It’s not only editors who need to watch their step. Columnists too are in danger. In March, Suzanne Moore of The Guardian wrote in defence of Selina Todd, an Oxford professor who was de-platformed for wrongthink on trans issues. Moore soon found herself facing an intense campaign of criticism. This included a condemnatory letter whose signatories included several of her own Guardian colleagues. Buzzfeed News reported on a further letter, this one apparently signed by hundreds of Guardian staff. Unlike James Bennet, this insider pile-on did not force Moore out. Still one doesn’t have to achieve a full cancellation to make others think twice before defying the party line.
Not that one has to be a public figure to be targeted. Earlier this month, the Washington Post decided to run a major story (getting on for 3,000 words of it) about a fancy dress party that happened two years ago. This was deemed newsworthy because a party guest had covered her face in black make-up. According to the article, the costume was intended as a satire on people thinking that wearing blackface is OK. The guest quickly regretted her decision and apologised for it. Nevertheless she was subsequently tracked down, named and ended up losing her job. Justin Trudeau is still in his though.
Another recent example is the bizarre story of how David Shor, a political data analyst whose work has contributed to Democrat election campaigns, got cancelled. His offence? Tweeting about research by a black academic showing how, in 1968, peaceful protests increased the Democratic vote while riots reduced it. For this, he was accused by members of his professional peer group of ‘anti-blackness’ and other affronts. His employers, a progressive data analytics company, fired him — though for reasons why are disputed. You can read more about this Kafkaesque tale here and here.
Meanwhile, on this side of the pond, we’ve had the Booker Prize Foundation’s cancellation of its honorary vice-president Baroness Nicholson, (see Janice Turner’s article for more). And also Graham Linehan, of Father Ted fame, getting banned from Twitter (trans transgressions, again).
So, no, it’s not just right-wingers who get cancelled. If they do or say the wrong thing — or merely do or say it in the wrong way — progressives can also find themselves in trouble. Indeed, on the principle of pour encourager les autres, liberals make the ideal cancellees.
*
Perhaps that’s the real reason why liberals are reluctant to speak-up — they’re afraid they’ll be next. As Winston Churchill said about appeasers, “each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last”.
What can liberals do to defend liberal values while standing clear of the snapping jaws? Well, one thing they could do is to name their ‘woke breaking point’ — to state publicly how much woke is too much. Think about it in terms of statues. It’s one thing to object to a monument to a slave trader (I’d certainly hate to have one in my town), but how much further would you want either the illegal topplings or the official removals to go? Where do you say ‘thus far and no further’? Should Churchill be safe? Gandhi too? I’ll admit this is fast becoming a clichéd question, but it does demand an answer — especially from those who fancy themselves cultural arbiters.
For commentators who believe that the woke threat has been exaggerated there is surely no risk. Either they are right and their lines in the sand will never be breached — or they are wrong, in which case they’d surely want to defend their liberal values. If you use your position of influence to say that the crocodile doesn’t exist (or only eats bad people) then you shouldn’t be afraid to have some skin in the game. If the mob does come for the monuments that you said wouldn’t be toppled, or the writers that you said wouldn’t be sacked, then you should be honour-bound to take a stand.
What is dishonourable (for a self-professed liberal) is to make excuses, or stay conveniently silent, no matter how many times that liberties are encroached upon, or history erased, or language twisted out of shape, or the blatantly irrational imposed as incontestable truth.
*
Note that liberals don’t have to choose the same breaking points as their reactionary opponents. They can heartily approve of getting slave traders out of the public square or banning racist trolls from social media sites. Indeed, this isn’t only about wokeness and anti-wokeness — because not all the threats to free speech are about overtly woke issues.
For instance, in April, the CEO of YouTube announced that content contradicting the World Health Organisation advice on Covid-19 would be banned from the site. One can certainly see the wisdom in denying snake-oil salesmen a platform to peddle their wares. But equally one should see the danger of shutting down sensible debate on scientific questions that have yet to be settled. For instance, take a look at this UnHerd interview with Professor Karol Sikora. Can any true liberal be comfortable with the fact that this entirely reasonable discussion of an important issue was taken down by YouTube for “violating guidelines”? Or that the limits of allowable debate in major forums are now defined by the official line of a UN quango (which, by the way, goes against its own previously published guidance — e.g. by U-turning on the use of face coverings)?
If a spirit of intolerance and paranoia takes hold of our most important institutions — whether in academia, the media, politics or the arts — then that, ultimately, is a threat to everyone. If you can’t find it within you to defend the rights of those you disagree with, then at least think of yourself.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeIf you cannot defend say Tommy Robinson’s right to freedom of speech you do not believe in freedom of speech and you aren’t a liberal.
JK Rowling and Suzanne Moore would never have defended anyone they disagreed with, had such a person been cancelled. Neither of them had anything to say about what happened to the girls in Rotherham etc. Their defence of women is a very particular defence of a particular kind of leftish feminism. They helped made the beds they are now lying in, much more comfortably than all those child victims of rape, torture and prostitution, for whom they were not prepared to speak out.
Those who still occupy their exalted positions and refuse to condemn outright, not just the shutting down of free debate, but the shutting up of victims of violence have no right to complain when their turn comes.
