The Weekly Weird #57

A Tale of Two Tiers, Mr Vance goes to Deutschland, 60 Minutes stans for censorship, Murder Is Awesome: US Edition, Murder Is Awesome: Aussie Edition, far-right fight club, modesty blaze

Feb 21, 2025

Welcome back to your Weekly Weird!

The past seven days have seen some stunning inversions of previously accepted principles. CBS’s flagship programme 60 Minutes stanned for censorship. Two nurses in Australia came out in favour of murder. A surprisingly large number of people love Luigi Mangione, the harmoniously-featured young man charged with the shooting of United Healthcare CEO Brian Johnson (not to be confused with Bryan Johnson, the tech millionaire who wants to live forever).

And that’s not all…

America’s Got Talent (Presidential Edition): Former president Joe Biden has (re)signed with the talent agency CAA, presumably to star in either a reboot of Weekend At Bernie’s or a politically-themed reimagining of The Walking Dead. Not one to be left behind, former vice president Kamala Harris has also signed with CAA. Word on the street is that her feature film debut will be called Don’t Tell Momala The President Is Braindead1.
Murder Is Awesome (Aussie Edition): Two nurses at Sydney’s Bankstown Hospital bragged on-camera that they would kill Israelis if they were admitted to their hospital as patients, with one of them proudly saying “You have no idea how many Israeli harra dogs came to this hospital and [makes throat-cutting gesture] I sent them to Jahannam2.” Their behaviour brought Susan Pearce, the Secretary of Health, to tears as she told reporters: “Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would be standing here with two staff of the New South Wales health system having said such horrendous things.” The nurses were both fired and told that “they will never work in New South Wales again,” prompting them both to claim they had been joking. In response, “50 of Australia’s Muslim community groups have rushed to the nurses’ defense,” as per The Free Press.
Far-Right Fight Club: Ever wanted to watch a fitness fanatic froth about fascism? ITV in the UK have just the video for you, complete with hidden camera footage of someone with their face blurred out calling Adolf Hitler “Uncle Addy”. They’ve rumbled Active Club England (ACE), who apparently are out doing cardio and hating foreigners like the dress code at Wimbledon: Whites only. Skip to 3:26 for “they celebrated his birthday…with a swastika cake.” Can we all agree that swasti-cake is way snappier? Ironically, over a drink after the workout, “when opinions are shared”, the conversation turns to black Americans, with someone saying that Martin Luther King was “part-white”, and Malcolm X as well, at which point someone chimes in with “Yeah, all the good ones.” This was shortly after they had been bemoaning the fact that “whites are all conflicted” whereas people of other ethnicities all “think alike” like a “hive mind”. New members are expected to attain a “base level of fitness” within six months of joining, and one of them brags about having “throwing knives and shit”, all of it a preparation for when “the shit goes down”. As one blurred face says while waiting for a flat white at a cafe, “we’re here to take power when the opportunity arises.”
Modesty Blaze: West Midlands Police in the UK agreed to re-take and re-issue the mugshot of a woman convicted of terrorism offences because the first mugshot, in which her face and hair are visible, caused her “distress”. Farishta Jami, 36, was caught in the process of arranging for herself and her four children to move to Afghanistan to join a terrorist organisation. At her sentencing, the judge described her as “a woman firmly committed to the cause and in possession of extremist propaganda, espousing radical views and intent on influencing others”. Re-taking mugshots is not irregular, but it is not common to do it to cover the face of someone rather than remove articles obscuring their face. It also seems a bit much since Jami sat through her three-week trial wearing a hijab that showed her face. Here’s the before and after:
Salman Rushdie Takes The Stand: The long-fatwa’d author Salman Rushdie, who was attacked, stabbed more than a dozen times, and nearly killed in August 2022 by an American-born Lebanese man named Hadi Matar, took the stand to testify against his would-be murderer. The encounter was one he had written about powerfully in Knife, his moving memoir of the attack and the fraught road to recovery in its aftermath. Rushdie maintained his composure while weathering a cross-examination that tried to challenge his recollection of events, despite the defendant’s attorneys knowing full-well that the entire attack was filmed and witnessed by hundreds of people. You can enjoy the childish but genuine thrill of hearing a news anchor mangle the attacker’s name in the following AP summary.

