If you were running the government of Scotland right now, you’d have no shortage of serious, potentially civilization-ending social problems to contend with. Chief among them would be that, before long, there might not be very many Scottish people left.
Since 2011, Scotland’s birth rate has been well below replacement level, meaning far more people are dying than being born. There were more than 630,000 deaths, and only 580,000 or so births. And yet, despite those numbers, Scotland recorded its largest population in history as recently as 2022.
How could that be? You can probably guess.
Like many other nations all over the world, including the United States, Scotland is importing boatloads of poor foreigners to make up the difference. The result has been exactly what you’d expect. Scotland’s economy is now in a death spiral, with more than one million of its five-and-a-half million residents living in poverty and no clear solution to the problem. The number of people aged 65 and over is projected to grow by nearly 30% by 2045, while the number of children is projected to drop by roughly 20%. Unless something changes very soon, Scotland may be completely unrecognizable by the time its next census rolls around.
In political terms, this is what’s commonly called an “existential threat.” A serious country would enact policies to reverse this trend immediately, starting with turning away the so-called refugees and migrants that Scotland can’t tolerate, much less accommodate. But Scotland has decided on a very different course of action. Instead of, say, encouraging more Scottish citizens to have families, the government of Scotland has decided to suspend the right of freedom of speech. And they’ve suspended the freedom of speech with the express purpose of endorsing and protecting transgenderism — an ideology that’s antithetical to reproduction, and which openly calls for the sterilization and castration of children.
This is precisely the sort of thing that self-loathing societies do when they decide they don’t want to exist anymore. It’s the path Scotland is on and, as I’ll explain in a second, it’s exactly the same plan our leaders are following in this country.
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The specific law I’m talking about is called the Hate Crime and Public Order Act, and Scotland formally enacted it on Monday. It criminalizes the act of , “behav[ing] in a manner that a reasonable person would consider to be threatening or abusive,” if in doing so, “the person intends to stir up hatred against a group of persons” based on one of the following characteristics: “age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity, or variations in sex characteristics.”
Anyone found guilty under this law can be sentenced to prison for up to seven years. Let me restate that: If you say something that a “reasonable person” in Scotland considers abusive, then the government can throw you in prison for seven years.
There are sites springing up all over Scotland where you can report wrong-think if you notice it, including, for some reason, sex shops in Glasgow. Watch:
Of course it’s a woman with big glasses defending this transgender “hate crimes” legislation. She reassures us that “freedom of expression” is “really important,” except when it’s “abusive.” But who defines what’s abusive? The bill doesn’t say. I checked. The only limiting principle is that this legislation says it doesn’t outlaw “discussion or criticism,” whatever that means. But once discussion or criticism becomes “abusive,” according to “reasonable people,” then it’s a serious crime and you’ll spend the better part of a decade in prison.
The problem is that, by the bill’s own terms, the people determining what’s “reasonable” and what’s “hateful” are people who believe that biology isn’t real.
The whole bill is established with the express understanding that it’s “reasonable,” by default, to believe that anyone can change their gender in an instant. That is what the bill is saying is the reasonable position. It literally says that “transgender identity” is something the law needs to recognize and protect. And as we’ve seen, trans activists are willing to cry about “genocide” if you use a pronoun they don’t like. These are the “reasonable” people who get to set the boundaries of what’s “abusive” and what’s not.
In effect, what this means is that the truth has just been outlawed in Scotland.
Tell the truth about transgenderism, and you can go to prison for longer than a serial rapist. That’s not an exaggeration, by the way. Late last year, a man who raped three schoolgirls — ages 14 and 15 — in the Scottish town of Falkirk received a sentence of just six years in prison. If he had “misgendered” them instead, he’d have gotten a tougher sentence.
To be clear, this isn’t insanity, although that’s certainly what it looks like. It is, instead, a declaration of war by the government of Scotland against its own people. At every turn, they are working towards the destruction of future generations. And now they’re making it illegal to talk about it.
As a result, there is now a non-zero chance that bestselling children’s author J.K. Rowling could soon be arrested. When this law took effect, Rowling posted a lengthy thread on social media, listing various men who identify as women in the UK — including men who have raped small children.
“Obviously, the people mentioned in the above tweets aren’t women at all, but men, every last one of them,” Rowling wrote. She continued: “In passing the Scottish Hate Crime Act, Scottish lawmakers seem to have placed higher value on the feelings of men performing their idea of femaleness, however misogynistically or opportunistically, than on the rights and freedoms of actual women and girls. … It is impossible to accurately describe or tackle the reality of violence and sexual violence committed against women and girls, or address the current assault on women’s and girls’ rights, unless we are allowed to call a man a man. Freedom of speech and belief are at an end in Scotland if the accurate description of biological sex is deemed criminal. I’m currently out of the country, but if what I’ve written here qualifies as an offence under the terms of the new act, I look forward to being arrested when I return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment.”
