Religion is a Mental Illness

"Cancel culture doesn't exist!" is a mantra we often hear from its most obstinate practitioners.

In October 2022, the comedian and BBC presenter Graeme Norton suggested that a better term for cancel culture would be "accountability." But is it really fair to harass, defame and ruin people's lives simply for expressing commonly held opinions? What exactly are they being held accountable for? A much better synonym for cancel culture was coined by the singer Nick Cave. He said it was "mercy's antithesis."

Given that the very existence of cancel culture is so often denied, I thought I'd take this opportunity to outline precisely what is meant by cancel culture, and why it matters so much for those of us who still care about liberal values.

But let's begin with that thorny question of definitions. Now, most of us understand what cancel culture means. But perhaps it might be more instructive to consider what it isn't.

If someone criticizes you for something you've said or done, that's not cancel culture, that's free speech. If someone blocks you on social media, that's not cancel culture; someone has just decided you're not worth listening to and is exercising his or her freedom to ignore you. If you've not been invited to speak at a certain event, that's not cancel culture either; no one's entitled to a platform.

No, what cancel culture actually means is a form of public shaming or harassment, often for relatively minor mistakes or unfashionable opinions. It's the difference between criticizing someone for something they've said or done, or systematically attempting to see their reputation and livelihood obliterated. Cancel culture is not criticism, it's denunciation. it's contacting employers and demanding that people are fired because you don't agree with what they've said. It's spreading lies about them online so their future work prospects are diminished. In other words it's a hugely disproportionate and vindictive form of revenge, dressed up in the guise of virtue.

Here's a way to think about it: let's say a colleague has attempted a joke via email and maybe you feel a bit offended by it. Do you have a conversation with them in private and say, "look I think that was a bit misjudged, but I know that wasn't the intention so let's just move on and go for a pint." Or do you screenshot the offending email, post it online, invite all your followers to pile on to the person who wrote it, and denounce them publicly and then demand that the employer fires them for hateful conduct?

Now if you're opting for the latter, I've got some bad news for you. You you're not the good guy here.

"But free speech has consequences," the cancel culture skeptics cry. Well look, I'm inclined to agree. If a person says something stupid or offensive, they can expect criticism, ridicule, counterarguments, even protest. But if the consequences of free speech are that someone becomes the target of a campaign of public shaming and personal ruination, or worse still, that they're arrested for so-called "hate speech," then that's surely unjustifiable.

A common misconception is that cancel culture is simply a matter of holding the powerful to account. The failure of activists to cancel JK Rowling is often cited as evidence that cancel culture is a myth. But as one of the most successful authors of all time, Rowling cannot be cancelled, much to the irritation of those who sender abuse and threats on a daily basis. The vast majority of targets are those with limited means, who don't have the public profile or financial resources to protect themselves from such attacks. This is why the Free Speech Union has been invaluable, offering support to so many people who found themselves at the center of witch hunts.

Perhaps the most sinister aspect of cancel culture is that it has successfully generated a climate of fear, in which many are afraid to express even their most cherished convictions. Once a few high-profile individuals have been cancelled, this can be sufficient to discourage others from speaking out. The relentless and cruel attacks on JK Rowling are driven not by any serious belief that she'll suddenly become impoverished and unemployable. But rather by the desire to send a message to others who share her point of view. After all, who would want to be on the receiving end of such malicious and continual harassment.

And so, the full impact of cancel culture is pretty difficult to quantify. Like "no platforming," which is the practice carried out by universities of denying platforms to individuals with controversial views, most of the targets of cancel culture are pre-emptive. Just as speakers with heterodox views will never know that they've been deprived of an opportunity to speak on campus, many of us will have been passed over for promotions, or not hired at all, simply for the opinions we've expressed in conversation or on social media. We will never know who has been cancelled, because we can only ever be aware of those handful of instances that have been publicized.

So, while the press will report on pop singer Róisín Murphy's cancelled shows, a consequence of her entirely reasonable comments about the dangers of puberty blockers, the supermarket employee who loses his job for an offensive joke on Twitter is unlikely to garner the same attention.

