International Women’s Day is a great opportunity to thank the truly incredible women and non-binary people I’m so lucky to know and without whom I’m nothing: writers and rappers, podcasters and promoters, activists and artists, booksellers and bassists, crafters and comedians, singers and scientists… my family and my found family.

Love and power to you all x

From the Sunday Times:

Journalist Pete Paphides asked his followers:

Is there an aspect of your work that involves dealing with the public? Is there a particular thing that people say to you all the time whilst thinking they’re the first person to have said it?

And oh my God, the replies. You’ll recognise yourself, and you’ll cringe.

I’ve just finished One Of Us by Ã…sne Seierstad. It’s very similar to Dave Cullen’s Columbine in that it’s an incredibly powerful piece of non-fiction about a massacre largely inspired by white supremacist rhetoric. In this case, the massacre is the 2011 bombing and subsequent gun massacre by Anders Brevik, who slaughtered 77 people.

It’s an extraordinary, shocking and upsetting book that tells the stories of the victims as well as the story of the massacre and the utter incompetence that enabled Breivik to kill so many people; as a piece of journalism it’s an incredible work.

It’s also deeply chilling. Breivik is seen as a hero in some right-wing circles and has been the inspiration for subsequent shootings, and the beliefs that radicalised him are commonplace in our mainstream and social media today.

Breivik was particularly enamoured of the UK writer Melanie Phillips, who he quoted multiple times in his poisonous manifesto. Phillips is famous for writing guff like this:

The traditional family […] has been relentlessly attacked by an alliance of feminists, gay rights activists, divorce lawyers and cultural Marxists who grasped that this was the surest way to destroy Western society.

Cultural marxism is an anti-semitic term based on an anti-semitic conspiracy theory dating back to the 1920s. Breivik used it over 600 times in his manifesto. It appears with similar frequency in the Daily Mail.

The Guardian:

The theory of cultural Marxism is also blatantly antisemitic, drawing on the idea of Jews as a fifth column bringing down western civilisation from within, a racist trope that has a longer history than Marxism. Like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the theory was fabricated to order, for a special purpose: the institution and perpetuation of culture war.

…It allows those smarting from a loss of privilege to be offered the shroud of victimhood, by pointing to a shadowy, omnipresent, quasi-foreign elite who are attempting to destroy all that is good in the world. It offers an explanation for the decline of families, small towns, patriarchal authority, and unchallenged white power: a vast, century-long left wing conspiracy.

Breivik was an islamophobe, but his targets were not Muslims: they were left-wing kids he believed were “cultural Marxists”.

As Dr Arun Kundani wrote about Breivik’s manifesto in 2012:

The bulk of the document constitutes a compilation of texts mainly copied from US far-Right websites… These writers are paranoid conspiracy theorists who claim Islam is a totalitarian political ideology that aims at infiltrating national institutions in order to enact sharia law. Like Breivik, they blame Western elites for pandering to multiculturalism and enabling “Islamic colonisation of Europe” through “demographic warfare”.

…It would be easy to dismiss Breivik’s beliefs as the ramblings of a man gone insane. But that would be to ignore the danger they represent. His case demonstrates that the new “anti-Islamist” far-Right is as compatible with terrorist violence as older forms of neo-Nazism. And, whereas neo-Nazism is a fringe phenomenon, anti-Islamism attracts wide support, including among mainstream politicians, newspaper columnists and well-funded think-tanks.

As Ian Buruma wrote in his review of One Of Us:

…what about the ideas that inspired Breivik? To be sure, the likes of Spencer, Wilders or Bawer do not preach violent revolution. They never told anyone to kill a Muslim, let alone a “cultural Marxist”. But their talk of war, of a Muslim threat to our civilisation, “Eurabia” and of the complicity of cultural elites in our imminent downfall, does create a toxic climate in which fantasists such as Breivik can find a justification for their horrible deeds.

Breivik may or may not be a madman. The court psychiatrists in Oslo differed on this. In the end it was decided that he was not. But that ideas have consequences cannot be denied. This book throws a great deal of light on the life and times of a miserable killer. That he had a sick imagination is clear. More is to be said about the ideas that fed it.

Ideas that have continued to inspire murderer after murderer after murderer.

David Neiwert, writing in The Daily Kos:

The pattern is becoming frighteningly familiar: A white man, radicalized online at alt-right media websites and through social media into hateful white nationalist beliefs built around the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about “cultural Marxism,” walks into a mass gathering of his selected targets (which can be any of the perceived participants in the conspiracy, including liberals, Jews, Muslims, Latinos, any nonwhite person, LGBTQ folk, even moviegoers) and opens fire.

Neiwert describes what he calls “chain terrorism”, where murderers such as Breivik and the people who inspired them go on to inspire the next generation of mass murderers.

