Well, the news and views continue to flood in to Dusty Towers but are more manageable because, in terms of the UK, most of them concern the tragic death of Jason Arday and we have said enough about that for the time being and, in terms of the States, they concern what I am calling Basketball Gate, and we have also said enough about that for the time being. So, until next time…only joking 😊
Thanks as ever to my paid subscribers and to those who buy me a coffee. These updates do take up an enormous amount of work, so please consider becoming a paid subscriber.
Onwards with the Dusty,Nicola, Moodie and Rex Film Series 😀 Please keep the suggestions for films coming in but please check the list first which I am updating as we go along. Please send suggestions in the comments here at this link:
https://dustymasterson.substack.com/p/empire-of-light-dustys-film-series
Moon is a 2009 film directed by Duncan Jones.
This was the choice of Rex Landy and I will let Rex introduce it:
Moon is a twisty, tortuous tale of perception, reality, and what’s really going on. Sam Bell ( Sam Rockwell) is nearing the end of his three-year stint mining on the moon for a corporate giant; a solo mission he’s glad to see the end of. However, his health takes a turn for the worse with just two weeks to go. He encounters a dangerous situation that threatens his safety, his well-being and most of all, his mind. Sam Bell has to solve this mystery before the relief crew arrive and he’s released.
Thanks to two wonderful readers for suggested pieces.
Some of the linked pieces below may be behind a paywall.
We mentioned in the last update writing to the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) about whether they would take action against one or more of the six London councils who have openly said they will defy the judgment. Here is their response received today:
Dear Dusty Masterson
Thank you for your email regarding council compliance with the Supreme Court judgment.
The services Code of Practice provides legally accurate, impartial and up-to-date guidance to help services comply with the Equality Act. By complying with the law, organisations can protect people that use their services while also reducing their own risk of litigation.
As we have said consistently since the Supreme Court clarified the law in April 2025, those with duties under the Equality Act should be following the law, updating their policies if needed and seeking independent legal advice where necessary.
We will monitor compliance with the law and take enforcement action where it is proportionate and necessary. We consider all alleged instances of non-compliance and base any decision to take action on our well-established regulatory model and decision-making framework.
Dusty: Puss, do you know what that means?
Puss: Haven’t the foggiest, Dusty!
We have also written to Sex Matters and LGB Alliance and will let you know if and when we hear from them.
We featured this major report in the last update. Excellent piece on it here from gay campaigner Jack Jewel:
Michael Deacon in The Telegraph writes:
15 August 2026
From 1958 to 1978, the BBC broadcast The Black and White Minstrel Show: a series featuring white entertainers who had caked their faces with ridiculous make-up, in order to impersonate black people. These days, the BBC is understandably rather embarrassed about this. So much so that, in the wake of Black Lives Matter, it published an article on its website, wondering how on earth its past bosses could have been so blind.
“It didn’t seem to occur to anyone in a position of authority at the BBC that the series really was offensive to more than just a few ‘killjoys’,” the article lamented. As a result, “this infamous programme” constituted “arguably the BBC’s most glaring failure to understand the damage it could do when it traded in outdated stereotypes”.
True enough. I’ve got just one question.
If, as the BBC now accepts, it’s wrong to show white people dressing up as grotesque parodies of black people, how come it’s fine – indeed, wonderfully enlightened and progressive – to show men dressing up as grotesque parodies of women?
I only ask because the BBC’s peculiar fixation with drag queens shows no signs of abating. Just this week, Newsnight invited one to participate in a discussion of the UK’s floundering economy. Perhaps we could boost quarterly growth if we each buy a pair of size 12 stilettos.
Meanwhile, the BBC has been eagerly plugging the new series of RuPaul’s Drag Race UK. Apparently we can look forward to meeting contestants who use such charming stage names as “Anita P---”, proclaim themselves to be a “Bikini Bottom Bimbo”, declare that they’re “feeling lit to the t--”, and challenge the “other girls” to “step their pussies up”.
No doubt the BBC would argue that this is harmless, light-hearted entertainment, to which only killjoys could object. But then, 50 years ago, that’s what its bosses said about The Black and White Minstrel Show.