For all that, there have been numerous examples of cancellations that have made the national news. And the evidence of cancel culture is there for anyone who wishes to see it. And although these examples represent a fraction of the problem, they should be sufficient to disabuse those who cling to the comforting misapprehension that cancel culture is just a fabrication of right- wingers. Not least because so many of its victims have been on the left.

And so, to counter the pervasive and false narrative that cancel culture doesn't exist, I thought it might be helpful to provide an overview of just some of its victims. And now, needless to say, this list is by no means exhaustive.

So, in June 2015, the Nobel prizewinning biochemist Tim Hunt was forced to resign from his honorary position at University College London after a journalist misrepresented jokes he'd made at a conference in Seoul in South Korea.

In August 2019, school teacher Christian Webb lost his job when it emerged that he'd been performing viral comedy rap videos under the pseudonym MC Devo in the mid 2000s.

In December 2021, choreographer Rosie Kay was compelled to resign from her own dance company after investigation processes began because she expressed her gender-critical views at a gathering with dancers in her own home. And although she had cooked them a meal and invited the company to her house, some of those present took it upon themselves to report her to the board.

In December 2018, tax expert Maya Forstater lost her job for saying that women are female and human beings cannot change sex. The decision of the tribunal was initially upheld, so she was forced to take the case to the High Court, which eventually ruled that gender-critical beliefs are protected by law.

The comedy writer Graham Linehan has been unable to work in the comedy industry for six years due to his gender-critical beliefs. His musical adaptation of his hit sitcom "Father Ted" has been halted by the rights owners, Hat Trick Productions, who had offered Linehan a substantial sum of money to have his name removed from the project.

In 2018, barrister Allison Bailey, a lesbian with a long history of gay activism, raised concerns about her chamber's decision to join Stonewall's "Diversity Champions" program due to its uncritical stance on gender self-identification. For raising these concerns, she was labeled as "transphobic" by Garden Court Chambers, who publicly announced that Bailey was under investigation. Bailey later won a court case for discrimination.

In 2018, the children's author Rachel Rooney published a book called "My Body is Me," which challenged sexist stereotypes and promoted a positive self-image for children. It was branded as "transphobic" and Rooney was subjected to a campaign of harassment by figures in the publishing industry. Some bookshops capitulated to activists and stopped stalking her work, and her publisher told her to stop expressing her opinions on the subject of gender.

In June 2023, it was reported that Sibyl Ruth, an editor at Cornerstones literary consultancy, was dropped because of her gender-critical views. Following an employment tribunal she received an apology and substantial damages.

In October 2023, Newcastle United fan Lindsay Smith was banned from the football club stadium for three seasons for her belief that sex is immutable, and that men shouldn't have access to women's changing rooms or compete in women's sports. In addition to her ban, she was investigated by a secret unit at the Premier League, who created a dossier on what they described as their "target." They attempted to find a home address, they assessed photographs from her social media accounts, and they even downloaded images in which Smith could be seen walking a dog.

Dr. Neil Thin experienced what he described as a devastating couple of years when he was falsely accused of racism by student activists. Thin is a senior lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh, and he had criticized a conference called "Resisting Whiteness" because it offered racially segregated spaces. He also objected to the renaming of the David Hume Tower as 40 George Square. It had been renamed on the grounds that Hume had written some passages in an essay in 1753 that would today be deemed offensive. Thin stepped back from teaching while an investigation was underway and was eventually exonerated in September 2021.

Also in 2021, the actor James Dreyfus was dropped from the audio range of Doctor Who stories for signing a letter to Stonewall calling for an open and respectful debate on the subject of gender identity ideology and its impact on the rights of women and gay people. The company not only dropped him but erased his episodes from a compilation in which he was meant to be featured.

In July 2020, the children's author Gillian Philip was dropped by her publisher for tweeting in support of JK Rowling. She's since retrained as a trucker and has written that the haulage industry is far more supportive and inclusive, and a lot less misogynistic, than the world of children's writing.

