Thread by @simonjedge

Nancy Kelley's interview on Woman's Hour did indeed seem like 'a Wizard of Oz moment'. But it raises an interesting question. If the CEO of Stonewall isn't the malign genius behind this breathtakingly efficient capture of the public and private realm by gender ideology, who is?

In my fictional take, to which @M4rtyman alludes here, there's a nutjob US billionaire providing unlimited cash for the flat-earth takeover, with a sinister lobbyist in a Bond villain lair at the top of a Bermondsey council block directing strategy.

https://twitter.com/M4rtyman/status/1461377262142509058?s=20

That's strictly fiction. To tell stories, you need a small number of players in easily defined roles, and you also need a way of resolving the story neatly. If only real life were so simple.

At Stonewall, there has indeed been smart leadership. In their day, Angela Mason and @anyabike won the early victories on lesbian/gay law reform. My old friend and colleague Ben Summerskill continued the process. A strategic genius, he achieved complete legal equality.

It was success beyond the Stonewall founders' wildest dreams. Ruth Hunt was another smart cookie. When she took over from Ben, she and her board had to decide which way to take Stonewall. Wind it slowly down because its work was done, or find new battles? They chose the latter.

That was what adding the T was all about. And of course they haven't stopped there. Since then, they've added the Q, the A, the '+' and – as of yesterday – even the U. It's all about creating new minorities to present as oppressed and in need of support.

https://twitter.com/DebbieHayton/status/1461603698304593920?s=20

Where does Nancy Kelley fit into all this? To those of us who have been following closely, it has long been clear that Stonewall's CEO doesn't have quite the same smarts as her predecessors. Otherwise she wouldn't make clumsy admissions like this one:

The point there, as @legalfeminist has pointed out, is that Stonewall has no business working on FOI requests that members of the public have made to their client organisations. Oops.

https://twitter.com/legalfeminist/status/1456307074850336768?s=20

The ever-pithy @jo_bartosch summed up Nancy's role scathingly but accurately yesterday

https://twitter.com/legalfeminist/status/1456307074850336768?s=20

So back to the real question: who is in charge of strategy? Not the clowns who front the ideas on social media and TV, that's for sure. They're just the useful idiots who'll trot out whatever they think is woke policy, and will say the opposite tomorrow if that changes.

Nor people like this pair, whom nobody would ever confuse with strategic geniuses

For the strategy, you have to go back to the so-called Dentons principles, which the journalist and thinktank director @jameskirkup has done much to publicise.
spectator.co.uk/article/the-do…

The document James wrote about, prepared by the world's oldest law firm, set out the cuckoo-in-the-nest strategy that has become so familiar: find a more popular cause to piggy-back onto, and don't for heaven's sake let the press know what you're doing.

As readers of THE END OF THE WORLD IS FLAT will know, these are much the same principles that my sinister, shadowy lobbyist Robinson White advises CEO Shane Foxley to use as he turns the Orange Peel Foundation from a benign map-making charity to full-on flat-earther ideologues.

For the real-life version, you can read about the activists who spent twenty or thirty years developing the ideas behind the Dentons report in @HJoyceGender's bestselling book Trans, if you haven't done so already. It's a crisp, very readable history.

So what happens when that strategy unravels? When the media starts to disobey the 'No Debate' edict, when opponents of the gender ideology juggernaut refuse to be intimidated by its progress, and when more and more ordinary people experience @TheRosie's Wizard of Oz moment?

My hunch is that there isn't actually a Plan B. Plan A was all about bullying, intimidation and legislation by stealth – precisely because its proponents knew they didn't have a hope of foisting a lunatic ideology on the world the honest way, by persuasion.

Maybe I'm wrong, but that's how it works with flat-earthery. As I said, real life works less conveniently than fiction, but FICTION ALSO EXISTS and if you haven't done so already, you could always treat yourself to a copy of my book. Apparently it's funny.
amazon.co.uk/End-World-Flat…

PS Sorry, I linked to the wrong tweet for the ever-pithy @jo_bartosch. Here it is. It's actually a nice way to end the thread.

https://twitter.com/jo_bartosch/status/1461326111036657675?s=20