Culture wars Archives | MelaniePhillips.com

Arrogant National Trust betrays trust of the nation

August 27, 2020 Melanieheritage, National Trust, stately homes

The National Trust’s proposed “revolution” in its relationship with the public has caused justifiable outrage. Its ten-year strategy, revealed by The Times, is to shift its emphasis from enabling the public to visit its stately homes and gardens to promoting access to the countryside. Historic houses, it says, will be “repurposed as public space in service of local audiences” to junk the “outdated mansion experience”. The Trust declared that although it remained “committed to, and passionate about” country houses, arts and heritage, it needed to ensure that these were “meaningful…

Culture wars Jewish people

Support for Black Lives Matter repeats a lethal error of history

August 21, 2020August 21, 2020 Melanieantisemitism, Black Lives Matter, Democratic party, Stalinism

In the 20th century, thousands of progressively minded people supported Soviet communism. Believing this ideology was the key to a better world, they refused to acknowledge the horrific abuses under Stalin when millions were brainwashed, murdered or starved to death. Today’s progressives are behaving in similar fashion in response to another onslaught on civilized values, perpetrated in the name of an ideology with the same roots as Soviet communism. And just as in the last century, a dismaying number of its cheerleaders are Jews. In both America and Britain, Jewish…

Culture wars Jewish people

The progressive world: an antechamber to evil

July 31, 2020July 31, 2020 Melanieantisemitism, Democratic party, western values, Wiley

After days of antisemitic rants on social media, the “Grime” rapper Wiley has finally been barred from Twitter and Facebook following outrage by Jews and others that he was allowed to use these platforms for his vicious incitement. This episode was particularly chilling. It involved a sustained onslaught of anti-Jewish invective by a prominent public figure who described Jews as “cowards and snakes,” likened them to the Ku Klux Klan and suggested they should be shot. He could do this with impunity because no one saw fit to stop him…

Culture wars Jewish people USA

The Jewish surrender to the west’s eclipse of reason

July 17, 2020July 17, 2020 MelanieBari Weiss, ideologies, New york Times

Rarely has a journalist’s resignation from their newspaper created such an impact as the coruscating letter with which Bari Weiss resigned from The New York Times. The moral bankruptcy of that paper has been plain for years to the many who have been shocked by its substitution of propaganda for objective journalism on many issues, including Israel. What really horrified people was Weiss’s description of the way she was victimized by her colleagues for challenging the paper’s group-think. They singled her out for her support for Israel as a Jew,…

Britain Culture wars USA

Politically homeless as the western mind shuts down

July 15, 2020July 15, 2020 MelanieCoronavirus, fantasists and realists, hyper-individualism

To make oneself politically homeless may be regarded as a misfortune. To do it a second time looks like recklessness on steroids. In the Eighties and Nineties, I broke with my former comrades on the left. On a variety of issues arising from their repudiation of the western nation and its values, I challenged the orthodoxy and found myself condemned as having gone over to the dark side, otherwise known as “the right”. I concluded that the left consisted of people who denied evidence and reason in the furtherance of…

Britain Culture wars Videos

Conversation: the eclipse of liberalism and the failure of conservatism

July 9, 2020 Melanieantisemitism, Conservatism, liberalism

I was pleased to have a long video conversation (in two parts) with John O’Sullivan, former senior policy adviser to Margaret Thatcher and now president of the Danube Institute, a think-tank based in Hungary. Our conversation started by talking about my early years at The Guardian newspaper and my experiences while working there which led me to break with the left. We discussed my play, Traitors (yes, I did write one and it was actually performed at a fringe theatre in London in 1986), my experience of antisemitism which led…

Britain Culture wars USA

Mrs America and the start of the culture wars

July 9, 2020July 9, 2020 Melanieequal rights amendment, feminism, Phyllis Schlafly

Know much about Phyllis Schlafly? Indeed, have you even heard of her? Well, people are about to find out a lot more, and perhaps learn for the first time about the direct line from her to our current political and cultural tumult. Tomorrow BBC2 starts screening a brilliantly produced and addictive series, Mrs America. This deals with the tremendous fight put up in the 1970s by Schlafly, an anti-feminist, anti-abortion, anti-communist campaigner, against the US Equal Rights Amendment. That sought to end the legal distinctions between men and women over…

Britain Culture wars USA

The war against the west, and its defender

July 7, 2020July 7, 2020 MelanieBlack Lives Matter, Donald Trump, Keir Starmer, western civilisation

Across America, law and order has now broken down. There are repeated attacks on the police and a huge spike in the number of murders. On FrontPageMag, John Perrazzo reports: “On Sunday, May 31, eighteen homicides were committed in Chicago, breaking the city’s previous one-day record of thirteen, set 29 years ago. In fact, over the course of that same weekend as a whole, Chicago police responded to at least 73 incidents in which 92 people were shot, including 27 who died as a result. ‘We’ve never seen anything like it at…

Culture wars Videos

The long march, and how to reverse it

July 6, 2020 Melanielong march, subversion

I took part remotely in a discussion held in London by the New Culture Forum to discuss their new book, “The Long March: How the Left Won the Culture War and What To Do About It.” The first part of the title refers to the “long march through the institutions”, the strategy of achieving revolutionary change by infiltrating subversive ideas into all the cultural institutions of society and thus transforming it from within. As chairman Peter Whittle observed, however, it’s the latter part of the title that’s the most important…

Culture wars Jewish people

What have the Jews ever done for us?

July 3, 2020July 3, 2020 MelanieJudaism, moral responsibility, rationality, western civilisation

I gave a talk to the sixth form and staff at London’s JFS school, under the title “What have the Jews ever done for us? The contribution of Judaism to western civilisation and modernity”. You can watch the talk here, and you can read an edited version below. What have the Jews ever done for us? The contribution of Judaism to western civilisation It’s an article of faith that religion and modernity are mutually exclusive. In one box, labelled modernity, are all the good things that we value: reason and…