Criminology Professor Jo Phoenix was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder after a campaign of harassment by colleagues after she co-founded a gender-critical research network. In early 2024, she won her constructive dismissal case against the Open University.

In November 2021, social worker Rachel Meade was sanctioned by her employer Social Work England because of gender-critical posts she had shared and liked on Facebook. This led to her being suspended on charges of gross misconduct by Westminster City Council. Meade later won her claim for discrimination against her employer and the judge ruled that the disciplinary procedure amounted to harassment.

In June 2020, Nick Buckley, the founder of charity organization Mancunian Way, was ousted for criticizing the radical politics of the Black Lives Matter movement, most notably its calls to defund the police and abolish capitalism.

In August 2020, Sasha White, an assistant at the Tobias Literary Agency in New York, was fired after a campaign by trans activists who took offense at statements posted on her Twitter account expressing her view that gender neutral pronouns were unhelpful to the feminist cause.

In January 2020, veteran television presenter Alastair Stewart was forced to resign after tweeting a quotation from Shakespeare which included the phrase, "an angry ape." This was misinterpreted as racist because he was replying to a black Twitter, user even though it was a phrase he had used previously in conversation with white people.

In April 2019, philosopher Roger Scrutin was sacked as housing adviser to the Conservative government as part of the "Building Better, Building Beautiful" commission. And this was after a journalist at the New Statesman doctored his statement in an interview in order to make them appear racist.

In June 2019, Asda Supermarket worker Brian Leech was fired after sharing a video online by the comedian Billy Connelly which mocked Islamic suicide bombers, even though the source of the offending excerpt was from a DVD sold by the company that employed him. He was later reinstated following an outcry.

In June 2019, BBC Books removed the writer Gareth Roberts from a Doctor Who short story anthology because he expressed his view that the trans activist movement reinforces outdated gender stereotypes.

In June 2021, the textile artist Jess de Wahls had her artwork removed from sale in the Royal Academy gift shop, having already been driven out of her hairdressing salon in the Soho theater. Simply for her gender-critical opinions. She was bombarded on Twitter with vitriolic messages and calls for her to commit suicide.

In June 2021, it was reported that the Reverend Dr Bernard Randall, a school chaplain at Trent College in Derbyshire had been reported to Prevent, that's the government's anti-terrorism program, and this was because he delivered a sermon on why it was reasonable to challenge ideological viewpoints. And this was in response to a training session that he'd been obliged to attend in which school staff were told to chant "smash heteronormativity."

In June 2021, the cricketer Ollie Robinson was banned from playing for eight months due to offensive tweets that he posted as a teenager. In addition to the ban from the Cricket Discipline Commission, he was fined £3,200 and was compelled to participate in anti-discrimination training.

In June 2021, it was reported that law student Lisa Keogh had been investigated by authorities at Abertay University in Scotland for saying that "women have vaginas." Although she was cleared, she described the two-month investigation as needlessly cruel given that it coincided with her final examination period.

In October 2021, the philosopher Kathleen Stock resigned from the University of Sussex following a campaign of abuse and harassment from student activists who claimed that her very presence excludes and endangers trans people.

Ann Henderson, rector of Edinburg University until February 2021, was falsely smeared by activists as "transphobic" and antisemitic and not fit to hold office simply for tweeting about a meeting at the House of Commons on proposed reforms to the Gender Recognition Act. She experienced a vicious campaign in which the University refused to tackle her abusers.

So that's just a sample of some of the victims of cancel culture.

And if it's true that cancel culture isn't real, it's got a hell of a lot of casualties.