Yes, let’s laugh at those the left are coming for, just because they didn’t wake up soon enough. Then when the left come for us, you and I will be abandoned by people on the right because THEY think we didn’t wake up soon enough.
Everyone has flaws and biases, everyone makes mistakes. If we stab each other in the back over those flaws [how woke], then we will end up falling apart and swarmed by our enemies.
You have nailed it once again, Alison. Somebody wrote yesterday that you should have your own column. I agree.
Oh, how kind. I am far to eccentric and angry to have my own column, though.
There are countless eccentric and angry people who have their own column in The Guardian and Independent etc. I see no reason why you shouldn’t have one too.
You’re an accomplished poet too. I very much like the three or four of your sonnets that I’ve read.
Being over the age of 16 I haven’t read any of Ms Rowling’s books but find myself not necessarily leaping but gently stirring to her defence here. Is the influence of celebrity culture so important that a well-known person can be condemned now not only for what they say but for also for what they DON’T say? Is she a hero for defending women’s rights in the trans arena or a villain because she did not mount an extended public campaign against a grooming ring?
Although I only visit Twitter occasionally to titter at POTUS and certainly never to impose my own puny opinions on the masses I do understand that many people look to celebrities to tell them what to think and as such what they Tweet does unfortunately matter.
Twitter is the heroin of the impotent egomaniac which is why no matter how many times they are burned by it they keep on coming back for more. It is ready-made for our left-leaning brethren still waiting for the nirvana in which we could all live if only ordinary people would do exactly as they are told.
It’s not going to change anytime soon so I can only encourage the young to ignore Twitter and do something useful like start a business, get a job you enjoy or search for a fulfilling relationship. Pretty soon you won’t be remotely interested in what JKR has to say because you will have an interesting life of your own and won’t need to be told what to do by someone you have never met.
I would urge anyone with an interest in a way out of this childishness to read Andrew Doyle’s article “The mark of an educated mind” on standpointmag.co.uk.
Your comments on “left-leaning brethren” cannot go unchallenged. Twitter is full of rightwing bile, as well as more thoughtful comment from across the spectrum. All human life is there.
The radical left sits in a position of special power and influence in the media, particularly social media. There is a strange, modern form left-wing McCarthyism going on. I never thought I’d see the day that the right defended free speech while the left clamored for censorship of dangerous ideas, but that day has already arrived.
Will anyone who actually needs to read articles like Doyle’s ever do so?
Agree with some of what you say but it struck me as surprising that Suzanne Moore wouldn’t have written about the girls in Rotherham so I googled SM and Rotherham Girls and straight away found this very clear eyed comment piece that draws on her experience as a residential care worker https://www.theguardian.com…
Well, I read the article by Suzanne Moore and really she sidesteps the issue of race and prefers to concentrate on the fact that the girls were poor and therefore hung out to dry by the police and social services etc. She also goes on to claim (with no evidence provided) that the same mainly Pakistani men put pressure on their own women and girls to prevent them spilling the beans – as if that is somehow equal to the treatment dished out to the white girls.
To give Suzanne Moore the benefit of the doubt, she may have thought she could not go further than she did without upsetting too many of the staff and readers at the Guardian, but the trouble with these deflection pieces is that they end up not tackling the real issue.
‘she may have thought she could not go further than she did without upsetting too many of the staff and readers at the Guardian’
Well, that’s precisely the problem. The truth dies when you put ‘not upsetting people’ ahead of it.
[this comment was already posted, ignore this one- I can’t delete it]
Well put. I was a Social Worker so have seen the damage.
“They would never have defended anyone they disagreed with….” and you know this how? As for the victims of Rotherham (or any others) why are Moore and Rowling singled out for this? Were they requested to give their views but refused to give them? I only ask. I honestly don’t know, but your statement implies they did this.
I agree there’s too much baiting of “liberals” (whatever that means) who don’t toe some line or other, just as there is of “conservatives” likewise. But there is a freedom to remain silent as well. Or at least, there used to be…
Not any more ” Silence is Violence” You have to be seen to agree. And this is the double bind of cancel culture. If you don’t speak out you will be cancelled. ( if you don’t condemn it you must agree with it) If you do speak out in a few months time the wheel will turn and you will be cancelled.
Great comment thanks – and the naysayers below need to remember that the likes of moore and rowling have enormous reach with their public pronouncements. To find time to go on and on about men in dresses whilst finding no time to denounce mass rape of underage girls tells you all you need to know about these creeps.
In that old phrase, “like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children.”
Fair point, nevertheless I think that JK Rowling and Suzanne Moore still deserve to be defended for taking the particular stances which have got them into trouble with their respective fans and colleagues.
There was a poster in a friend’s room at college (many, many years ago) featuring the words of Pastor Niemoller; ‘First they came for…’
I have recently come to recall this almost daily, and completely agree with the author that it’s high time people who believe in Enlightenment values stand up to anybody whose response to history is tear it down or smash it, whose response to dissent is to tear at it and smash it, whose response to people whose opinions differ from their own is to.. well, you get the idea.
Where I’d part company is the comments that seem to imply that a line should be drawn that indicates some statues should be torn down, and others not. To the Taliban, the Bamiyan Buddhas (idolatry) were as offensive those of slave traders are to us. The solution is not to erase and destroy, but to learn and build, not to forget. Slave-trader statue? Build a bigger statue of Wilberforce close by with a plaque on both statues explaining what happened. Build a Martin Luther King statue opposite the confederate general.
