Andrew Doyle, host of Free Speech Nation on GB News and member of the Free Speech Union’s Advisory Council, is publishing a book called The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World and the Mail on Sunday has an excerpt. It begins:
We are living through a time in which unproven accusations are once again enough to see a person damned.
Charges of ‘racism’, ‘homophobia’, ‘transphobia’ and even ‘fascism’ are commonplace and no evidence is required to secure a ‘cancellation’. People have had their careers destroyed and personal relationships ruined simply for expressing unfashionable opinions.
It will be oddly familiar to anyone who has seen Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible. In the 1953 dramatisation of the 17th Century Salem witch trials, our tragic hero John Proctor cries out: “Is the accuser always holy now”
The trials of Salem, a Puritan community in Massachusetts, lasted a little over a year, from February 1692 to May 1693. In that time, more than 200 people were accused, 19 hanged, five others had perished in jail and one, farmer Giles Corey, had been pressed to death with boulders for refusing to enter a guilty/not-guilty plea.
And their tormentors? A group of children who had stumbled upon the means to become the most powerful members of the community. Their histrionic accusations could see fellow citizens executed on the basis of ‘spectral evidence’ alone – what we might today refer to as ‘lived experience’, the phrase used by the likes of Meghan and Harry.
And today, just like in Salem, those who attempt to apply reason and logic, who dare to stand up for the accused, make themselves vulnerable by doing so.
As Miller’s anti-hero says, “the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom” safe in the knowledge that those who cross them are the next to be condemned.
For those of us who have found ourselves caught in the culture wars of the present – and I have often been vilified for having created a satirical character, Titania McGrath, the “radical intersectionalist poet and Twitter activist” – the parallels are obvious.
Such patterns recur wherever reason is abandoned and fear prevails, be that during the 1950s McCarthyism that inspired Miller, or the ideological capture of today’s institutions and the trickle-down orthodoxies that followed.
THE new religion of ‘wokeness’ now dominates all of our major cultural, educational, political and corporate bodies.
Its high priests make grand claims of moral purity and brook no dissent, a mindset which has led to the development of today’s ‘cancel culture’.
They seek to control public discourse by deeming certain terms ‘problematic’ or supporting legislation against ‘hate speech’. They require no concrete evidence of sin in order to detect and denounce the sinners in our midst.
Phrases such as ‘social justice’, ‘anti-racism’ and ‘equity’ mislead people into believing that those who utter them are on the right side of history. What we are witnessing is the march of online zealots destroying people’s livelihoods and reputations, all the while proclaiming their own virtue, using hashtags such as #BeKind.
Like the Salem Trials, they inflict their punishments while claiming to be on the side of the angels.
Although today’s ‘heretics’ are unlikely to be burned at the stake, their inquisitors are convinced they must convert for their own good. It is the legitimisation of bullying on a grand scale.
Worth reading in full.
The New Puritans by Andrew Doyle is published by Constable on September 8TH, priced £20. To pre-order a copy for £18 visit mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937 before September 12TH. Free UK delivery on orders over £20. Alternatively, order the Kindle version from Amazon.co.uk here.
Stop Press: The Free Speech Union has organised a Q&A between Andrew Doyle and me, followed by a book launch party, on September 27th in Central London. But it’s a members-only event, so if you’d like to come you’ll have to join the Free Speech Union. Membership starts at just £2.49 a month. See here for more details.

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.
What struck me about the article was the height at which the bar has been set in order for a claim to even be heard, let alone successful. Claimants are being alarmingly gaslit and fobbed off with the flimsiest contraindication that it wasn’t the jab what done it. A scandal in the making.
You have to prove 60% disability caused by the jabs. That’s very difficult to do if you already have some pre-existing conditions and even harder if you don’t have someone healthy and competent to fight your corner.
I checked out the Government’s Compensation Scheme as soon as I found out that Big Pharma would not be held liable for any injuries and it was one of the factors that led me to decline joining in the mass medical experiment.