150 Examples of Cancel Culture

When some people claim that cancel culture doesn’t exist, that it’s just about ‘consequences’ or ‘accountability’ – well that’s just bullshi

Democracy Coma

• Scholars Under Fire Database
• Campus Disinvitation Database

"Be unafraid to criticise those who reach for the lowest common denominator. Any fool can lampoon a king or a bishop or a billionaire. A trifle more grit is required to face down a mob, or a studio audience that has decided it knows what it wants and is entitled to get it." -- Christopher Hitchens

Public shaming has moved from the village square and is now an established online phenomenon. The current paper explores whether online shaming is motivated by a person’s desire to do good (a justice motive); and/or, because it feels good (a hedonic motive), specifically, as a form of malicious pleasure at another’s misfortune (schadenfreude). We examine two key aspects of social media that may moderate these processes: anonymity (Study 1) and social norms (the responses of other users; Studies 2-3). Across three experiments (N = 225, 198, 202) participants were presented with a fabricated news article featuring an instance of Islamophobia and given the opportunity to respond. Participants’ concerns about social justice were not directly positively associated with online shaming and had few consistent indirect effects on shaming via moral outrage. Rather, justice concerns were primarily associated with shaming via participants’ perception that the offender was deserving of negative consequences, and their feelings of schadenfreude regarding these consequences. Anonymity did not moderate this process and there was mixed evidence for the qualifying effect of social norms. Overall, the current studies point to the hedonic motive in general and schadenfreude specifically as a key moral emotion associated with people’s shaming behaviour.

How to destroy a reputation

The art of character assassination has ancient roots

UnHerd

I am at the home of a psychopath. Here on the easternmost point of the island of Capri, the ancient ruins of the Villa Jovis still cling to the summit of the mount­ain. This was the former residence of the Emperor Tiberius, who retired here for the last decade of his life in order to indulge in what Milton described as “his horrid lusts”. He conducted wild orgies for his nymphs and catamites. He forced children to swim between his thighs, calling them his “little fish”. He raped two brothers and broke their legs when they complained. He threw countless individuals to their deaths from a precipice looming high over the sea.

That these stories are unlikely to be true is beside the point; Tiberius’s reputation has done wonders for the tourist trade here on Capri. The historians Suetonius and Tacitus started the rumours and, with the help of successive generations of sensationalists, established a tradition that was to persist for almost two millennia.

All of which serves as a reminder that reputations can be constructed and sustained on the flimsiest of foundations. Suetonius and Tacitus were writing almost a century after the emperor’s death, and many of their lurid stories were doubtless echoes of those circulated by his most spiteful enemies. Or perhaps it’s simply a matter of prurience. Who can deny that the more lascivious and outlandish acts of the Roman emperors are by far the most memorable? One thinks immediately of Caligula having sex with his siblings and appointing his horse as consul. Or Nero murdering his own mother, and taking a castrated slave for his bride, naming him after the wife he had kicked to death. For all their horror, who doesn’t feel cheated when such tales turn out to be false?

Our reputations are changelings: protean shades of other people’s imaginations. More often than not, they are birthed from a combination of uninformed prejudice and wishful thinking. And we should be in no doubt that in our online age, when lies are disseminated at lightning speed and casual defamation has become the activist’s principal strategy, reputations are harder to heal once tarnished.

I am tempted to feel pity for future historians. Quite how they will be expected to wade through endless reams of emails, texts, and other digital materials — an infinitude of conflicting narratives and individual “truths” — really is beyond me. At least when there is a dearth of primary sources it is possible to piggyback onto a firm conclusion. “Suetonius said…” has a satisfactory and definitive air, but only because there are so few of his contemporary voices available to contradict him.

As the culture war rumbles on, and I have found myself ostracised by former friends who now interpret even minor political disagreements as evidence of malevolence, I have learned that reputation is invariably a form of fiction. One such friend used to complain endlessly about a certain conservative commentator, asserting that he was a mendacious hatemonger whose every action was motivated by contempt for marginalised communities. These ideas were so frequently repeated in conversation, and confirmed by others within our circle, that I had no doubt they must be true. Imagine my confusion, then, when I eventually became well acquainted with this man, and found him to be both generous and empathetic. It’s like meeting Beelzebub and finding that he has been secretly baking cupcakes for the poor.