Already, as you’ve probably guessed, many people in the UK are calling for Rowling’s arrest. A lawyer named Rajan Barot, for example, wrote that Rowling had engaged in a “deliberate act of defiance,” and that the police “must mount a full investigation.” And by the letter of the law that was just enacted in Scotland, the police are obligated to do that. For offending the cult of transgenderism, J.K. Rowling could soon be imprisoned for up to seven years.
This is the new definition of blasphemy in the UK. Transgenderism is the new state religion. And just to underscore that point even further, this same law — this same Hate Crimes bill that bans anyone from criticizing transgenderism — also repeals the existing blasphemy law on the books in Scotland. That had been in effect since the common law was created, but it’s gone now. Again, I’m not exaggerating for effect here.
This is literally a line from the same bill: “The common law offence of blasphemy is abolished.” And really, it makes sense. After all, you have to destroy the old religion to enact the new one. The Scottish government understands that as well as Mao did. They understand it as well as Joe Biden’s administration did on Easter Sunday.
But this is not a story about the internal affairs of Scotland. What’s happening in Scotland is not some kind of aberrant, overly extremist application of Leftist doctrine, rather, it’s the logical end result. When you value feelings over truth, and define untruth as truth, what follows next is inevitable.
Anyone who really believes that men can become women, and that affirming biological reality is tantamount to genocide, is eventually going to throw you in prison. That’s why they use terms like “genocide.” It’s not to accurately describe what you’re doing, it’s to justify destroying your life by force, through any means necessary.
You might be thinking to yourself — “Well, that can’t happen here, at least not to the extent it’s happening in a place like Scotland. After all, we have a much more robust Constitution here, and our First Amendment protects the freedom of speech from government interference. And surely, if the government explicitly said it was going to target people for their speech in this country, and then ruined them, then there’d be a major outcry over it.” If you thought that, however, you’d be wrong.
The attorney general of New York, Letitia James, is of course best known for her campaign to seize all of the assets of the leading presidential candidate. What she’s not so well known for is her campaign to target the website VDARE, explicitly because of its inconvenient and unpopular beliefs. This is a story that’s gotten very little attention in conservative media, but it’s every bit as scandalous as what Letitia James is doing to Donald Trump.
Shortly after she took office, as reported by the fringe Left-wing activist group Southern Poverty Law Center, Letitia James promised to target conservative and Right-wing organizations based on their speech: “In 2020, James said her office would take tougher legal action on organizations that engage in real-life discriminatory actions and online hate speech against protected classes.”
It’s an astonishing statement because there is no such thing as “online hate speech” in this country. We’re not Scotland, at least not yet. That’s the point of the First Amendment. But Letitia James just admitted, out in the open, that she was going to ignore the First Amendment, and go after people saying things online that she didn’t like. And that’s exactly what she’s done.
Over the weekend, VDARE explained that the New York attorney general’s office has ruined them financially with a subpoena that requires them to, “review 40 gigabytes of emails, an enormous amount. .. And of course these [emails] could in fact reveal the names of those pseudonymous writers, as well as our donors, privileged communications with lawyers, etc.” In all, VDARE says the subpoena could cost more than $150,000 to comply with, and as a result, the website may not be around for very much longer.
All of this is happening without VDARE being accused of any criminal activity whatsoever. There’s apparently just a suspicion of a possible violation of New York’s nonprofit rules, relating to their purchase of a castle as a conference venue several years ago. (Which they needed to purchase, because hotels wouldn’t let them host conferences there). But the New York AG’s office isn’t being very specific about what the problem is, so we’re really speculating about the specifics.
And as VDARE’s Lydia Brimelow said in a recent interview, New York really doesn’t have anything to do with VDARE, so their whole fixation with the organization is a little strange. In fact, VDARE has been trying to leave the state behind for a while now. The castle property that’s at issue is in West Virginia. Watch:
So VDARE is being chased around by a vindictive attorney general for an out-of-state property they bought. I’m no expert on the facts of the case, but at a glance, what VDARE is apparently being investigated for is somewhat similar to what BLM has admitted to doing.
We know BLM spent a lot of money buying multiple lavish mansions — not just one conference venue. But BLM was never subjected to any kind of investigation. They never had the New York attorney general, or any other attorney general, bombard them with subpoenas. And we know why that is. It’s because BLM is on Letitia James’ side. VDARE isn’t. VDARE likes to talk about things like crime statistics, and what happens in cities like Baltimore. So therefore, like Donald Trump, they need to be crushed. Every real-estate transaction they’ve ever engaged in needs to be carefully scrutinized until they’re broke.
Suddenly Scotland’s decision to suspend freedom of speech doesn’t seem so unthinkable here. If Letitia James can get away with targeting a Right-wing media outlet like this, while admitting it, then we’re basically there already.
If anything, we could learn from what’s happening in Scotland. At least they have someone like J.K. Rowling who is willing to go to jail over what Scotland’s government is doing. Is there anyone in this country who’s even suggested sacrificing anything for a site like VDARE? Of course not. They have unfashionable views. So they won’t be around much longer. Inevitably, that means the people who decide what’s “unfashionable” will be coming for you, too.