Still, times change. So, in another 50 years, maybe the BBC will once again be wringing its hands, as it wonders, in horrified disbelief, how it could ever have promoted the practice of pinking up.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/eb80c4d6873c1156
Sarah Phillimore of Fair Cop is taking action against Wiltshire Police for their active involvement in the local Pride event. Sarah provides us with an update on her substack and note the date for the hearing of 23 November:
Aug 15, 2026
The substantive hearing of my judicial review application against the Wiltshire Police will be heard on 23 November 2026. I am seeking a declaration that they have acted unlawfully in breach of their statutory duty of impartiality by sending out uniformed officers (including their Chief Constable) in the colours of a contested political ideology at Pride Events.
At the permission hearing on 8 June 2026, I heard the arguments of their barrister to explain why their Chief Constable bedecked in the Progress Pride Flag, was not a breach of the police’s statutory duty of impartiality, rather a necessary show of public ‘support’ for a ‘marginalised community’ which was also a ‘duty’ upon the police. I wrote about that permission hearing here.
I and my crack Team of Operatives went undercover at Chippenham Pride on 13 June 2026 to check out the police presence. Which was zero. What there was however was repeated and clear evidence that Pride is most definitely political, and almost exclusively focused on gender identities, the crowd being urged to ‘fight’ the laws ‘against’ trans people and only one rainbow flag amongst the huge variety of striped gender flags. I wrote about my visit here.
We repeated the exercise today on 15 August 2026 at Swindon Pride which I will assume is the jewel in Wiltshire’s Gender Fabulous Crown and will represent the event with the largest expected turnout. If Wiltshire Police genuinely consider they are under a ‘duty’ to be visible to support this community, I would expect them to be here.
A cunning disguise
They were not. I was at Great Western Park from 10.30 - 12.30 and the only police presence I saw was a police car driving past the park as I left. My operative said that two uniformed officers then approached the main entrance but she also left before being able to get any evidence of them suddenly dancing and painting their faces etc.
There were plenty of stalls. It was a very well organised and pleasant event - or at least the quiet first hour was before the marches arrived and I left. The RAF had a stall. Amazon had a stall. Wiltshire Wildlife had a stall. The police were not there. They didn’t have a stall. Nor were they policing the event.
I made it very clear at the permission hearing that I had no problem at all with the police attending such events to provide information and education about how the police operate, how and who to contact if you wish to report a crime etc. That to which I objected, and most strongly, was the police wearing the colours of a contested political ideology and thus making me anxious and afraid that they would not treat me with respect and care, once they knew of my opposite ideological leanings.
So where were they? If this ‘duty’ of visible support exists, why did it not apply to either Chippenham or Swindon Prides?
I had a very nice morning. There were not as many children with tails and puppy fetish masks as there were in Chippenham. There was the same one lonely Rainbow Flag in a sea of gender stripes. I had a tarot card reading which to my great pleasure revealed the Major Arcana ‘Justice’ as the first card in my Celtic Cross.
The full piece is here:
https://sarahphillimore.substack.com/p/the-curious-incident-of-the-invisible
Best of luck to Sarah at the final hearing. I intend to be there as your roving reporter.
It’s completely mad in Switzerland as reported by Feminist Legal Clinic via Reduxx:
On August 10, Fehr Düsel, who represents the Swiss People’s Party, published a statement condemning the nation’s overly-simplistic gender identity change process, which became law in 2022. Since then, Swiss citizens have been able to pay a nominal fee, the equivalent of less than $100 USD, and instantly change their name and sex marker at any registry office.
In her statement, Fehr Düsel references a recent incident at Bern’s Marzilibad. famous outdoor swimming and riverside bathing area at the Aare River. Marzilibad has a designated, segregated nude area called the “Paradiesli” which is only open to women.
In June, a controversy erupted after a male claiming to be transgender entered the nude area and caused discomfort amongst the female sunbathers.
The man, who was described as having a beard, black hair, and penis, was confronted by multiple patrons who asked him to leave. He claimed he had a right to use the area because of he identified as a woman.
Female sunbathers then escalated their concerns to the park’s security, which called the regional police after the man continued to refuse to leave. Police arrived and attempted to check the man’s ID for evidence he was “legally” a woman, but the man would not provide it. He was then arrested.
According to local reports, some pro-trans patrons attempted to defend the man and assaulted a female police officer during the arrest. The officer sustained minor injuries as a result.