Brian Levin of the Center for the Study of Extremism and Hate at California State University, San Bernadino, says the newer dynamic replicates the old content, but everything happens with much greater speed. “In pre-Internet days, the violent extremist act itself of neo-Nazis and white supremacists was considered messaging and labeled ‘propaganda of the deed,’” he told Daily Kos. “Today, sociopaths, particularly ideological ones, are seeing social media not just as a radicalizing and messaging tool, but also as an archive of a folkloric warrior narrative,” he continued. “Once they too act out, they have a link to notorious killers of the past, where their new manifestos are inscribed in a continuing perverse online subculture of scripted violence.”

Paul Rosenberg in Salon:

As Neiwert writes, a specific anti-Semitic narrative about “cultural Marxism” — meaning “Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms” by a cabal of Jewish intellectual émigrés from Nazi Germany known as the Frankfurt School — is motivating these massacres, whose victims have included Muslims in New Zealand as well as Jews in America.

This is a narrative Donald Trump has long echoed, especially with his attacks on “political correctness.” For potential terrorists, it’s also embedded in a very specific, dynamically evolving matrix of right-wing political activity and institutions that marks out a wide range of other targets for retribution, up to and including mass murder.

Anyone who’s traditionally of lower status — women, minorities, non-Christians, immigrants, LGBTQ individuals, etc. — is a potential target.

My favourite comedian isn’t pulling any punches.

[Jeremy Clarkson’s and Boris Johnson’s] careers have flourished by exploiting the notion that they are lone voices of sanity against a politically correct snowflake cabal intent on silencing normal blokes like them. Their comedy counterpart Ricky Gervais has managed to monetise this notion spectacularly, saying the things that he is apparently not allowed to say, on a variety of global media platforms, for millions of dollars, with the full co-operation and approval of the legal representatives of the institutions on which, and about which, he says the things he is not allowed to say, his functionally adequate standup act having been overpromoted worldwide off the back of his pitch-perfect contribution to the ground-breaking Office sitcom two decades ago.

Over at Ask Polly, Heather Havrilesky responds to a reader who’s finding it hard to find joy any more. 

Engage with this crisis instead of trying to cut it off. Let these feelings in instead of blaming yourself for them. Be more patient with your own sadness. And look for joy everywhere you can, every day, from the first hour you’re awake until the moment you fall asleep. Stop torturing yourself and make joy the first priority of every single day. I know I’m a broken record on that front, but it’s honestly the one clear and solid contribution I feel I have to make to this world: reminding people that just enjoying yourself is important. It matters.

As someone wrote in a song:

I hope you have a good one; I hope your Christmas is fun
I hope you’re with your family and there’s something for you under the tree
And I hope you thank your lucky stars

I’m thanking my lucky stars this year: in the run-up to Christmas I’ve been able to spend time with people I care about very much, and after a couple of very difficult years I’m looking forward to spending Christmas Day with my children and close family.

Others, I know, are not so fortunate. Some of us will be mourning loved ones they’ve lost, or that they’re estranged from; some will be gritting their teeth to spend time with people who won’t accept them for who they are.

If you’re one of those people, I hope the coming year brings you joy, joy that’s bigger and more powerful than any of the sadness you’ve experienced. If you’ve been rejected, I hope you find the chosen family who can give you the love you so richly deserve. You might not know them yet, but they’re out there. And if you’re one of the people who’s caused or contributed to others’ sadness, I hope 2020 fills you with the love and empathy you lack.

Merry Christmas.

C x

It’s time for my annual joke: every queen should have two birthdays. Today is my second one of the year, because I legally became Carrie two years ago.

It feels much longer than two years, and sometimes I feel like this.

But more often, I feel blessed. This isn’t an easy road to walk but life is good. I’m happy. And that’s largely because of the people I spend my time with.

I feel blessed to know so many wonderful, beautiful, kind and hilarious humans, many of whom I didn’t know before I became me. They have made me feel happy, made me feel safe, and made me shoot expensive gin out of my nose.

I hope they, and you, have a very happy and joyful 2020 when it comes.

As for me, I’m going to the pub soon. After all, it is my birthday.

Today is International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, and Rape Crisis Scotland needs your money. Please donate if you can: it’s an essential and desperately underfunded service. The stories being shared by the @rapecrisisscot Twitter account are heartbreaking.

On a typical day across Scotland this year over one thousand survivors of sexual violence are waiting for specialist support from Rape Crisis Centres.

The wait can be excruciating; the support is described as lifesaving.

I took the kids to see Frozen 2 today and had an unexpectedly brilliant time. The film’s a ton of fun, particularly so in 4DX when your seats move and you get sprayed with compressed air and water. 4DX is ridiculously expensive but hugely entertaining.

if you’re going to go, try and see it in 3D. It’s a very beautiful film, and the way it uses 3D is often breathtaking.