Murder Is Awesome (US Edition)

On December 4, 2024, the CEO of United Healthcare, Brian Johnson, was shot dead in the middle of Manhattan while walking down the street. Five days later, Luigi Mangione, 26, was arrested for the murder at a McDonalds in Altoona, Pennsylvania. Despite the evidence, being arrested does not make Luigi Mangione guilty. However, it has made him extremely popular. He has a website and a fan club, the latter of which sent “54 emails, 87 pieces of mail and 163 deposits into his commissary account” within ten days of his arrest. He has even been recreated as an AI chatbot using Character AI, a platform that allows users to customise a bot. There are “Free Luigi” t-shirts, and a song on Spotify. The phrase has become a rallying cry. At one of the rallies at which it is cried, a masked attendee showed up with a sign that put Mangione on a list of “government recognized terrorists” with Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and Gandhi (misspelled as “Ghandi”). “Obviously what Luigi did was an act of violence,” one protester says to the camera crew in the video below. “But I’m not going to touch on that as much.”

Granted, the US healthcare system is a hot mess, and there are generations of people scarred by how it works. The fact that people are angry enough to cheer for the murder of an insurance executive should be a dire warning to those with authority to consider ways of fixing or addressing the issue. Believing that the pre-meditated murder of a fellow human being is a bad thing doesn’t wave any of that away.

I had a friendly American tell me to my face, with a smile, that he thought Luigi did the right thing and that United Healthcare’s record on denied claims was an acceptable justification for murder. A Substacker named Teresa wrote an article about how hot the alleged murderer is, opening with:

When it comes to what we find attractive, there’s no accounting for taste, and nobody in this world has it all. Nobody has universal appeal.
Unless you are Luigi Mangione.

Kaitlan Collins, a journalist at CNN, shared a link to Mangione’s defense fund on X before deleting it after there were understandable complaints. A few days ago, Rolling Stone reported that Mangione’s defense fund has “accepted” nearly $300,000 in donations via crowdfunding. Mangione made a statement that is up on the landing page of his website, telling his fans that “this support has transcended political, racial, and even class divisions.” Ironically, Mangione’s family benefits from a multi-million dollar trust fund courtesy of his grandmother, a trust fund that he withdrew from to meet the medical bills that supposedly drove him over the edge into a homicidal abyss.

So why do so many people think Mangione is some kind of folk hero? He comes from a stupendously wealthy family, he was educated at a $30,000 a year high school and an Ivy League university, and yet people are claiming him as some sort of revolutionary against the predations of a power structure captured by the rich. After his photo was taken when he appeared at court, the sweater he was wearing sold out in stores the next day. People talk about a post-trust world, but what about a post-irony world?

Mr Vance Goes To Deutschland

Vice-President JD Vance dropped jaws when he attended the Munich Security Conference and came out against Europe’s censorship regime and quashing of political parties deemed outside the Overton Window, or, since we’re talking about the EU, La Fenêtre Overton.

Here’s his speech in full:

Some choice cuts:

I was struck that a former European commissioner went on television recently and sounded delighted that the Romanian government had just annulled an entire election. He warned that if things don’t go to plan, the very same thing could happen in Germany too.
[…]
I look to Brussels, where EU Commission commissars warned citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest: the moment they spot what they’ve judged to be “hateful content.” Or to this very country where police have carried out raids against citizens suspected of posting anti-feminist comments online as part of “combating misogyny” on the internet.
I look to Sweden, where two weeks ago, the government convicted a Christian activist for participating in Quran burnings that resulted in his friend’s murder. And as the judge in his case chillingly noted, Sweden’s laws to supposedly protect free expression do not, in fact, grant — and I’m quoting — a “free pass” to do or say anything without risking offending the group that holds that belief.

