By Harry Storm
All people are supposed to be treated equally, but these days some groups are more equal than others
It didn’t take long for the UK’s new prime minister, Keir Starmer, to be dubbed “Two-tier Kier” by native British citizens angry about the state’s sharp crackdown on what has been described by some as “far-right” violence and speech, precipitated by the murder of 3 young girls by a knife-wielding assailant mistakenly thought to be an immigrant. Although Starmer merits the nickname – his reaction to the riots against immigrants was far more heavy-handed than his reaction to riots by immigrants (in Leeds, 2 weeks earlier) – two-tierism in the UK preceded Starmer’s accession to the prime ministership by at least two decades.
However, while the UK draws the most attention currently, the Brits are hardly alone in treating certain groups – typically racial and religious minorities, and women – differently. In lockstep with the woke “social justice” agenda, two-tierism is being experienced in all western countries, and English-speaking countries in particular.
Of course, two-tierism is nothing new. Authorities treating religious groups differently was the norm until fairly recently: In the Christian world, Jews were denied the right to practice a host of professions and crafts, whereas in the Islamic world, Jews and Christians had to pay a tax (Jizya) and still were subject to petty humiliations by the Islamic majority. And in all countries, women were denied the same rights as men. This was the way of the world, and few questioned it.
What differentiates unequal treatment now from those earlier times is that from the 18th century onward, equality of individuals under the law and in society generally came to be seen as the norm, as exemplified by the American Revolution (“we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”) and by the French Revolution (liberty, equality, fraternity). Of course, in those early Enlightenment-influenced days, equality didn’t extend to everyone: blacks in the U.S. remained slaves, and in both France and the U.S., women couldn’t vote and were expected to stay home and raise children.
After the last vestiges of legal and social inequality were removed in the latter half of the 20th century, many people, including me, presumed that equality – both under the law and in all other human endeavours – was here to stay in North America, western Europe, and in any other countries that adopted western values. It turns out we were naïve, and didn’t take into consideration human nature, including the desire to fit in and give the appearance of doing and being good.
Equality under the law is still officially on the books. But being on the books doesn’t mean much if the powers-that-be refuse to enforce laws equally, or if administrators choose to favour one group over another (for any number of reasons including, especially, not wanting to appear racist). And this is precisely what’s happening.
Examples abound: In the UK, two-tier “ground zero,” a 58-year-old British man shouting “dirty Muslims” outside a mosque during the recent riot in Sunderland over the Southport child murders was sentenced to 8 months in jail, while a 24-year-old who held up a flag of St. George during the same riot and shouted “this will go on all summer,” and then ran away from police received a 2-year sentence. And a 42-year-old Rotherham man was sentenced to 40 months imprisonment for “actively encouraging” rioters and making racist comments.
Contrast their treatment with that of the four Muslim men who were arrested in 2021 after driving a van through the streets of London shouting “Fuck the Jews, kill the Jews, rape their daughters” and then had all charges dropped. A police statement recognizing “how disappointing this must be for the Jewish community” wasn’t much of a consolation prize.
In March, a Nando’s waitress was struck in the head with a plate from a customer who was sitting in a booth with his hijab-wearing wife and a child. Although two police were in the restaurant at the time, when she reported the incident to them, she was told nothing could be done. Fortunately, the incident was caught on video and went viral; in late August, police tweeted that they were “looking into why we didn’t respond promptly at the time of this incident in March and are sorry we didn’t provide a better service.”
More recently, a Bradford man who assaulted three Muslim women after calling them slags and prostitutes because they wore western dress and makeup received a 6-month suspended sentence. The aggrieved man slammed one woman’s head onto the dashboard of her vehicle, grabbed a second woman’s hair and punched her in the head, and punched the third woman. In addition to his suspended sentence, he was also ordered to perform 35 ‘rehab activities,’ and 180 hours of unpaid work, was to be electronically tagged for 4 months, and was fined £500 pounds, all of which I suspect did little to assuage the trauma these women will carry with them.
Also in the UK, gender critical feminists and others who don’t toe the line – i.e. by posting “woman = adult human female” online or by putting stickers on their doors that say “I heart J.K. Rowling” – risk being visited by the police for having committed a “non-crime hate incident.” High-profile individuals who publicly criticize the excesses of transgenderism, such as Kelly Jay Keen-Minshull (AKA Posie Parker) and TV comedy writer Graham Linehan, have been harassed by police, frequently in Keen’s case, whereas the actions of transactivists who post threats against them and engage in physical intimidation during protests are typically ignored or, at most, rationalized.
Even being an adolescent offers no protection if you have the wrong opinions, as a 12-year-old who stupidly posted a racist tweet aimed at a black soccer player found out. Unironically and shamelessly, the police tweeted this after the boy was taken into custody: “We were alerted to a series of racist messages sent to a footballer today and after looking into them and conducting checks, we have arrested a boy. The 12-year-old from #Solihull has been taken to custody. Thanks to everyone who raised it. Racism won’t be tolerated.”
Meanwhile, despite extensive Google searches, I was unable to find a single report of Muslims, other minorities or transactivists – adult or minor – being arrested for online hate speech or even visited for “non crime hate incidents.”