A principled stance here is not to define what statues you (personally, and in this period of your life) like and don’t like, it is to define whether or not society is best served by destroying its symbols and erasing its past, or not.
Neil Oliver has a neat phrase for this; ‘you should only add to history, never subtract.’
How long before they come for him?
They’ve already started. As a Unionist, his appointment for a three year term as President of the National Trust for Scotland angered Nationalists, some of whom went so far as to say that the post should be held be “someone who loves Scotland”, as though only separatists love that country.
Problem is Martin Luther King is now in danger of being cancelled. I am sure Wilberforce will have a skeleton in his cupboard.
True, the likes of Reni Eddo-Lodge deride MLK for his view that character is more important than skin colour. She also claims the industrial-scale child abuse in Rotherham and elsewhere is a symptom of the “Western objectification of flesh.”
Good grief
ST MLK”plagiarist, serial abuser of women, and stooge of the CPUSA”should have been cancelled long ago. But he won’t be.
He was all those things, but his “I have a dream” speech demands to be remembered, nonetheless. Sometimes you have to separate the man from the work, and the work of that speech is to hold back the forces of Critical Race Theory.
Absolutely! I recently quoted that speech, and a couple of other things by MLK, in an attack on the presuppositions that lie beneath woke anti-racism.
That was plagiarized, too. And King didn’t mean a word of it.
“To the Taliban, the Bamiyan Buddhas were as offensive (as) those of slave traders are to us.”
I have yet to read a comment from a ‘liberal’ on the Atlantic slave trade that mentions the FACT that the unfortunate Africans who were transported to the Americas were first enslaved by their African national and tribal leaders for profit. The European slave traders were traders in a very sordid business, but they did not do the enslaving. They bought people who were already slaves.
Until liberals, who are the establishment, are willing to publicly speak truth to the lies being spread by the media and Marxist agitators, there can be no end to the destruction being wrought on open society as we know it.
So, my question to liberals is; “Are you as offended by black enslavers as you are by whites who traded in enslaved people?”. Do you have the courage to put your belief in open, democratic, society on the line and take a public stand against the fascist mob ruling our universities and engaging in the destruction of our society?
You know the answer to your question. The Left are simply anti-West and anti-white.
The people who have succumbed to Woke ideology are swamped by paralyzing fear. They aren’t scared of conservatives or moderates, but terrified of their peers. It is particularly bad in the US because it is still segregated. Not just along race lines, but also along socio-economic and political lines. The US is built for cars; basically outside home and work, people never really talk to strangers down the pub or on the bus as is more common in Europe. As a result they are not exposed to diverse ideas or opinions. This means that they haven’t learned to be friends with someone that holds a different view to their own.
I have friends along both sides of the political divide. The ‘liberal’ side terrifies me because they believe they have moral righteousness on their side and that systemic racism must be defeated with whatever means available, even if it means overturning science and logical reasoning (these are the white man’s weapons). There is also a thriving cottage industry growing rapidly around ‘white racism’ where speakers get paid thousands to give workshops in which they lecture white women on their privilege.
Non-leftists are left scratching their heads wondering why people are listening to these whackadoodles who are tearing down statues and creating no-go zones. They are just now slowly starting to realize how deeply entrenched political correctness is in our systems even though the warning signs have been there all along.
In my paranoid mind the coronavirus and the prevalent anti-white racist rhetoric are being used to install a deeply authoritarian system upon us through big tech, the media and our own education systems. The coronavirus limits freedom of movement while cancel culture inhibits freedom of thought and speech. I fear most for the hapless minorities who are being used as cannon-fodder to whip up ‘white anger’. No doubt, when they’ve outlived their usefulness and wokeism is no longer fashionable, the selfsame institutions that encouraged them will change their spots and close their doors to them. It’s an old story that has literally been done to death.
Couldn’t agree more
In an economic collapse the poor and the least powerful always suffer the most. BLM supporters are literally digging their own graves. Remember the new affordable housing complex in Minneapolis burning in flames? This is what the future holds.
Indeed how far will it go? Just waiting for them to come for the statues of Peter Pan, Grey Friars Bobby, Robin Hood and the Little Mermaid – who knows what sins they have committed? In this ridiculous farce that seems to be to quote Glinner “an episode of Brass Eye that made itself” anything and everything seems to go and the more idiotic the idea the more acceptable it seems to the woke!
Robin Hood. As soon as they realise that Robin Hood was a tax protester, he will definitely be out!. Robin Hood was effecting unofficial tax rebates when he “robbed” the “rich” (tax collector) to give to the “poor” (tax payer).
Nah, he robbed the rich because the poor didn’t have anything worth nicking.
Força Sporting!
Com certeza! Yes RH may deffo be out. Greyfriars Bobby who knows what sins he may have committed?
Peter , I am afraid, over time, words change their meaning.
The liberals you refer to are not, to me, in any sense liberal. I would classify myself as liberal, but in the sense of not wishing to make other people do what I want. This, of course, means more choice, more tolerance, less regulation and a small government and free speech.