Vance went on to give examples of speech restrictions in the UK, such as the implementation of safe zones around abortion clinics which, in Scotland, have seen residents warned that what they do inside their own homes may be an offence if it is visible from the street, and in England seen arrests of individuals standing silently and peacefully because of the presumed content of their thoughts.

Free speech, I fear, is in retreat and in the interests of comedy, my friends, but also in the interest of truth, I will admit that sometimes the loudest voices for censorship have come not from within Europe, but from within my own country, where the prior administration threatened and bullied social media companies to censor so-called misinformation. Misinformation, like, for example, the idea that coronavirus had likely leaked from a laboratory in China. Our own government encouraged private companies to silence people who dared to utter what turned out to be an obvious truth.

Before switching gears and moving on to talk about immigration, Vance referred to President Trump as the “new sheriff in town”, and admonished European governments for chilling domestic speech and dissent.

I believe deeply that there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions and the conscience that guide your very own people. Europe faces many challenges. But the crisis this continent faces right now, the crisis I believe we all face together, is one of our own making. If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you.
[…]
Contrary to what you might hear a couple of mountains over in Davos, the citizens of all of our nations don’t generally think of themselves as educated animals or as interchangeable cogs of a global economy. And it’s hardly surprising that they don’t want to be shuffled about or relentlessly ignored by their leaders. And it is the business of democracy to adjudicate these big questions at the ballot box.
I believe that dismissing people, dismissing their concerns or worse yet, shutting down media, shutting down elections or shutting people out of the political process protects nothing. In fact, it is the most surefire way to destroy democracy.

The Guardian called Vance’s speech “a brutal ideological assault on Europe” and quoted the objections of the German defence minister, Boris Pistorius, who, true to his title, defended Germany’s censorship policy.

“If I understood him correctly, he is comparing conditions in parts of Europe with those in authoritarian regimes,” Pistorius said. “That is unacceptable, and it is not the Europe and not the democracy in which I live and am currently campaigning.”

Feel free to scroll down and watch the 60 Minutes video of what is happening in Germany right now.

The BBC called Vance’s speech “a very weird 20 minutes”, and wrote that Vance “shocked delegates on Friday by roundly attacking Washington's allies, including Britain, in a blistering attack decrying misinformation, disinformation, and the rights of free speech.” Frank Gardner, the BBC’s security correspondent, made his own feelings clear in a paragraph further down:

Vance's speech went down very badly - unequivocally badly. It was extraordinarily poorly judged.

Tellingly, I found no reference in that article to whether what Vance said about censorship was true or not.

CNN called it “a bombastic rejection of liberal orthodoxies that have prevailed in Western Europe since the Second World War”. Politico described Vance’s statement that European governments shouldn’t fear “the voices, the opinions, and the conscience” that animate their electorates as “an absolutist view of free speech”.

Perhaps most egregiously, the New York Times claimed that Vance had “urged European leaders on Friday to end the isolation of far-right parties across the continent, an extraordinary embrace of a once-fringe political movement with which the Trump administration shares a common approach on migration, identity and internet speech.”

You can read the full transcript of the speech here. Do a word search, see if you find anything like what the Times described.

Remember: These are the media outlets that produce a consistent drip feed of stories about the dangers of misinformation.

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60 Minutes Stans For Censorship

The flagship show of the CBS network aired a segment this week gushing over how effective Germany has been at “policing the internet”.

It's 6:01 on a Tuesday morning and we were with State Police as they raided this apartment in Northwest Germany. Inside, six armed officers searched a suspect's home then seized his laptop and cell phone. Prosecutors say those electronics may have been used to commit a crime. The crime? Posting a racist cartoon online.

The implication from the tone and presentation is that the United States would be much better off if the First Amendment wasn’t standing in the way of arresting people for saying mean things on the internet.