It was obvious that a maximum of £120,000 wouldn’t pay for more than a few years care if you were completely disabled, and it would be very difficult to prove that the jabs had caused it.
Who will compensate the dead?
This is the level of journalism these days? It’s ‘floored’ FFS – “it’s floored me”. Jesus.
They will never admit liability because the scale of potential claims could be astronomical. And of course there is the deeper question – if people were injured by the vax then were they not injured by the bioweapon?. I would wager that hundreds of millions of people have been injured by the injection and that millions more are injured who didn’t take the stab. And it hasn’t even got properly started yet. No government could ever address these wrongs. Just look at the successful clams for disability benefits in the UK over the last three years. And these are seriously disabled people with corroboration from the medical profession. The situation is going to get much much worse and so there will be no remedy or justice.
Denis Rancourt world wide study, 17 million dead from the poisons, 13 million from the fascist lockdowns. In the UK that means 150 K dead, some 2 million injured.
They will rob you of your health and your vitality and leave you with nothing save your eyes to cry with. They’ve already done it. Don’t expect to get some sort of compensatory cushion or your mouth stuffed with gold. It costs about £5 million to look after a severely disabled person throughout their life.You will get no help. You will be derided as a whingeing nutcase. They will turn your life upside down to make an extra few quid on a vaccine. Never mind that your child is barely human. This way of thinking has no self-imposed limits.
Clearly the Telegraph is still very much in the pay of BioNTech and Moderna.
Off — T. Where is Nigel Farage hiding?
Farage has a five year Marathon: he can’t be in the headlines every day.
And, hopefully, he’s working behind the scenes doing what many have suggested: setting up a local party structure, preparing for next year’s local elections, and information gathering and analysis.
He knows that ‘Timing is Everything’.
It’s something that a friend of his told him.
You are well and truly screwed if you believe in liberty. Your next door neighbour wants vaccine passports and compulsory vaccination and it won’t be long now. We talk like we have dodged a bullet noting could be further from the truth. Your neighbour wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire and that is putting it mildly.
Most of mine are either oblivious to the dangers, or appear frightened into inaction.
And a few even argue that the BBC agendas are true.
I have two elderly neighbours with transverse myelitis post covid vaxxes. It is not pretty and has incapacitated both women

I wonder if this why Sunak cut and ran so unexpectedly when it was obvious that economic circumstances were slightly improving and the Treacherous Tories might have done a bit better if he’d held on until the autumn?
He’d already dropped the “effective” bollocks when standing at the Dispatch Box; perhaps he knew he was on very thin ice with the “safe” propaganda.
Picking up Covid? Yeah right! Presumably took the spurious nonsense “test” that “confirmed” she had some kind of respiratory infection. A cold maybe or some kind of ILI? Just goes to show we’re still not out of the woods with the scam.
My comment from the Daily Telegraph article about vaccine injury:
The tip of the iceberg has been revealed.
The Yellow Card reporting system indicates over 360,000 serious CV injuries and deaths. Typically this is under reported by a factor of 10.
The DT could get some sort of redemption by calling for compensation from the Big Pharma companies, not from the taxpayers. Vaccine indemnity is null and void if trial data has been withheld and or fraudulent. There is a mountain of evidence that Pfizer knew that the mRNA injections ( they were not vaccines) were not safe or effective.
Recommended reading for S Knapton: “The Courage to face Covid 19” by John Leake and Peter McCullough, MD.
Let’s stop pretending that it was only AZ jabs that caused harm.
The crime against humanity that has been perpetrated and gruesomely suppressed by our Governments, the Medical fraternity and our Mainstream Media must be dragged out into the open. When the public understands the implications of the scale of the harm done to them, their families and children and friends, the MSM and Government credibility will be ripped to shreds.
Every cloud has a silver lining. The people will wake up to the other outrageous scam, the Climate Crisis and Net Zero policies destroying our livelihoods and economy.
Only the Reform Party has the clarity of vision and integrity to stop this abuse of our citizens.