Perhaps, in your eyes this makes me a conservative, but you would be safer from this cancel culture with my liberal views than your current version of liberal.
They will not defend liberalism because they are not liberals. But we have known that for many years.
This article offers a solid summary of those who have been cancelled etc, but just yesterday a number of people including Stefan Molyneux were kicked off Facebook. For a real time account of such issues follow podcasts by people like Tim Pool and styxhexenhammer666
Extraordinary that such a calm and reflective thinker as Stefan Molyneux should be ejected from the Facebook swamp.
And somewhat ironic to think that the former LibDem leader, Nick Clegg, is now on the FB payroll.
At least there are alternative platforms springing up, and I trust Stefan will take advantage of this.
The purging of Facebook has been long gestated and was the immediate response to Trump’s victory in 2016, with Matthew D’Ancona leading the charge.
The hysteria BLM has given them the perfect cover by which advertizers can threaten to withdraw revenues, and Zuckerberg has caved. This is about getting Trump.
I hope Trump wins.
Stefan Molyneux was kicked off YouTube yesterday as well. If you now search on YouTube for his name, you get nothing. If you go on a search engine and search for his name, his YouTube channel will come up, but when you click on it “Page not found”.
I also notice that Wiki describes him as a “far right white supremacist”. So much for Wiki.
I think the actual answer to the question is this. Most liberals (in the present-day sense, i.e., the one we’ve rather stupidly borrowed from American discourse) feel some affinity with the Woke in the sense that they tend to support some of the same causes. This makes it hard for them cleanly to dissociate themselves from the extremists – partly because they think there are more dangerous opponents, partly because some of their friends and acquaintances may lean further in that direction than they do themselves. This is often a problem for people of moderate instincts within a broad umbrella grouping. For instance, democratic socialists tended to be softer than they should have been on Communism, because they shared some of the same economic goals – nationalisation, redistribution, etc; meanwhile, old-fashioned Tories were less critical than they ought to have been of Franco, Salazar, Pinochet, etc, because they shared a commitment to the family and religion, a hostility to Communism, and so on. Likewise, sensible middle-of-the-road Christians and moderate Muslims find it difficult to offer no-holds-barred criticisms of the fundamentalists, because, after all, they inhabit the same tent.
Although in some cases (particularly the religious ones) these problems are close to inevitable, I think it really would help for us to stop talking about “the Left” and “the Right” as if these groupings are more than convenient descriptions for sets of policies.
Very true this. People rarely condemn the extremists with their own group, whatever walk of life we are talking about, because they agree with much of their cause if not their actions. And they are still better than the other side.
Very well said. Your final sentence nails one of the most difficult issues that confronts anyone who attempts to hold a coherent debate on this subject. The old left/right polarities no longer mean anything in that those two words no longer convey anything about ideas. They have become an epitome of Humpty Dumpty’s comment on a word ” “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean ” neither more nor less”, and all the more so because Carroll has Humpty Dumpty saying this “in a rather scornful tone”. We have to learn to speak of these things by identifying the ideas that lie beneath, for while the scorn can be heated, it is almost always directed at surface issues.
You do that here and elsewhere, Basil. Goodness, you even know the value of not splitting the infinitive.
Thank you very much for that kind compliment. I was wondering if anyone else still cared about split infinitives!
I do; though I find that I have to keep my inner pedant under control. It is not primarily an issue of rule or propriety, but one of meaning and emphasis. Your “cleanly to dissociate” is a strong example of the latter.
I’ve often laid awake at night, or sat in the pub over a pint of beer, wondering about what must be just about the most famous split infinitive in the history of the English language: “To boldly go where no man has gone before”.
That, of course, is from the early series of Star Trek. In later series “no one” went. (Such pettifoggery!)
I’ve sat there ruminating on possible differences of meaning between: “Boldly to go . . . “, “To go boldly . . . “. Very different emphases in reading are needed for the three versions; but I’m still not sure about to split or not to split.
I think the reason Star Trek went for the split infinitive is because it preserves an attractive rhetorical rhythm (the line is almost iambic pentameter – “To Boldly Go Where No Man Went Before” would be perfectly so). By contrast, “To go boldly” brings the two strong syllables awkwardly together, and “Boldly to go” gives the sentence an awkward stop-start rhythm.
Thank you. As a poetry-loving musician, I feel somewhat chastened by my own failure to nail down that fundamental property. Too much thought, perhaps, over too many pints. Cheers!
I am surprised that your inner pedant didn’t spot that “laid” in the first line of your second paragraph, and insist on replacing it with “lain”.
Nice one, David. I am ashamed of my lapse. Thank you!
It is pure cowardice. The liberals know that if a real mob ever gets loose, they will be first up against the wall – they take good salaries for doing nothing at all. So their only defence is to pretend to be Woker than Woke; it’s the intellectual equivalent of boarding up your shop and writing ‘BLM’ on it. It says: “Don’t hurt me, I’m on your side.”
I object to the use of the word “liberal” to describe the very illiberal “progressives”. Both terms are newspeak for their opposites.
This is not new. Traceable at least as far as Rousseau whose admirers call this very counter-enlightenment writer “enlightened”, and use his totalitarian notion of “general will” to justify suppressing dissent.