The segment opens with the presenter telling you how you feel about online speech: “If you've ever dared to read the comments on a social media post, you might start to wonder if civilised discourse is just a myth.”

YouTube’s commenters wasted no time:

In a line-up that conjures the impression of the waiting area at a Bavarian swingers’ club, three state prosecutors sit down with the presenter to explain, justify, and exalt Germany’s newfound strictness.

Dr Fink (pictured above looking like the maths teacher who makes your daughter uncomfortable) drops this chestnut:

They say “No, that's my free speech,” and we say “No, you have free speech as well, but it also has limits.”

Delicious. That’s what you want, a German telling you that your freedom has been limited for your safety.

“After its darkest chapter, Germany strengthened its speech laws,” the presenter unironically intones over black-and-white footage of goose-stepping Nazis, leaving out the fact that there was no free speech or free press under the Nazis. The “strengthened” speech laws in Germany’s post-war constitution, the Basic Law, created speech protections for citizens that hadn’t existed before, prohibited the use of Nazi symbolism with certain exceptions, and provided an avenue to restrict democratic access to the legislature to protect against a resurgence of fascism or the rise of communism.

The Federal Republic has the power to ban unconstitutional parties - and used it to shut down the neo-Nazi Socialist Reich Party (SRP) in 1952 and the German Communist Party (KPD) four years later.
Furthermore, not every party can get into parliament: Only those that overcome the constitutional 5-percent threshold in an election are allowed to take seats. This rule is intended to give the Bundestag stability.

It’s that last provision that underpins the current uncertainty around the status of the Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD) party that has been tearing up the polls and scaring the incumbent government.

It is appalling that a reputable show like 60 Minutes would couch Germany’s transition from fascism to democracy as a move from unfettered speech to limited speech. Almost as appalling as the host of CBS’s Face The Nation claiming that the Nazis “weaponised free speech to conduct a genocide”, a lunacy of such glaring outlandishness that I’d put it right up there with the claim in some conspiracy circles that the Nazis were actually Zionists because NaZi stood for National Zionists, whereas if they were in fact National Socialists their nickname would have been NaSo.

Kudos to Marco Rubio for stepping in with a measured correction and not just smashing the camera they had stuck in his face.

Free speech was not used to conduct a genocide. The genocide was conducted by an authoritarian Nazi regime that happened to also be genocidal because they hated Jews and they hated minorities, and they had a list of people they hated, but primarily the Jews. There was no free speech in Nazi Germany,. There was none.

Has there been a carbon monoxide leak at CBS? Is there lead in the drinking water? Do they have a collective brainworm? How could an exchange like the following take place between a journalist and a state prosecutor in any country without it becoming a heated interrogation of government over-reach?

[Presenter:] If somebody posts something that's not true and then somebody else reposts it or likes it, are they committing a crime?
[State Prosecutor:] Yeah, in the case of reposting, it is a crime as well because the reader can't distinguish whether you just invented this or just reposted it.

Instead, after a playful bit of narration explaining that apart from jail time and fines, sometimes the judge keeps the defendant’s devices, we’re back with the three prosecutors as they and the presenter share a good chuckle over how shocked people are when the German government seizes and keeps their phones because of what they put on social media.

One featured case involved a local politician who was called a “pimmel”, which is German for “schmuck”3.

That triggered a police raid and accusations of excessive censorship by the government. As prosecutors explained to us, in Germany it's okay to debate politics online but it can be a crime to call anyone a pimmel, even a politician.

Even a politician? But they’re the pimmelest pimmels!

As Dr Fink explains, “comments like ‘you're a son of a bitch’…has nothing to do with a political discussion or a contribution to a discussion.” Of course not, but what the hell business is it of the government if someone wants to call their elected representative a pig-faced donkey rapist or a wart-distended gangrenous cock?