The city later issued an apology to the trans-identified male, concluding that he had been “improperly removed” from the women’s area.
“All people who identify themselves as women and live as such have access to the voluntary nudist area Paradiesli,” the city wrote in a statement.
Fehr Düsel highlighted the bizarre situation in her August 10 statement.
Kiwi Terf, Garwhoungle started her substack one year before this substack in 2022. Here she re-posts her first ever substack which remains relevant today:
Aug 15, 2026
Four and a half years later, and nothing’s changed. This is a repost of my very first Substack article, published in March 2022. It is as good an account as any of the origin story of Garwhoungle and why I started writing and continue to write The Ministry Has Fallen. Hardly any of you will have read it as back then, right at the beginning, I had no subscribers.
Most people on the left, like me, are empathetic towards trans people and the challenges that that life must entail. We think all people should be able to enjoy their human rights and live life free of discrimination and violence.
Lots of us have grown up and grown older comfortable with a distinction between sex (biological reality) and gender (a social construct often based around stereotyped ideas of how males and females should behave). We accept that the former shouldn’t be limited by the latter. You can be anyone and anything. Be who the hell you want.
And because bucking against society’s ridiculous and uncomfortable expectations is at the core of our flavour of progressivism, transgender people seem an interesting addition to our transgression party. Of course we’ll support them. It’s the only logical and compassionate position.
But the framework of egalitarianism and tolerance underpinning our instinctive support has been ripped out and replaced by a conservative trans rights framework. The most vocal brand of trans rights activists (TRAs) argue that the only way that anyone can support trans people is through rigidly and unquestioningly adhering to a set of beliefs that are fundamentally opposed to progressivism.
And from where I’m sitting, it looks like what they’re going for is less about trans rights and more about entrenching old ideas about the relative roles and rights of males and females, about what is proper and seemly, and who should be in control. In a move of genius hoodwinkery, they’ve got large portions of their natural critics, the left, in line and out in front. The left is eating itself.
The core principles of TRA’s gender ideology are something like this:
Human biological sex is not real or not important. Transwomen are literally biological women. Sex is not binary but on a mysterious never fully explained spectrum. Sex is not recorded at birth, based on observation, but is assigned, and can be assigned wrongly. Sex is a feeling. Sex can change during one’s lifetime.
Transwomen must have access to the same spaces, activities and opportunities as biological women.
Any male-bodied person who feels that they are a woman must be recognised as one from the moment they announce it.
Children and young people who don’t conform to gender stereotypes are likely to be trapped in the wrong body. It is the children not the stereotypes that need to change.
Children and young people who have gender dysphoria or identify as a gender not their own must be believed, supported and affirmed. It is imperative that they are provided with “affirming” treatment including puberty blockers, hormones and surgery.
This is a conservative, anti-science agenda. One that unblinkingly accepts that a healthy kid is in the wrong body and must be fixed, that biological sex is a feeling not a fact (meaning of course that evolution, as science understands it, can not exist), that biological women have no right to self-determination — to organise and caucus as we wish, that there is a hierarchy of rights, and transwomen’s rights and comfort always trump biological women’s rights and comfort.
The full piece is here:
https://theministryhasfallen.substack.com/p/the-trans-activist-fundies
Dusty - the only thing I would add to that is that, though I accept that the ‘trans rights’ ideology is really neither left nor right, in reality it is parties on the left who are shilling for it. All thoughts gratefully received.
Dusty: Well, Puss that was a lot less effort than usual.
Puss: Indeed, Dusty
Dusty: Did you see I mentioned the great darts commentator, Sid Waddell in the comments to another piece today?
Puss: I did and it reminded me of another great Sid Waddell quote: “The atmosphere is so tense, if Elvis walked in, with a portion of chips... you could hear the vinegar sizzle on them.”
From Tenaciously Terfin
#BeMorePorcupine
#KeepTerfing
#BringDownAmnesty
#KeepFighting
#RepealTheGRA
#AdultHumanFemale
#LetWomenSpeak
#LGB✂️TQ
#NeverGiveUp
#HoldTheLine
#StopTheBlockersTrial
#NeverSurrender
#NeverForget
#TruthWillTriumph
#WeWillWin
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