We live in a world where newspeak pushes out meaning. We should be reclaiming the language. If we, who remember what words mean, use the newspeak, soon there won’t be any language left with which to express rational argument (which is the whole idea of newspeak in Orwells’ 1984).
Look up I, Hypocrite on You Tube he has a feature called “You can’t stop progress” it shows exactly what progress is right now…makes you think twice!
Today we don’t have liberals, we have illiberals. The unwillingness to accept any view that is not “acceptable” is long standing. There is also a new strain of Illiberalism and it stems from the vote to leave the EU. This strain exists on the right as well as left of politics and can be summarised by the Lib Dem’s EU election slogan of “Bollox to BRexit”. It is the ultimate “cancel culture”. It means, in their view, anyone who voted to leave the EU should not have the right to speak. Some of the more extreme elements called for leave voters to be removed from the electoral roll and we can all remember prominent remain voters revealing in the death of old people who they assumed had voted leave!
There are very few liberals left, that is why there are very few liberals standing up to the woke. The reality is most people who call themselves liberals are truly illiberal and actually support the whole concept of censoring views they think are unacceptable and denigrating those who express them.
This whole debate surely, is simply about freedom of speech, and the persecution of those who are deemed by their detractors to have overstepped the mark. The moment an intrepid urge to voice an opinion is overtaken by the fear of being judged unfavourably, from any quarter, is the moment we no longer live in a democracy.
The woke ideology hates free speech as we have seen, but it only hates it when it is in total opposition to its own views. This cannot be allowed to ‘progress’ in a civilised society and the ‘culture-cancellers’ are merely adding to an ideology as dangerous to this country as fascism was. Let us learn the lessons from the past; we fought for, and won the right, to say what we think, without fear of reprisal or persecution.
Liberals won’t stand up for the same reason every one else doesn’t stand up because the elite, the establishment and big business are against them.
We have to get rid of this fallacy that its a tiny minority. It is the establishment using this stuff to hang on to power and money. They can all mouth the words black lives matter safe in the knowledge that the great and the good don’t support marxism or really care about black lives its just about using that section of the community to hang on to money and power.
The article is excellent but I would suggest slightly off target. Real Liberals were people like JS Mill and WE Gladstone. Over the decades their clothes have been taken over by Progressives, who trade on the positive association of the word Liberal while making use of the wiles of the Puritans and Marxists.
They are a cancer on society and Hayek and Popper warned of them.
Nemesis is already following hubris as the fundamentals of the BLM organisation is exposed.
However,this is simply their latest incarnation. Libertarians and Conservatives, and even real Liberals need to unite as an anti-Gramscian force to retake the lost institutions.
Peter tells us a female guest at a fancy dress party chose to wear blackface makeup “as a satire on people thinking that wearing blackface is OK. The guest quickly regretted her decision and apologised for it. Nevertheless she was subsequently tracked down, named and ended up losing her job.” Then he adds: “Justin Trudeau is still in his though.” It’s good of him to notice the double standard. Does he have an explanation for it? PM Trudeau’s numerous backers argue that he should not suffer any penalty for his multiple appearances in blackface or his public lies about them because it is well known that he is not a racist, so these transgressions can simply be set aside. It is the worst kind of circular reasoning.
It’s selective open-mindedness.
It’s not about logic. It’s about in and out groups. It is self-defeating (at least for now) to kick a powerful ally out of office. Witness the same double standard between allegations against Brett Kavanaugh and Joe Biden. Of course, if Trudeau loses the next election, expect him to be fair game for canceling.
The liberals built the world of woke and now they are the victims. How funny.
Follow the money. The Woke may think they are penniless social justice warriors, but behind the scenes, powerful forces are at work. Follow the money. The idiotic woke would get nowhere otherwise – look at the Stop Hate for Profit campaign, which has massive funding and powerful corporates behind it. Yet the Stop Hate for Profit campaign is not an impartial observer of hate speech, it is an extremely partisan operation to shutdown “wrongthink”. Why would it get corporate backing?
It is all a distraction away from real issues which are economic! Neoliberals together with their dogma have successfully clouded the issue.
They have achieved a world of keeping wages low, or debt pressure high, and workers will be less likely to complain or make demands. As workers struggle to provide their families with all the temptations that a capitalist society offers, they become far less likely to risk their employment, and less able to improve their situation.
1-10% of the population believe in this social hierarchy of “haves” and “have nots”. They have taken this corrosive social vision and dressed it up with a “respectable” sounding ideology which all boils down to the cheap labor, desperate insecure people they depend on to make their fortunes.
They will encourage racism, misogyny, homophobia and other forms of bigotry. Why? Bigotry among wage earners distracts them, and keeps them from recognizing their common interests as wage earners. It is to their advantage to have all these groups running around fighting among themselves.
Another problem, related to Alison’s comment below, is that the Liberals who are suddenly realising they too may become victims have no allies.
Conservatives have been criticising ‘woke’ and the mob under its various labels for decades, while Liberals have stayed quiet or even applauded as they get thrown under the outrage bus. Now Liberals will ‘get a taste of their own medicine’ and ‘eat their own’ and ‘live in the world they made’ and frankly many Conservatives I think are delighted.
The link in the article to Quillette.com is apt. There are dozens of ‘I was woke until they turned on me’ articles.
