BBC against Trump: Wrong man with whom to pick a fight

Theodore Roosevelt urged, Speak softly and carry a big stick. Donald Trump urges: Bellow like hell and swing a two-handed, double-edged, nuclear-tipped claymore. Different forays, different mores. So MAGA takes on the taxpayer-subsidised cult that is the BBC, the Battle of the Capitals, and by God, the Beeb deserves whatever it gets. It is a cult that lies repeatedly, but operating at so many levels of dysfunctionality that it can blandly deny “knowledge” about the many things that it really should know. Yet when dissenters to its liberal dogmas are being interviewed, they can usually expect a well-researched gotcha gin-trap, that will leave an interviewee limping out of the studio and a small smirk sewn onto an interviewer’s face. 

But the BBC is not unique. So, what happened? How did so many anglophone countries – the US, the UK, Canada, New Zealand – seemingly choose to swallow the hemlock of cultural treason rather than promote their own rich legacies? Biden, Johnson/Starmer, Trudeau, Ardern: These were national leaders who could not be trusted to mop a dancefloor without taking a chainsaw to it, but they were also symptoms of a profound moral disorder, a refusal to face stark racial and cultural realities.  For, within eleven years of the 7/7 Islamist London bombings in 2005, the British capital elected a Muslim mayor, with white British people now an ethnic minority within that city. Likewise, within 24 years of the 9/11 atrocity, New York city overwhelmingly elected a Muslim mayor who, though he said he wanted to “globalise the Intifada”, nonetheless won 33 per cent of the Jewish vote in the city.

The BBC is thus not behaving outside existing norms, but merely embodying and promoting a different moral order from the society that produced it. This is what enabled it  last year to falsify footage of a speech by Donald Trump of five years ago, linking two passages that were unconnected when spoken. His original words urged the crowds to march down to the Capitol peacefully to cheer on “our brave Senators and Congress men and women”. This was edited into “we’re going to march down to the Capitol,” to which was spliced the following words from fifty minutes later, “and I’ll be with you all the way, and we’ll fight, we’ll fight like hell.” The icing on the insurrectionary cake came with footage of the Proud Boys, thus incited, marching towards the Capitol to mount their “attempted coup”, whereas that footage. in sequence, came before Trump’s speech, and merely showed them arriving in Washington. 

Thus, a year on from the broadcast, the quite contemptible excuse from the chairman of the BBC, the Muslim convert Samir Shah:  “The purpose of editing the clip was to convey the message of the speech made by President Trump so that Panorama’s audience could better understand how it had been received by President Trump’s supporters and what was happening on the ground at that time.”

So the BBC’s version  of the speech was not reality, but merely the imagined perception of Trump’s supporters: In other words, a work of “art”. Of course, to the pseudo-liberal mindset, Trump’s followers are neo-Nazis, and the BBC’s confected work of art could be seen as a filmic metaphor for Hitler’s attempted bierkeller putsch of 1923, in which the BBC’s carefully-crafted fictions conveyed a greater, generic truth. In both intent and outcome, this was how totalitarian film-makers such as the Bolshevik Eisenstein and the Nazi Riefenstal worked, on the theory that great truths require an artist’s scissors. In elision resides reality. Arbeit macht frei. All are equal. Et cetera.

Moreover, in this dystopian moral order, national self-hatreds have become normative in many Caucasian states, a hatred that is rather generously extended to Israel, though now in the name of “tolerance”. Thus, the BBC’s employment-guidelines exclude as commentators known hate-mongers, except, as we now know, if they are anti-Semites. So, though one opponent said that Jews should be burnt, just like Hitler (in his bunker), the BBC World Service put him on air some 244 times over eighteen months. Another such splendid gentleman, who said that Israelis were “less than human” and that Jews were “devils”, appeared 522 times.

In the empirical vacuum inhabited by the BBC, its newsrooms have embraced the lies that people can change sex. So, a newsreader whose teleprompted-script contained the words “pregnant people”, and who promptly corrected herself to say “women”, was publicly rebuked by the BBC for expressing “a controversial view about trans people”.

Yes, saying that only women can get pregnant is controversial. And some people are more equal than others.

The BBC has also enthusiastically imported the liberal Americanism “reproductive rights”, though this usually refers to the opposite, namely non-reproductive “rights”, including full term in utero infanticide. This is usually by beheading of babies inside their mothers, though no doubt the term “womb-owning people” is more correct. 

The re-engineering of the English language to suit the political requirements of doctrinaire liberals has succeeded.  One quarter of the way through the 21st century, we can now understand how in the 1920s, both Communists and Nazis were shaping vocabularies to suit their needs, as “herrenvolk” and “proletarian” acquired a higher moral status, irretrievably damning their polar opposites, “untermensch” and “imperialist”, even if neither term applied. This is precisely what today’s anglophone liberals do to their opponents, employing categories that serve as irredeemable curses: Zionist, the patriarchy,  institutionally racist, transphobic, misogynist, white privilege.

Yesterday’s Stalinists and Nazis would smile in recognition of their old friends, but now in fresh and modern guises.

So the BBC’s armed forays into the language and culture wars in the liberal interest reveal the power of the schismatic toxins within the anglophone world. Trump’s extraordinary achievement has been to recognise the loathing that ordinary people feel for these liberal disorders and to turn it into a powerful political movement.  However, the triumph of Mamdani – a name that means “follower of Mohammed” (what a surprise) – has revealed not merely the limits of that power, but also the depth of the divisions within the Judaeo-Christian communities in the USA. But for now, that is a longer-term issue: Next comes the battle between the BBC and Trump. For the sake of the British people and what little remains of their values, the BBC must lose. 

Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, author and broadcaster. He has reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia.