maybe she just wants to promote my work because she is a secret admirer? However, that theory takes a bit of a tumble when she refers to my “hideous blog”, adding, “The man is utterly grotesque, and I wish him the worst.”

Let’s say her fandom is a work in progress!

COULD HAVE SAVED MYSELF THE BOTHER

After putting out my marathon slog through the major concepts relating to sex and gender last time, I chanced upon a marvellous article that could have saved me much of the trouble. Titled “Do Sex and Gender Have Separate Identities?”, is an academic piece by Gonzalo R. Quintana and James G. Pfaus that says more or less what I did but in considerably greater detail and with much greater authority.

So, I highly recommend it for anyone who wants to explore the issues further. To facilitate this, I here give my own link to the full paper. The best bit is a brilliant diagram. See Figure 2.