Brendan O’Neill has written an excellent piece for Spiked about the outrage mob that has sprung up demanding that GB News be cancelled, following Laurence Fox’s remarks about Ava Evans on Dan Wootton’s show last night. It begins:
Sometimes a bad thing happens and you just know, right away, that the frothing outrage over the bad thing is going to be even worse. Worse for liberty, worse for society, worse for us all in the long-run. So it is with the latest Laurence Fox scandal.
What Fox said about the political journalist Ava Evans on GB News last night – that no man in his right mind would shag her – was odious. It was juvenile and sexist. Every decent bloke above the age of 17 knows you don’t speak about women in that way.
And yet, the fuming reaction to Fox’s comments, the middle-class mob that has formed with unholy speed to demand that GB News be officially sanctioned, is more objectionable in my view. It is an objectively greater menace to public life than the chauvinistic blather of a man on the telly. This hopping-mad army of aspiring censors scares me far more than Fox.
This is not a defence of Fox. You’ll have to go somewhere else for that. It was nauseating to see him describe Ms Evans, a journalist at Politics Joe, as a ‘little woman’ and to ask, ‘Who’d want to shag that?’. ‘Show me a single self-respecting man that would like to climb into bed with that woman ever, ever’, he said.
It’s the kind of thing you’d expect to hear from a table of pissed teens in a pub. GB News swiftly issued an apology. Dan Wootton, on whose show Fox said those words, also apologised. This morning GB News announced that it has suspended Fox from the channel and will be formally apologising to Ms Evans. Far from being the biliously hateful channel of the bourgeois left’s fever dreams, actually GB News is taking this incident very seriously.
It won’t stop the pile-on, though. And that’s because the pile-on isn’t really about Laurence Fox. Or Ava Evans. Or sexism. It’s about the virtual left’s burning hate for GB News. Their prim horror that there exists a news channel that thinks differently to them. Their staggeringly entitled belief that they should never have to see ‘unwoke’ commentary on TV. The Fox scandal is a Trojan horse for the longstanding urge of middle-class authoritarians to take GB News down.
Consider their frenzied condemnation of GB News as a cesspit of misogyny. Who are they kidding? For the woke left to call other people sexist is an act of industrial-strength chutzpah.
These are the people who fight for the right of men to strip off in women’s changing rooms. Who think rapists should be in women’s jails. Who turned a blind eye, or even nodded along, when Róisín Murphy was ferociously set upon by misogynists in gowns for the crime of criticising puberty blockers. Who said nowt when Kellie-Jay Keen was assaulted by a feral sexist mob in New Zealand. Who kept schtum when ex-con turned trans activist ‘Sarah Jane’ Baker told a crowd in London that if they see a TERF they should ‘punch them in the fucking face’. Who are fine with the hounding and censure of women like Maya Forstater, Kathleen Stock, Julie Bindel and far too many others to mention, all for the wrongthink of believing sex is real.
Yes, Fox’s comments were loathsome – but so is the hypocrisy of these privileged virtue-signallers who spend their days siding with bepenised people against women and then think they can get on their high horse over a sexist jibe on a news channel. Get real, fellas.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Dan Wootton has been suspended from GB News as well, which may be linked to Laurence Fox leaking a text exchange between the two of them following the interview.
Stop Press 2: Fox has also lashed out at his fellow GB News presenter Mark Dolan, accusing him of being a “cos play freedom fighter”. A return to the channel for Fox looking less likely by the hour.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.