With the recent cancellations of Graham Linehan and playwright David Greig, we are in an age of ‘trans McCarthyism’, writes Brendan O’Neill in Spiked. And you would have to be wilfully blind not to see it. Here’s an excerpt:
It’s been a bad week for the ‘cancel culture is a myth’ lobby. For those woke bros of the pretend Left who squawk ‘It’s not cancel culture, it’s consequences culture!’ every time someone is punished for their beliefs. Women hounded from their jobs, blacklisted by university campuses, set upon by heaving mobs of feral misogynists, all for the thoughtcrime of knowing men are not women, and still the censorship apologists say: ‘Cancel culture isn’t real.’ ‘This isn’t a witch hunt, it’s just God’s consequences’, these petty tyrants would have said in Salem.
The cancellation deniers were mugged by truth this week. First we had the extraordinary sight of the good people of Comedy Unleashed traipsing around Edinburgh to try to find a venue for their comedy night. Their line-up included Graham Linehan, you see, and his insistence that people with penises are men, not women, makes him a public enemy to the woke Joe McCarthys. Not one but two venues cancelled – yes, cancelled – these thought criminals of comedy. Eventually they had to perform their set on the street, outside the Scottish parliament, a grim snapshot of the decline and fall of Enlightened Scotland.
Then we had the shaming of David Greig. The blacklisting of Linehan and friends is an incredibly important moment in cancel culture, but I hope it doesn’t overshadow the Stasi-style humiliation suffered by Greig for his wrongthink. He is one of Scotland’s best-known playwrights. His works have been performed everywhere from the National Theatre to the Royal Shakespeare Company. And this week he fell victim to the culture of denunciation, the frenzy for finger-pointing, that swirls through woke circles. He was snitched on, exposed, shamed, and pressured to recant his profane and wicked thoughts. What did he do? He liked two tweets posted by ‘TERFs’.
His ‘careless and harmful’ Twitter behaviour – as he himself described it in the timorous apology extracted from him by the mob – involved pressing like on the following tweets: “Lads and lasses in the trenches fighting the gender madness – what is the best (very recent) example you can think of that shows how we have won this crazy war?” and: “If you are a 16 year-old autistic girl who says someone looks like a lesbian you will be arrested and held in custody, but if you are a 26 year-old man who punches a woman twice at a women’s rights rally, you will just be cautioned.” …
The shaming of David Greig might seem a small affair, certainly in comparison with the chattering-class bloodsport of going after Graham Linehan. But it matters, because it shows how cruel cancel culture has become. It has all the ingredients of cultural despotism. The denunciation of Greig by a fellow artist brings to mind the ‘culture of denunciation’ that pertained in the GDR. There, too, in the words of the historian Robert Gellately, “oppositional persons” were frequently denounced as “enemies” of the common good, and this culture of grassing had “devastating effects, particularly on writers and poets”. That Greig was reprimanded for mere likes on Twitter confirms that even giving fleeting approval to ‘oppositional’ thought can land you in trouble now. One doesn’t even have to speak in order to sin, far less write a manifesto – a murmur of agreement with wrongthink is enough to see you condemned and chastened.
Worth reading in full.
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Well, as Peter Hitchens pointed out in his review of “Oppenheimer”, McCarthy was partially right. There were reds under the bed.
McCarthy was proven right in the long run, though. The transgender mob are the cultural descendants of the evil people whom he correctly fought against, ultimately being driven into an early grave.
McCarthy was right then, and is still right.
The thing that gets me is the the Trans activists are still a relatively small group whose views have not been adopted by the majority of the population yet just about every venue, university, media outlet, school, business and the civil service, public sector and government have pretty much kowtowed to their ridiculous ideology. They have a power that is unnatural since it is not embedded in the truth. Everyone can see how insane it is yet it’s almost as if the fear of being cancelled or having the baying mob turn up on your doorstep is too much to handle. However, if everyone did it at the same time, they just wouldn’t have the numbers to counter that and they would become just another barking mad fringe group rather than a barking mad central group.