The same sense of bewilderment has struck me whenever I have happened upon bad-faith critics attempting to summarise my views. I have been variously described as “far-Right”, “bigoted”, “racist”, “sexist” and even “homophobic”. Of course, I would not expect total strangers to know my mind, but given that my actual opinions are freely available to anyone with a search engine, it does feel odd to be so wildly mischaracterised.

I am not alone in this. That false narratives can be more powerful than reality is, of course, the reason why our opponents so readily resort to distortions and smears. A colleague recently alerted me to one of the more bizarre hit pieces that has been written about me in an online magazine. The strategy was at least novel: the writer had contacted former students from my time as a teacher in order to trawl for unflattering anecdotes. According to one account, I had sent a pupil out of the classroom because he dared to disagree with me about the use of metaphorical language in Of Mice and Men.

But perhaps funnier than the story itself is that the author of this article was gulled into repeating it as though it could possibly be authentic. It is a reminder that reputations are often cultivated by those who must first suspend their critical faculties. This kind of nonsense is harmless enough, of course. It falls far short of defamation and, as RuPaul so neatly put it: “what other people think of me is none of my business.”

For all that, more serious attacks on people’s reputations can be devastating. Three years ago, I lost a friend to cancer after he had been falsely accused of sexual assault. In his final days he told me that he had no doubt that the years of intense anxiety following the trial had exacerbated his illness. The source of his distress wasn’t even so much the initial accusation, which was easily disproved in court, but rather the gossip that continued to reverberate and the loved ones who no longer picked up the phone.

In the past, I have often made the mistake of assuming the worst of my detractors, simply because a scurrilous lie has seemed more appealing than a complicated truth. Few of us who have been dragged into the deranging ideological skirmishes of the past few years will have avoided making these mistakes, but these days I like to keep in mind Philip Roth’s remark in The Human Stain: “our understanding of people must always be at best slightly wrong.”

No doubt it is hopelessly optimistic to assume that this approach will become the default. Our brains are hardwired to take mental shortcuts — known as heuristics — and we are generally more willing to believe the worst of others than make the effort to consider that we may have been misinformed. Worse still, the inherent appeal of scandalous and titillating tales means they will be propagated at an accelerated rate, so that even outright lies can quickly become received wisdom. We tend to accept that there is “no smoke without fire”, when more often than not it’s just a few troublemakers with a dry ice machine.

So perhaps we ought to give Tiberius the benefit of the doubt. In that spirit, let us consider one of Suetonius’s more flattering accounts. While living on the island of Rhodes, Tiberius remarked that he ought to visit all the sick people in the town. His servants assumed that this was some kind of decree, and the local invalids were hastily summoned. Rather than turn them away, Tiberius took the time to speak to each one and apologise for the misunderstanding. This story may not satisfy our appetite for murder and depravity, but at least it might be true.

New Rule: Great news about a new award show. Listen to this. About a year and a half ago, I was asked to moderate a discussion at the home of a very prominent Hollywood producer. And the attendees that night was a who's who of A-listers and stars. If a bomb went off in that room, there'd be nothing on TV next year but, well, let's just say it would be a great year for Kevin Sorbo. I can't say exactly who was there, but if there really is a Jewish space laser, these guys have the codes.

Anyway the subject we all wanted to talk about that night was cancel culture. It's funny. If this was 10 years ago, this group would have been talking about censorship from the right. Back then it was the Jerry Falwells and Pat Robertsons, the Bill Bennetts and Rush Limbaughs who kept us up at night. I mean besides the cocaine. The book banners and boycotters then were Republicans, like the ones that got me fired after 9-11.

But that's in the past now. And by the past, I mean Florida. And of course not just Florida, today's Republicans have shown that when it comes to canceling they're still more than capable. They canceled Colin Kaepernick for taking a knee, Liz Cheney for defying Trump, Kathy Griffin for performance art. Just last week the redneck royalty of the music world threw a hissy fit because they think Anheuser-Busch is turning their beer gay.

