Mary Beard’s Absurd Cherry Picking

Corporate TV’s most beloved ‘historian’, national embarrassment Mary Beard, is not actually a historian in any meaningful sense — she is an activist partisan. She is a quasi-deranged crypto-communist boomer shill, hand picked and sent to pervert and subvert decent society. She is, in a number of ways, the very antithesis of a historian.

It’s surprising, isn’t it, when someone reaches the very top of their given field despite displaying none of the qualities necessary for reaching that position. Gordon Brown or Theresa May, both displaying a complete lack of charisma, for example; or Katy Perry, who is unable to hold a note. So too, then, with national embarrassment Mary Beard, a professor of classics at Cambridge University. How odd it is, how incongruous, to think that Cambridge is supposed to be among the very best institutions the academy has to offer, the pinnacle of scholarly endeavour, and yet they tolerate and even promote professors who have utterly abandoned the goal of objectivity. Perhaps I am just being naive, though. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised at all that even Cambridge is apparently happy to stain history with unabashed, undisguised leftist propaganda posing as legitimate research.

In this culture war which the globalist left have foisted upon us, there are multiple fronts. The peddling of fake news is of course one of the most obvious battlegrounds, but the conflict plays out in a broad spectrum of different theatres. Whether you be the CEO of a successful company, a tenured academic, or a shelf stacker in Tesco, the culture war looms over all of us like a sword of Damocles, ready to drop it’s blade of cancellation at a moment's notice. One of the most crucial and potentially pivotal battlefields is that of history. On this particular battlefield, the socialist maniacs love to deploy the likes of David Olusoga or Akala or Benjamin Zephaniah: shock troops sent to sow discord and misery. They are pure, implacable enemies of Britain; monsters bent on deliberately cancelling our past, obliterating our entire culture and heritage out of resentment and spite — national embarrassment Mary Beard’s style of inverting reality is ever so slightly less obvious, but, I would argue, equally as poisonous.

It becomes immediately obvious in the aforementioned cases that the person selected for corporate TV fame has been selected for characteristics beyond those usually required for the role they are supposed to be fulfilling. In the case of national embarrassment Mary Beard, she has been plucked from academic obscurity not because her work is particularly valuable, nor because she is an expert communicator, and certainly not because she is easy on the eye. No — she has been parachuted onto TV because she is an arch feminist and a committed leftist devotee. She is the darling of TV producers because she is the very embodiment of that particular stripe of super-cringe feminism; that type of Germaine Greeresque-cum-Woman’s Hour semi-hysterical man-hating nonsense. 

Obviously, in order to spew such bunkum, she has to distort and bastardise history; she has to carefully cherry pick her references and omit vast swathes of knowledge. It is something she apparently is more than comfortable with, something she has carved a career out of, something she is remarkably adept at. This is not the behaviour of a serious historian committed to the pursuit of truth. She is an agent of partiality, a creature spawn of deceit and lies; a type of modern witch.

Allow me to illustrate precisely what I mean with reference to Beard’s 2018 effort Women and Power: A Manifesto. It is, without doubt, one of the rankest pieces of navel-gazing prattle I have ever seen produced by someone who claims to be a historian. This A5 sized picture book with large font and very little in the way of coherent argument reflects the mind of Beard very well. It is small and shallow and pretty much pointless. It is a poorly constructed laundry list of retrospective feminist gripes, cherry picked and mostly devoid of context. It is the miserable and humourless fever dream of a half-wit fixated with the chip on her own shoulder.  

National embarrassment Mary Beard starts by saying that the public voice of women has been stifled and suppressed since the dawn of recorded history. She gives the example of Telemachus — the son of Odysseus — telling his mother, Penelope, to leave the public speaking to men; an order which Penelope dutifully follows. This infuriates Beard. It infuriates Beard to the point that she loses all sense of perspective and literary analysis. With a deliberate lack of context or explanation, Beard gives the impression that Penelope is powerless and brow-beaten. Lies. I happen to have read the Odyssey, and Penelope is an extremely strong character. She is no push over, and stands tall in the face of a great many men over and over again (she just isn’t so insecure that she can’t handle a mild rebuke from her son). This is Beard’s insecurity, not a shortcoming of all men since the dawn of time.

Beard’s deliberate failure to understand, her shameless cherry picking, is constantly on display. She writes:

“Telemachus’ outburst was just the first case in a long line of largely successful attempts stretching throughout Greek and Roman antiquity, not only to exclude women from public speech, but to also parade that exclusion.”

Funny, as I can recall many examples of women in antiquity who weren’t excluded from public speaking and whose words were faithfully recorded by men. It takes a special type of liar to distort history with such sweeping contempt for the truth. I’m thinking of Hecuba from the Iliad, I’m thinking of Dido in the Aeneid, I’m thinking of Atossa in Herodotus; Hatshepsut, Boudicca, Cleopatra, Agrippina, Theodora. Antiquity is literally littered with strong female political voices. There are a huge number of queens and empresses in antiquity whose voices echo in eternity. But Mary Beard doesn’t want you to be reminded of those. Beard is only concerned with her particular type of uber-cringe feminism, and thus sacrifices honesty and history itself upon the altar of wokeness. A disgusting and reprehensible crime.

There is, also, an almost comical level of irony in some of Beard’s subsequent observations. For example, she bewails that women’s voices throughout history, when they are heard, are disproportionately concerned with women's rights and representation. This, in a book about ‘women and power’, which she chose to write. So weird. She cherry picks jokes throughout history that are at a women’s expense, and deliberately fails to see the humour or satire in it, instead choosing to be offended. So pathetic. She seems to be entirely omitting the reality that women have been a constant and integral part of human civilisation and will always be so. She seems to adamantly ignore the countless examples which stand against her claims that men have always ignored women and love doing so. What a wretch. What a nasty, shabby grift. What a frightful flimflam.

Mary ‘National Embarrassment’ Beard reveals herself to be nothing more than a tawdry partisan, doing the grubby work of activism. Like nearly all boomer champagne socialists she is, in fact, largely only interested in power. She calls the book itself a manifesto, embarrassingly. On the back cover of the book, there is a single unadorned quote:

“You can’t easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male; you have to change the structure.”

On the inside sleeve we are told:

“Mary asks: if women aren’t perceived to be within the structures of power, isn’t it power that we need to redefine?”

So, Professor Beard is nakedly a structuralist, or a post-structuralist, or a cheerleader of some other manner of grotesque leftist claptrap which justifies her clear desire to teardown the world of men. She wishes to ruin the West at the very least, to undermine society as we know it and replace it with some crazy feminist dystopia. Be in no doubt that that is what Beard and her ilk are aiming at.

I would just urge all unassuming television viewers to be suspicious of Mary Beard. Though she seems like a harmless storyteller, a mildly obnoxious Karen at worst, she is in fact a pernicious snake. She is the example par excellence of a useful idiot, the purveyor of leftist filth, the vehicle for subversive civilisation ending folly. She is certainly not, in any meaningful sense, a historian. She is an anti-historian, interested less in truth and more in grinding her moronic axe. History takes a back seat to partisan leftist activism, and her cherry picking of history is a crime of the most revolting type.