Two-tierism is hardly restricted to the UK, or to police or the courts. In the US, for instance, it is most evident in different media treatment of individuals and incidents. As most of the mainstream media in the US is firmly in the Democratic camp, reports about the Harris campaign are warm and fuzzy, using words like “joy” and “electricity” to describe the “buzz” around her campaign; there is never any mention or question of why Vice-President Kamala Harris has only done one interview and no press conferences, or why she has said little without the aid of a teleprompter.
And while the media lob softball questions such as “how do you feel about being the first minority woman candidate?” at Harris, it’s an entirely different story for Trump and J.D. Vance, with news clips and articles regularly talking about how “weird” Vance is (of the four in the race, he seems to me to be the least weird) and repeated references to Trump’s legal travails (in itself another example of two-tierism, this time in the U.S. justice system).
Meanwhile, in my home province of British Columbia, the provincial government rubbed its two-tierism in the face of the province’s Jewish community. In January, Post-Secondary Education Minister Selina Robinson, one of two Jewish cabinet members in Premier David Eby’s leftist NDP government, made a speech in which she rather inelegantly said that before 1948, “Palestine was a crappy place.”
As expected, outraged Muslims and leftists kicked up a fuss, and despite Robinson issuing two groveling apologies, she was quickly forced to resign from cabinet by Premier Eby, who called her remarks “belittling” and said that “the depth of the work that Minister Robinson needs to do, in order to address the harms that she’s caused, is significant.” (Eby never bothered to describe the supposed “harms”).
Eby’s shoddy treatment of Robinson angered and upset Jewish groups in B.C., who noted that when members of Eby’s caucus had made remarks construed as anti-Semitic, they had been asked to accept apologies from the offending politicians, and they had done so and moved on. Yet Robinson, despite her two groveling apologies, was still booted unceremoniously from the cabinet.
Robinson was allowed to remain in the NDP caucus, but two months later, she sent a scathing letter to Eby resigning from the NDP caucus and now sits in the B.C. Legislative Assembly as an independent. The letter cited several examples of antisemitism by sitting NDP MLAs. The other Jewish cabinet minister, George Heyman, denied the NDP caucus was antisemitic, prompting the CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver, Ezra Shanken, to say, “instead of the BC NDP caucus working together to come up with plans on how it is they could address Selina Robinson’s lived experience, they trotted out a Jew to disagree with another Jew’s lived experience.”
It’s hard to imagine this NDP premier treating another minority member of his caucus so shabbily.
Two-tierism extends far beyond governments and other official institutions. Take the case of Gina Carano, a former MMA fighter who starred in Disney’s The Mandalorian, a Star Wars spinoff. Carano, an outspoken conservative and Trump supporter, was unceremoniously fired by Disney’s Lucas Films after she tweeted an image from Nazi Germany and compared it to the current climate of hatred for political opponents, a poor and silly analogy, to be sure.
Two years earlier, however, one of Carano’s co-stars, Pedro Pascale, had tweeted a photo of children in the holocaust behind barbed wire above another photo of migrant children being held at the U.S.-Mexican border. Pascale’s clearly anti-Trump tweet was every bit as offensive and silly as Carano’s, yet nobody at Disney or Lucas Films had anything to say about it. (Some suspect that the real reason Carano was targeted was for tweets in which she denigrated COVID vaccines and masking, and mocked transgender orthodoxies, tweeting that her pronouns were “beep/bop/boop,” all while cancel culture was raging across North America.)
The list of two-tier inequities could go on forever. During the recent Olympics, organizers allowed a group of genderqueer individuals to parody Leonardo Da Vinci’s ‘The Last Supper’. Notably, there was no similar parody of Islam, likely because a few years earlier, the editors of Charlie Hebdo, which did parody Islam, were slain by Muslim extremists in their offices.
Black people freely use a racial slur that used to be directed at them. Black musicians and comedians regularly repeat the slur even when performing to mainly white audiences. But white people are not allowed to utter this slur in a non-racist context, or even when reading out book titles, such as black comedian Dick Gregory’s autobiography and Pierre Valliere’s notorious history of Quebec, both of which contain the slur.
Veteran New York Times reporter Donald MacNeil discovered this in February 2021, when a conversation he had two years earlier with students on a Times-sponsored trip to Peru in which he used the slur as an example of racism became public and he was forced to resign after 45 years at the Times.
In television commercials, men are routinely portrayed as stupid if not imbecilic, whereas women rarely, if ever, are. In a recent episode of The View, the female hosts of the TV program saw nothing wrong with discussing how “useless” men are. Now I have no problem with women having a laugh at the expense of men, but it’s unimaginable that you’d ever find a group of men on television talking about how useless or stupid women are.
Some inequality in life is inevitable: The rich tend to live better and are better served by the medical and legal systems than the rest of us. Beauty, intelligence and strength are not distributed equally. But in a society supposedly based on equality, both under the law and in other areas of human endeavour, the increasing encroachment of two-tierism based on skin colour, religion or sex is a frightening development.