But there's no getting around the fact that what was on the mind of the Liberals that night in Brentwood, or wherever we may have been, was that the most powerful witch hunters now were coming from Twitter, the Ivy League and the progressive left. JK Rowling used to be a villain to the right because she wrote books about witchcraft. Now she's a villain to the left because she has the crazy belief that there's more to being a woman than pronouns and lipstick.

So, that was the point of the evening: how do we take a stand against cancel culture? And I suggested since we were mostly all in show business that we start an award show to honor the brave people who have fought back. Well, I got to tell you, the idea was met with great enthusiasm by everyone, and in short order different people were suggesting the ways that their varied talents could be put to use. And then of course, being Hollywood, nothing happened.

But it's still a good idea. So I'm gonna do it, right here, right now. And not only that, we're gonna do it every year. Ladies and gentlemen, you know the Emmys, you know the Grammys, you know the Tonys, now say hello to the Cojones.

Thank you and welcome to the Cojones. I'm your Master of Ceremonies, and if you're triggered by the word "master" you're in the wrong room. Tonight we present these solid brass balls to the individuals and organizations who others have tried to silence and who answered, "that's not a rule, fuck you."

Our first award goes to the president of my alma mater, Cornell University: Martha Pollock. This month students there demanded trigger warnings before all the lectures in case any of the adult subjects you specifically went to college to learn about came up. And Martha said, "yeah, no, we're not doing that." She didn't cave in or hire a new Dean of Sensitivity. She just said, "no college is for introducing you to new ideas, not for kissing your ass and making you feel wonderful and always right." You're thinking of brunch with your parents. I'm just amazed at how this generation can simultaneously be too sensitive for anything distasteful, and somehow also so into eating ass. So, Cornell, I present you with these balls. I sure could have used them when I was there.

Our next award goes to the place where many Cornell grads will be working next year: Trader Joe's. Trader Joe's, who for years have been selling a line of ethnically themed products trading on the name Joe. For example, they have Trader José's beer. So of course one teenager on Twitter heard the word "José" and said it was racist, and then there was a petition, and then Trader Joe's management did the right thing. They burnt down all their stores and killed themselves. No, they didn't. They said "fuck off you oversensitive little shits, get a life and a sense of humor," and released this statement: "We disagree that any of these labels are racist and we do not make decisions based on petitions." You see how easy it is? So, to the home of the 19 cent banana, here have some nuts.

This next Cojone goes to a man who's dear to my heart for standing up for stand-up. When dozens of Netflix employees walked out over Dave Chappelle's reckless decision to perform comedy on his comedy special, CEO Ted Sarandos could have pulled the special and replaced it with more episodes of "Who Wants to Watch Koreans Get Killed?" But instead he reminded his Netflix employees that comedy exists to push boundaries, and told them, "If you'd find it hard to support our content breath, Netflix may not be the best place for you." So for making the phrase "don't let the door hit you in the ass" never sound better, this is for you Ted.

And you know, when movie lovers get together these days, one phrase that comes up a lot and always makes me sad, "is yeah, you couldn't make that one today." Top of that list is the great "Tropic Thunder" which these scolds have been after for years. But in February, Ben Stiller tweeted, "I make no apologies for Tropic Thunder. It's always been a controversial movie since when we opened. Proud of it and the work everyone did on it." See, people? It's not that hard. He said it and he still got a commercial.

And the lesson is, if you stand up to the mob for just a day or two, their shallow, impatient, immature, smartphone-driven gerbil minds will forget about it and go on to the next nothing-burger, and you? You still will have your Cojones.

Secret Facebook group Bad Girls Advice brags about domestic violence

Secret women's Facebook group 'Bad Girls Advice' brags about various ways they have abused their partners. The graphic conversation was shar

Mail Online

This is the secret Facebook group where women brag about the various ways they have physically abused their partners.

Graphic screenshots from the Bad Girls Advice Facebook page emerged on Thursday when a Domestic Violence support group publicly shared them.

The posts show women discussing domestic violence situations in detail after one member asked the other women what the most violent act committed against their partner was.

[..]