Journalists are supposed to be interested in asking the hard questions, and in that regard 60 Minutes fell flat on its face in this instance. Asking prosecutors “How do people react when you take away their phones?” with a gleeful smile on your face isn’t just a waste of precious face time with an agent of the state, it’s a serious abrogation of professional responsibility. Grinning like a trained circus monkey while the lynchpin democracy in Europe tells you it is actively prosecuting and imprisoning its own citizens for words and images posted online is a bad look even for a hack working at TASS. For an established American journalist to play softball with these Teutonic goons should be unimaginable.

But after all, as the presenter says, “For Germans, rules are gospel.” Congratulations on your cultural sensitivity, CBS, I get it now,. It wouldn’t do to insult someone’s religion.

A Tale Of Two Tiers

The Independent reports:

Hamit Coskun, 50, from Derby, has been charged with “intent to cause against religious institution of Islam, harassment, alarm or distress” during an incident near the consulate in Rutland Gardens, Knightsbridge, central London.

The “incident” involved Coskun setting fire to a copy of the Koran and then being attacked by Moussa Kadri, 59, a bystander brandishing a large knife, who chased him and then kicked and slashed him when he fell to the ground.

The Free Speech Union has said that Coskun’s case “has sparked fears that England and Wales are on the brink of reviving blasphemy laws by stealth, despite having formally abolished them in 2008.”

On the brink? He’s charged with causing alarm or distress against a religious institution. That sounds an awful lot like blasphemy already.

You can watch an IslamNet video including footage of the book-burning and subsequent knife attack here. Note the delivery rider in the video who watches the attack without intervening, films it on his phone, and then kicks Coskun when he is on the ground before cycling away.

Here’s what the host says about the incident:

If you are insulting the book of Allah, if you are insulting Muslims, if you are maligning our religion by burning our holy book, even an old uncle like that will react.

The Telegraph’s coverage of the case points out that the (mis)use of hate speech legislation to prosecute what would otherwise be protected speech is a “blasphemy law by the back door”.

Here’s the UK’s shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick, quoted in the Telegraph:

This decision risks creating a de facto blasphemy law by the back door. This is a dangerous path that must be resisted. Burning a Koran, like burning any religious text, is offensive to some and not conduct most people would support.
But that’s not the point. The point is the criminal law. There’s a difference between things we don’t like as a society and things that we make criminal.
Burning a Koran outside the Turkish consulate, allegedly to protest at Turkey’s political stance, would not seem to meet that bar. Nor indeed would burning a Torah scroll outside the Israeli embassy or a Bible outside the Apostolic Nunciature [Vatican embassy]...
The challenge with the Koran in this context, over and above most other religious texts, is that many Muslims say they regard it as offensive wherever it is done. This poses a problem for us as a society.
Criminalising the burning of the Koran in any setting, if there happens to be someone in the vicinity who finds it offensive, creates a blasphemy law by the back door – and a blasphemy law which really only applies to one religion.

Meanwhile, Angela Rayner, the Deputy Prime Minister of the UK, has announced her plan to create a “16-strong council [that] will help advise on drawing up an official government definition for anti-Muslim discrimination and will provide advice to ministers on tackling Islamophobia.”

Concerns over the danger to free speech in Britain if religious ideology is permitted to dictate legal consequences have been waved away by the current Labour government. This probably doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that “[i]n the 2019 General Election, over 80% of Muslims voted for the Labour Party,” while in 2024 Muslims swung away from the Labour Party towards independent and Muslim candidates. The Labour government surely wouldn’t be craven enough to toss free speech overboard just to win back Muslim votes.

Both Coskun and Kadri have been charged and will stand trial. Kadri made bail within hours while Coskun remained in custody. Kicking and slashing someone with a knife because they are holding some paper that is on fire vs. holding some paper that is on fire - it’s so difficult to see which person presents more of a danger to their fellow humans.

Of course, as previously covered here in the Weird, “[f]ears over two-tier policing are an 'extreme right wing narrative', a leaked Home Office report claims,” as per the Daily Mail.

More extreme than slashing someone with a knife for burning a book?