Anyone for Drag Queen story time..?

When the Woke train stops at your station.

So, now the dust, or should we say glitter, has settled, what the hell just happened in South London over the weekend?

We had the undernourished, blue-haired, mummy-dressed-them antifa mob, hiding behind facemasks and safety in numbers in Honor Oak at the weekend. They were quite an angry bunch, overspilling with hate while announcing love, although it felt as though a particularly bracing sneeze might send them flying like bowling pins. They were joined by a white middle class all frothing at the mouth with diversity and the fundamental right that children should be read to by drag queens.  What they had in common was calling anyone who disagreed with them fascist and far-right, and even racist, although how they concluded this when the drag queen was white is beyond me.  

And the more I reflect on this local protest in support of drag queens reading diversity and gender fluidity stories to children, the more I understand. I guess it’s how deeply you think. Many people don’t see/refuse to see how this intends to erode in children’s’ minds the clear and important distinction between men and women. The drag queen is a distorted version of both and yet is neither. They belong in the decadent and liberated hours of the night; and long might they reign there. However, many feminists and lesbians feel that drag queens are reductionist and cliched tropes of a misogynistic mind set, which is evidently rejected by the rabid local witch-hunt. And don’t mistake drag queens for panto dames, they are NOT the same thing; you’re risking a testosterone hurled handbag around the ear if you suggest otherwise. The mob declare love and inclusivity, so long as you agree with them.

The idea that an undeniably sexualised sub-culture is reading to children can ONLY be a good thing with NO reservations, is what leads to a sign declaring ‘Queer joy for all ages’ at the protest, and schools inflicting the idea of 78 genders on subsequently disturbed children. Besides, how is this new doctrine going? Extraordinarily well if you measure success via incidence of self-harm, depression and gender confusion in teenagers. I wonder if they would be so supportive if it was a priest reading the stories?

‘Queer joy for all ages’. Does this include babies? Presumably so. There’s dereliction of duty when inflicting inappropriate aspects of the adult world onto childhood, not that you’d have known on Saturday where concerned local parents were subjected to hours of spittle-flecked abuse in person and on local facebook groups, the main thrust of which was 'get these fascists of 'our' streets. The irony that most of the crowd appear to be earning insufficient amounts to pay tax to pay for 'their' streets was yet another subtlety to have eluded their limited attention.      

For those not caught in the hive-mind we witnessed at the weekend - and utterly terrifying it is (as it was also seen in the covid hysteria and with Net Zero) - will have seen how heretics are treated. Called names, screeched at by a baying non-critical thinking mob. If you step out of the woke lane you are IMMEDIATELY a racist, fascist, homophobe, climate denier, transphobe, conspiracy theorist, or anti-vaxxer . And of course Nazi. Maybe for those on the fence or the undecided they’ll have seen how fundamentalist this woke doctrine is. And how they need to be cautious themselves, or the lynch mob will get them. And that's what is; a group filled with the sort of self-righteousness that leads to make-shift gallows and witch-burning. It was archaic; all that was missing were the pitchforks.  

In some ways it was like one of those military re-enactments of Waterloo or the battle of Stamford Bridge favoured by middle aged men content to be doing exactly what they want to be in their spare time. Only it was the reenactment of a Twitter pile-on, in real life, with face masks and scarfs and placards standing in for obscure profile names.

Although this is about safeguarding children and the integral innocence of childhood, it’s also about free speech and about the combating of actual fascism that the mob likes to project upon anyone disagreeing with them. Some people have hitched their horses to a runaway train and are now having to gallop to keep up.  Being called a far-right fascist by dads I once saw on the school run reveals how insidious this division has become. This is about standing up to those, emboldened by numbers, calling someone disapproving of drag queen story time as having ‘warped minds’.  Presumably those feminists disapproving of also have warped minds and should get with the programme or else. 

We live in newly puritanical times and at some point you have to pick a side - many already have - but boy you’d better get your pronouns in order, your oat milk ready and vitriol high, or they’ll smell your blood next time, and believe me, it ain’t pretty. 

The headline summary, as it always should be, is: If in doubt leave the kids alone.