They don’t have the numbers, and what numbers they have consist of a tiny number of mentally ill people -and some cheats in sport – supported by a larger group who could best be described as PC imbeciles, but what they do have is the support of the parasite class, who have nearly all the money, power and influence.
It’s the ‘mosquito strategy’. Only a small section of our society needed to be taken over for them to gain control over all our lives. Basically, it’s the public sector and HR departments of corporations that are holding the majority to ransom.
A good observation, and now the public sector and HR are on board, the cancellation culture is now morphing into full persecution of people by actively looking for people and organisations to cancel. You may have read that some are promoting violence and in some cases have used it. The responses of governments and police will indicate how this could pan out.
The Government could stop it, with legislation, in 24 hours.
They choose not to.
Is this true or fake news? Either way, let them try. The majority wouldn’t tolerate this BS any longer because enough people see through the PsyOp bollocks now, pitiful uptake of death jabs is one proof of that, and anyone with a pair of eyes can see Biden is an incompetent criminal, pervert stooge with a paedo, crackhead crook for a son.
”The Biden regime is preparing to reinstate full COVID-19 lockdowns, beginning with masking mandates for TSA and airport employees reportedly as early as mid-September, Infowars first to report.
A high-level TSA official reached out to Infowars, detailing a Tuesday meeting where TSA managers were informed of new memorandums and policies that would reimplement mask-wearing.
These policies will reinstate the mask mandate for TSA and airport employees starting in mid-September.
According to the TSA official, further details on how the policy will escalate will be provided next week.
The official added that by mid-October, mask-wearing will be mandated for pilots, flight staff, passengers, and all airport patrons.
Following this disclosure from the TSA official, Infowars reached out to a trusted Border Patrol source, also in a managerial position.
This source corroborated the directives, confirming that similar measures were being planned for Border Patrol personnel.
“They were told it was not a matter of “if” but “when” official Covid numbers will go back up and they expect by mid-October a return to forced-masking policies that the Biden administration previously only reluctantly ended after massive pressure,” Infowars reported.
The news outlet added, “Both whistleblowers were told this rollout will be in tandem with the new Covid “variant” hysteria that the MSM has been reporting on this week.”
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/08/just-time-election-biden-regime-reinstate-covid-19/
Can’t believe even the loony Democrats would make a blunder like that- it would surely lose them the election
They’ll just do more rigging to compensate.
They have an election to steal.
It has to be read as a symptom of ‘all we have left’. If look at this issue from the point of view of the Nietzschean philosophy of perspectivism then you will derive a proper sense of its imoprtance. Honestly they have nothing left hence this. I wouldn’t get tangled up in the weeds of some toxic created distraction. That’s the main spiel – keep the plebs preoccupied long enough so that we can get away with all the spoils.
There are many great articles in Spiked, and this one by Brendan O’Neill is one of them. But Spiked’s deputy editor, Fraser Myers, ought to be able to see that the way gender critics have been treated is very similar to the way vaccine critics have been treated, which ought to raise alarm bells and make him think again.
Brendan O’Neill has not yet apologised for his article pushing mandatory injections on care home workers. As far as I am concerned O’Neill is extremely tainted. Anyway it lost Spiked my subscription.
Yes, that’s when I stopped my monthly subscription.
I went before that but for similar reasons, one of which was Joanna Williams, a regular writer for Spiked, preaching the mantra to James Delingpole on TV that hundreds of thousands of lives had been saved by the vaccine
Spiked made a mess of things. They’ve been right about so many things, but for some reason they have a blind spot about vaccinations. Myers went completely mental about it. This is my frustration with much of the opposition to the far left lunacy decimating our society: they spent too much time on infighting.
“Have you no sense of decency?”
Joseph Welch’s famous words that destroyed McCarthy overnight
Why, oh why did he apologise?
He shouldn’t have apologised. The minute you show weakness, they go in for the kill.
McCarthy was right in the end.