Big W's for the little guy

To Jodi Shaw and all the other citizens of good conscience

What a glorious few days it has been.

After years of being on the receiving end of blunt psychological warfare tactics designed to demoralise and derange us, in just four sweeping days we’ve seen some serious mo-fo’s get their comeuppance. I’m looking at you, 51 signatories of the Hunter Biden laptop propaganda letter. And you, World Health Organisation, for the torments of the Covid lockdowns. And you, men in dresses. Back to the bowels of hell you go.

And closer to the ground, we’ve seen some relief given to the salt-of-the-earth types whose lives were shattered to one degree or another by a vindictive and worthless administrative state: the mass pardons issued to the January 6th political prisoners, and the reinstatement with backpay to the military personnel who were driven out of service for refusing to obey the insane vax mandates, for example.

But one moment of the last four days was particularly electrifying. On Sunday night — which if you are a red-pilled Gen X’er like myself was like Christmas Eve — Megyn Kelly gave a speech at a Trump rally in which she mentioned, at length, Jodi Shaw, and called her a hero. Megyn Kelly is correct.

Shaw was an employee of ultra-liberal Smith College, which fully embraced the neo-Maoist racist ideology known as critical race theory. As a result, she was made to attend struggle sessions in which she was expected to confess her racial sins, and other Smith employees were hounded out of jobs when they ended up on the wrong side of racial witch hunts.

In October 2020 she made a heartfelt and very brave plea against woke policies, directly addressed to her employer, and posted it to Youtube.

‘I ask that Smith College to stop reducing my personhood to a racial category.

‘Stop telling me what I must think and feel about myself.

‘Stop presuming to know who I am or what my culture is based upon my skin color.

‘Stop telling me that as a white person I am — quote — especially responsible for doing the work of dismantling racism.

‘Stop emboldening students to act abusively towards staff by refusing to hold them accountable for their own egregious behaviour.”

I first heard of Shaw shortly after that. I was so impressed by her eloquence and moral clarity that I tracked her down on Facebook and sent her a message. Unlike most messages like that which disappear into the ether, Jodi saw mine and responded. In January 2021 I published an article in the Spectator about her pushback against the college. And over the years, we became friends.

In the Spectator, I wrote:

“If, like me, you have been following racial toxicity at liberal arts colleges for a while, these words are stunning. Revolutionary, even. Because they come from the people on the ground who are being harmed and have been, until now, voiceless. This is — we should hope — the first hole poked through the dam of elitist privilege that has been enabling and encouraging critical race theory, at a huge cost to non-elites. A torrent of common-sense rejection of the ideology must surely follow.”

I wrote those words in a spirit of hope more than expectation. It was a dark time. But Megyn Kelly’s speech on Sunday was a jubilant bookend to an era in which all fairness and sanity seemed to have vanished. In which blue-collar normies and ‘desk jockeys’ (as Jodi described herself) were being attacked and ostracised by the great and the good. Kelly’s words will place Jodi in the history books as one of the regular Americans who refused to buried like that. Kelly’s remarks showed that ordinary people can, in fact, make a difference.

(Thanks to subscriber and mutual friend Jacqueline for sending me the video.)

I’m very proud to call Jodi my friend. Hearing her get the recognition she deserves in front of the whole country, was an experience I will never forget.

On Monday, I attended a small gathering in Dublin to mark Trump’s inauguration. It was at a working man’s bar on the far outskirts of the city — a far cry from the leafy and prestigious neighbourhood where the American embassy is located. Among the attendees were a few women who gained notoriety in woke Ireland when they formed the Natural Woman’s Council, founded to push back against the harms of Covid mandates on children, and now against graphic sexual content in schools. The group’s leader is an American woman, Jana Lunden, who has lived in Ireland for over 20 years and is raising two children here. I knew her by reputation, because she generates as much scorn and fury from professional managerial class social media users as someone like Tommy Robinson. (Check out the hilarious yet disturbing YouTube series made by the Natural Women’s Council, in which Irish mammies read from sexually explicit books for children.)

Like Jodi, Jana lived an unassuming life before the encroachment of this hideous ideology. Like Jodi, she has paid a price. Here on this island we are watching the vibe shift across the Atlantic with tentative hope, because our day of vindication feels a long way off.

No matter. We keep going.