“Except that cancel culture goes so much further than any of that. This issue is about what is happening within mainstream institutions ” and what is being done to people with mainstream views.”
Despite Wokeism being a contemporary lived experience of cultural fascism, in the real sense of the word, it still appears that this phenomenon needs to be properly understood and analysed.
As a starter, it seems the graduated shift from political correctness and the calling out of bigotry when mixed with the grief driven reactions against Brexit and now Boris have collectively produced a cultural spell in which the cultural fascism of Wokeism can thrive.
The way to break the spell is to realise that it is norms of Inequality that underlie Wokeism in which basic equal rights are turned into basic unequal rights. However these norms of Inequality have been building up for some time within the previous incarnations of Wokeism, that being PCism and call out culture, and so these norms of Inequality have become normalised.
It is the norms of Inequality that are impregnating public consciousness that are the real threat, which you rightly point out ought to be resisted by the Liberal Community. In this respect, are they appeasing because they actually want these norms of Inequality to build up into systemic discrimination and inequality, just like the appeasers of fascism and nazism did in the 20th century.
The plain reality is that the appeasers and proponents of Wokeism are real live 21st century fascists, not as a critical slur, but as the exact mirror of fascist and their appeasers of the 20th century.
In this respect, how do we stop history literally repeating itself. By calling out their fascism and calling it for what it really and truly is, Woke Fascism.
Many good, insightful comments here. But I am surprised that no one has mentioned the connection between modern wokism and religious zealotry, perhaps because many people posting are themselves religious.
As for that connection, it seems to me that being woke is simply a modern version of the Great awakenings that periodically roil American culture. These movements erupt under periods of cultural tension and uncertainty as a psychological defense mechanism. Whether it is a reaction to the growing influence of Satan or the patriarchy is less important than the fervour and emotional catharsis that such movements engender in the True Believer.
In the past, movements around religious purity lead to a return to more fundamentalist, biblical- literalism, a return to older values in the face of secularism. But now the woke are the secularists themselves who, without a bible to guide their awakening, manufacture their ideology whole cloth from a sense of self-righteousness based on injuries to their dignity, real or imagined. The politics of grievance is, at its root, based on resentment.
Welded to this psychological morass of anger is an epistemology based on nihilism, postmodernism’s other face. If objective reality doesn’t comport to your woke dogma, then science and reason are simply re-cast as tools of the patriarchy. There can be no appeal to facts, because facts are necessarily imbricated in oppression, and so can be safely ignored. And because there are no longer objective standards for reasoned debate, disagreement is necessarily subjective and ad hominem: if you can’t defeat the ideas of your opponents, you have a right.. nay, a duty to cast him into the pit of perdition along with evolutionary psychology and its attendant sins.
Meanwhile, classical liberals in the school of Mill and Locke stand back in confusion and dismay that the values of the Enlightement, the very values that led to free speech and equality, have now been weaponized against their own foundations. The politically correct and their legions of useful idiots are winning because too many of us have taken our freedoms for granted.
But be warned: these people have tasted blood. They will not be sated until they have toppled western civilization and replaced it with their own version of Big Brother’s utopia.
Well said Mr Franklin, at least you have the guts to stand up and be counted. Your are correct, Wokes aren’t and can never be, true Liberals. Woke is a pernicious Virus, that comes and goes like the tide and continually mutates to adapt to its host. The Woke Virus (WV) has been with us from at least the 1918 Bolshevik Revolution. Using the camouflage of liberalism it has infiltrated every major institution in the UK, from the judiciary downwards. Who can forget the appalling conduct of Lord (leg over Lennie) Hoffmann and the Pinochet Appeal?
Or the extraordinary double standards involved in the failure to prosecute the aged Soviet Spy Melita Norwood, whilst almost simultaneously prosecuting the equally decrepit Nazi Camp Guard Anthony Sawoniuk?
Alison Houston below, correctly highlights the barbarism of ‘grooming’ ( a weasel word, if ever there was one) that has raged, almost unchecked through our cities. Where indeed were the sainted Rowling and Moore ?
WV is a clear and present danger, second only to the Chinese. The most potent weapon to defeat it is to to ignore it. Nothing will inflame it more than avoiding any discourse with it, whatsoever. Then, at least, there is a good change it will self immolate and rid us of its festering presence.
Our ‘leaders’ must learn to shut up, and not ‘rise to the bait’.
Incidentally has anyone heard whether the Bristol Constabulary have placed any charges against the vandals who tore down the Colston statue? Or will this be another WV fudge?
“Raged”? This grooming rage must have passed me by. It’s worth noting, though, that the vast majority of UK sex offenders are white.
Did I say otherwise?
Deleted
I have Contempt for illiberal Liberals, Labour,Conservatives,Greens,Plaid cymru,Snp, sinn fein etc..therefore im the Most Egalatarian on this thread?
.. ”I despise your view ,but will fight to the death to protect them”.J Voltaire c18th…..
Voltaire est maintenant mort.
I have never subscribed to Twitter and generally use FB for social purposes unless completely provoked by the usual illiberal suspects trying to impose their tiresome twaddle on myself and then I have to admit that I enjoy baiting their narrow, naive, intolerant views.
