hot brass

Blaney even takes his charges on firearms training courses. In 2008 he took activists and young Conservatives to the Blue Ridge Arsenal in Virginia, reporting that the feeling of "hot brass, gun recoil and smell of gunpowder was incredible". There are also partnerships with American rightwing thinktanks and foundations. The trips are all part of a plan to place "young radical free-market Anglosphere Conservatives in public life".

Being taught to shoot never made me rightwing. But then it was in Canada, and under the guidance of a responsible adult. Uncle Frank wasn’t a lumberjack, though he looked like you's imagine one should.  He was a foreman at a Wrigley’s chewing gum factory. But he was OK.

Blaney brings to mind what one famous American – Gore Vidal – once wrote about another – Theodore Roosevelt, to wit: “Give a fat sissy a gun and he’ll shoot at anything.” 

Also instructive.

Comments

[Alex]

Blaney's blog and his Twitter feed have mysteriously disappeared. Not only that, but he blocked the Internet Archive Foundation from spidering the blog as well.

Coward.

[Tom]

Odd coincidence, vapid right wing idiots erasing all trace when it dawns on them that someone might be keeping notes. See http://twitter.com/einyshah for another example this week - annoying Conservative Future moron I've been interested in for a while - got into City Hall via the Lib Dems, got onto the Mayor's Peer Outreach Team, spends her time earnestly pushing right wing horseshit on Twitter, got into the Mayor's brother's campaign in Orpington, sent me a threatening email telling me not to mention this or else.

I put in an FoI request about whether this is wholly kosher for someone on the public payroll and what the guidelines are around political activity while employed in a non-political position, all of a sudden she vanishes from Twitter...

I'd love to know *who* Blaney took on this guns'n'fun jaunt. I keep coming across people who sound like they did (Alex may remember the idiotic C_FIT air travel pressure group, for a start, who seem to share a background at York university). Conservative Future are a nasty, nasty bunch, and there's no pretending they're not associated with the party.

[Alex]

Blaney's operation is one step removed - too shitty for CF. If you need to read him, do a Google search using (query string here) site:donalblaney.blogspot.com

Also, there's still a Twitter feed out there - claiming he received £10,000 in donations since the story was published. Obviously drivel, but by the time his next lot of accounts are public it will be irrelevant.

Perhaps we should make him deny it's from Ashcroft?

[dsquared]

I happened to be hanging around the ULU this week and can thoroughly recommend a cover story on "London Student" newspaper which has a look at the rather strange "Students' Rights" organisation, an organisation which spends its time campaigning for Islamist speakers to be disinvited from meetings (and simultaneously against no-platform policies for the BNP), which doesn't appear to have many actual students as members, and which appears to have a lot of its bills paid by (and operate out of the offices of) the Henry "Scoop" Jackson society. Is it a Blaney project? Yes of course it is.

[Alex]

An interesting question: what is the YBF exactly? It doesn't appear to be a charity, a company, an unincorporated or members association in the meaning of PPERA 2000, or indeed anything else. Further, how is it managing to not appear in the register of donors?