Howard Donald was due to perform with Take That at Groovebox’s Nottingham Pride Festival next month, but he’s had to withdraw following the discovery that he’d liked tweets with a ‘gender critical’ tone, as well as some tweets criticising the Covid vaccines. Brendan O’Neill has come to his defence in the Spectator.
The mob has claimed another scalp. This time it’s Howard Donald’s. The Take That star has been found guilty of likecrimes. That is, he liked some ‘problematic’ tweets, including a tweet that said – brace yourselves – “Only women have periods.” For this, for giving his approval to a statement of biological fact, he’s been damned as a vile bigot and dumped from July’s Nottingham Pride Festival.
Next time someone tells you cancel culture is a myth, point them to the unpersoning of Howard Donald. For here we have a good bloke, a veteran of the boyband era, being publicly shamed not even for anything he said but simply for using his thumbs to signal agreement with other people’s ideas.
And what were those scandalous ideas? What terrible heresies did he associate himself with? I hope you’re sitting down. He liked a tweet that said: “Men cannot menstruate. Transgender ‘women’ cannot menstruate.” And another that said: “No woman has a penis. No man has a vagina.” He also liked an anti-vax tweet, a tweet about “the Great Reset”, and a tweet saying “Defund Disney” next to an image of a banner advertising a Pride-themed Disney event in LA.
This is perverse. It’s sinister. Cancelling a man for his Twitter likes is a ruthless act of thoughtpolicing. Mr. Donald made no un-PC utterance. He did not give voice to wrongthink. He simply exhibited a little intellectual curiosity towards gender-critical ideas and vax-sceptical commentary. He’s being punished not for any public pronouncement but for the contents of his heart and mind, which is the truest form of tyranny.
His greatest offence, judging from the crazy media meltdown, was liking the idea that biological sex is real. He was seen consorting with the devil of scientific fact. But it is true that men do not menstruate and women do not have penises. That people can be cast out of polite society for approving of truth itself is a testament to the cloud of unreason that now hangs over our society.
Truth is being rebranded as heresy. Biology has been refashioned as bigotry. Just look at the unhinged headlines about Donald’s Twitter crimes. He liked “transphobic tweets”, they say. The treatment of factual speech as ‘hate speech’ is one of cancel culture’s most ominous features. Damning certain ideas as ‘phobic’ is the 21st-century equivalent of yesteryear’s treatment of dissent as ‘blasphemy’. Now, as then, shaming labels are attached to those who demur from elite consensus opinion, in order to reduce them to social lepers.
The Donald affair highlights the cruelty and irrationalism of cancel culture. Behold the organiser of Nottingham Pride Festival Groovebox’s statement. “We are dealing with this situation as a matter of urgency,” it said in response to the snitches who bombarded it with complaints about Donald’s likes. (“Please bare with us,” it continued, which I loved.) “A matter of urgency”? It was a few Twitter likes. Has everyone gone mad?
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