Twitter and FB seem to be primary platforms for society’s rejects who have the opportunity to collectivise their nihilistic grievances to make normal people’s lives hell or even destroy them. They are a bully’s paradise with no downside unless you fall foul of the illiberal wokeratti and they rightly gorge upon yourself. Time these provocateurs’ platforms were held to account and ground into the dirt.
As the astute Jordan Peterson and others of his ilk have correctly pointed out, this entire movement is about power with tried and true tactics of communist revolutionaries in full swing.
But they’re a clever bunch and realize they need help in the form of “useful idiots” to achieve their aims.
Conservatives and anyone to the right of centre would never buy their garbage so the liberals are the target host for the communist parasite.
And what a willing host these well-intentioned saps make.
What liberal wouldn’t want to stand against racism or injustice?
It’s not like there aren’t enough examples past and present.
It’s just the right thing to do.
As per the Churchill reference, the liberals are feeding the crocodile a steady diet of apologies, cancel-culture and ‘bottom rail on top now’ reverse racism, thinking that once the cold-blooded maw is full we can all settle down and enjoy a new and improved peace.
The cruel joke is on them however; the crocodile is never full or satisfied.
How far we go down this road to political disaster won’t depend on conservative backlash but on whether or not liberals twig to the scam before it’s too late.
The writer says he as a liberal can approve the removal of statues of slave owners. This is still the erasing of history. If they aren’t there, especially in this age void of the written word, how will they be discussed? Those that try to disprove the holocaust can’t while the ovens,gas chambers,bricks & mortar of Auschwitz stands.
Once truth is regarded as unknowable, or even an offence to the tolerant….you then need to seek meaning and purpose in the unlikeliest places.
And post modern university thinking( I use the oxymoron in jest) as well as the educational ” offer” that the state has compelled since Kenneth Bakers reign of idiocy way back? Well, any port in a storm, the cancellers can’t be blamed any more than they can be helped.
The Revolution eats its own.
Who knew huh?
The first step would be for everybody who is concerned at what is happening to get off social media, in particular Twitter.
It doesn’t matter what nice things you think you are using it for, you are simply enabling all the trolls have a platform to behave like this
Woke and liberal what’s the difference and who cares? They all sound the same to me. None of them can stand reality and are in a permanent rebellion against it. They are like the howlers in ‘Invasion of the Bodysnatchers’
They are the pods made flesh in our time. What should exercise all of us and them is the inevitable reaction against all of them. That will not be a pretty sight and best avoided although the latest strange outbreak of statue demolition is moving that up the timescale a bit sharpish.
The statue breakers mostly seem like nice well bred youngsters out for a lark that they can really believe in for a while . Till they need the job offers to come in. The somewhat older liberals running foul of them are no less well heeled. Insulated by wealth and luxury. But they all live on a temporary licence from reality . Who knows what beasts of left or right are waiting in the shadows.
Kenneth Patchen
‘O the lions of fire
Wait in the crawling shadows of your world
And their terrible eyes are watching you ‘
Think of these days as the days of indulgence.
Simple really , just say it was the will of Allah. Does anyone disagree with the will of Allah? If it has happened then it must be the will of Allah
At the core of cancel culture there’s the refusal to treat the political “other” with basic civility, fairness and decency. Everyone believes political opinions conflicting with their own are mistaken, misguided or wrong. In cancel culture when the views/speech do not align with the illiberals, their automatic assumption is that the person is deliberately being malicious hateful etc . It’s arguable whether they even believe this, or whether it’s just a strategic choice to gain tactical advantage. Denounced speech is said to demonstrate the person’s intent to demean, wound and cause damage to others, reflecting intended malice, evil and hate. All this reminds me of those tyrannical preachers from hundreds of years ago railing against and damning unrepentant sinners.
Franklin’s article largely misses the proverbial pachyderm 😠in the living room, possibly as he’s on the “rainy and damp” side of the Atlantic.
Here in the US the entire establishment media states it agrees with, or at least never questions the notion that mainstream Republicans today ipso facto are alleged to be white nationalists (absolutely no one had ever heard of white nationalism before illiberals commenced their Republican denunciations.). Those illiberals adamantly insist on alleging Republicans are racist, white supremacist, white nationalists who allegedly harbor this great abiding hatred for all black people and people of color. This is bizarrely preposterous, untrue, completely irrational, hysterical, slanderous and prejudicial. It’s reflective of illiberals prejudice, stereotyping and their jettisoning of societal norms, consideration, fairness and civility. They determinedly brings this hateful insistence to bear in dehumanizing the political other. It can be understood as the virtual criminalization of political differences. They insist their denunciations are “the truth” writ large, a truth so consequential it requires restating multiple times daily. Regardless of politics, most people in modern society would rather be known as an arsonist than a racist. This very thing reveals the real reason denunciations of alleged white nationalists have become a predominant staple technique and tactic of hate-fuelled illiberals today. This technique is sure to intimidate and terrorize some significant number of conservatives. Illiberals ultimate goal is making people fearful of the vitriolic abuse plus the life-damaging consequences of supporting conservative ideas or people. A movement cannot flourish when its supporters are too terrified to openly express their opinions. To state this in the lefts language, conservatives are being targeted to cause them to feel unsafe.
I have a hard-and-fast rule: when someone uses “Democrat” as an adjective when they mean “Democratic” (“a political data analyst whose work has contributed to Democrat election campaigns”) I stop reading. This is a childish, idiotic mangling of the language. Would we say “Republic election campaigns”? We would not. Do better.
It’s because they are not “liberal”, they are communists.
Engaging in discussion about the merits or otherwise of the wokist cult of unreason is ridiculous.It gives validity to this ignorant, absurd political extremist nonsense wrecking our culture, threatening our freedoms and now our toleration and our racial l harmony while also insulting our intelligence..
This article is part of the problem. Wokism -the cultivation of cultural ignorance as a virtue – deserves ridicule and abuse not debate.It should be knocked on the head and dismissed when it becomes violent by the firm application of the law.
I think that the current ‘identitarian politics’ and its ‘cancel culture’ weapon is the culmination of neo-liberalism: it is hyper-individualistic wherein the individual puts their interests above those of the collective and anyone who attempts to impede the individual in their battle for supremacy (by denying their special identity, rights, privileges, in their terms, their very existence) is a mortal enemy (inflicting literal ‘violence’ on them). You must have noticed that the self-aggrandizing advocates of these ‘rights’ are always above and apart from their supporters, who tend to be young women who feel sorry for these poor souls. These people are ‘morbid narcissists’ who, instead of being offered psychological help, are put on pedestals by our social institutions. They co-opt movements for their own particularistic interests. Meanwhile the mass of people, whose interests are ignored, are alienated by the seeming insanity of their policy makers and opinion makers turning to right-wing populists for relief.
Those with the power to oppose the anti-statue movement prefer to appease them rather than take an intellectual view. Cries for Thomas Guy’s statue to be taken down by some students were based on the erroneous assumption he was a slave trader. In fact he was a very good man with no involvement in the slave trade but the hierarchy in the University ,Trust and Southwark Council find it easier to appease the students rather than engage in a debate on the historiography. Very intellectually lazy by both the students and the powers-that-be. See: https://www.change.org/p/pr… AND /u/27137838?cs_tk=AlZ6mc07GoaHQgry_F4AAXicyyvNyQEABF8BvC7a7hHQRj0aGTadxYPeyaw%3D
Is there anything about liberalism – in its modern, illiberal incarnation – that can or should be defended?
Although it is generally agreed that there are limits to Free Speech , nobody has agreed where they are beyond justice Holmes assertion that ” Nobody has the right to shout fire in a crowded theatre”
One small sign of hope, maybe:
https://www.thesun.co.uk/sp…
Liberalism is not an attitude of mind, but a legal framework. What is not banned must be tolerated. What is banned is that which causes egregious harm to others.
Most of the examples of ‘cancel culture’ given here involve more than straightforward speech – but orchestrated campaigns against the existential rights of certain groups, or in James Bennet’s case, failure to actually do his job and screen an article for factual misrepresentation. In all cases they involve decisions by private people and private organisations, whose reactions to the speech of others is entirely a matter for them as long as they remain within the law.
The advent of social media, and the ‘market forces’ that make certain platforms dominant, amplify both the effects and the reactions that we see. If we don’t like it, then pointing fingers achieves little. Only an extension of the liberal legal framework covering speech can bring change – if that is really what we want.
What “factual misrepresentation” was there in the Tom Cotton Op-Ed?
Postmodernity is eating Liberalism from within.
The cancel culture is just a socially acceptable way to engage in censorship without being accused of using authoritarian tactics.
By attacking their opponent’s character or personal traits, the Woke movement has found an easy way to suppress dissent and frame the public debate in its favour.
We live in strange times where abusive Ad hominem is the rule of the land. The Woke Witch hunters are constantly attacking the characteristics of a person without addressing the substance of their argument. They are doing so because they are simply incapable of building their own counter-argument with supporting evidence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
TRANNY TRANSPLANT
A man can now show as female on a DNA test, depending on the sample, eg. hair roots tend to be the original DNA.
Bone marrow recipients
In 2008, A man was killed in a traffic accident that occurred in Seoul, South Korea. In order to identify him, his DNA was analyzed. Results revealed that the DNA of his blood, along with some of his organs, appeared to show that he was female. It was later determined that he had received a bone marrow transplant from his daughter.
It is amusing to watch the Leftist opinion shapers begin to get nervous when the howling mob that they set on me turns on them.
Thank you so much, Peter. I’m so relieved to finally know that I am not the only one who is seeing this issue. I am a true liberal at heart and always will be. It just breaks my heart knowing that it got stolen and nobody will band together to defend what it use to mean.
I would like to see a full and proper debate on for instance transgender/all gender, with a robust chair.
It seems to me that no platforming/refusing to listen is creating a world of conspiracy theorists because open debate no longer happens. If people think that somebody’s views are toxic, then they should expose the full span of those views for all to see; this had a material effect on for example the horrible historical distortions circulated by David Irving. Somebody needs to call out lies and deceits, whether the perpetrators are safely ensconced in armchairs or in high office.
I myself thought JK Rowling mistaken in her views about transgender, but I would defend to the death her right to articulate them. All Western education is built on the premise of adversarial and dialectical discussion to arrive at truth; that’s what the peer-review process does. Without that process in the public sphere, it is very difficult for the busy citizen juggling a job and domestic responsibilities to know the difference between truth and falsehood.