The confronting conversation was shared on Thursday by domestic violence support group the Black Ribbon Foundation Australia.

'And people wonder why we have a problem in this country,' it said.

'Ask yourself, had it been female victims being spoken about, would they have been so blasé?'

Facebook Quietly Reinstates 'Bad Girls Advice' After Bestiality Backlash

After an eventful weekend that saw controversial Facebook group Bad Girls Advice shut down ‘cos of an explosion of outrage over a post defen

PEDESTRIAN.TV

Facebook Quietly Reinstates ‘Bad Girls Advice’ After Bestiality Backlash

After an eventful weekend that saw controversial Facebook group Bad Girls Advice shut down ‘cos of an explosion of outrage over a post defending bestiality, the group has quietly – and inexplicably – been reactivated. 

[...]

The group’s caught shit for appearing to advocate spousal abuse, nonconsensual nude sharing and pile-ons that would see men hounded by hundreds of women for any number of perceived slights against a member. 

'Bad Girls Advice' Whistleblower Talks

A day after notorious women-only Facebook group Bad Girls Advice was shut down, one of the whistleblowers who helped get the group removed h

PEDESTRIAN.TV

'Bad Girls Advice’ Whistleblower Talks “Pack Mentality” As She Cops Abuse

A day after notorious women-only Facebook group Bad Girls Advice was shut down, one of the whistleblowers who helped get the group removed has spoken to PEDESTRIAN.TV about copping a wave of abuse from former members.

Our source, who we’ll call Kate, flagged a post defending bestiality before midday yesterday. Since then, the group has been deleted by Facebook, and Kate has copped so much abuse that her account has been suspended – the result of angry former group members reporting her profile to the same platform that took away their forum. 

Kate says that the content and culture of the group had been getting worse for a long time, culminating in a toxic atmosphere where dissenting opinions would attract serious punishment, admins were afforded cult-leader status, and the 200,000+ members were told to “scroll on” if they saw anything that made them uncomfortable, rather than bringing it up for discussion.

Bad Girls Advice Facebook group shut down after bullying complaint - triple j

What started as a place of female empowerment has descended into bitter accusation.

triple j

Bad Girls Advice Facebook group shut down after bullying complaint

[...]

Until its downfall, the girls-only group had close to 200,000 members with ceaseless posts ranging from dating advice to dirty jokes and memes.

Started in 2016, it was sold as a place of female empowerment where women "feel free to release their inner sexual being".

But as it grew, it was also earning a darker reputation.

It became known for alleged online bullying and pile-on culture — an example of the tribal dynamics of internet sub-cultures.

Former members complained of lynch mob behaviour, saying some girls who turned against the group were spammed with hateful messages from other members.

The group thrived on the controversy, and was soon monetised, with thousands of dollars' worth of branded merchandise sold.

This annotated bibliography describes 343 scholarly investigations (270 empirical studies and 73 reviews) demonstrating that women are as physically aggressive as men (or more) in their relationships with their spouses or opposite-sex partners. The aggregate sample size in the reviewed studies exceeds 440,850 people.

“One of the things that is a classic trope of the religious bigot, is while they’re denying people their rights, they claim that their rights are being denied. While they are persecuting people, they claim to be persecuted. While they are behaving colossally offensively, they claim to be the offended party. It’s upside down world.“

– Salman Rushdie

Intolerance leads to McDonald’s of the mind

Tyrannical minorities force decisions like the closure of the Wellcome show and must be resisted

www.thetimes.co.uk|James Marriott

I was perturbed to learn that the Wellcome Collection is “racist, sexist and ableist” (its own words) as I’d been vaguely meaning to go at some point. Evidently, my plans to enliven the melancholy damp of an early December weekend by inspecting such artefacts as Napoleon’s toothbrush and Florence Nightingale’s moccasins concealed more sinister subconscious motives.

Anyway, as we have all now heard, the museum has closed its Medicine Man exhibition so I will not be able to potter around some of the minor curiosities of medical history — sorry, collude in the exclusion, marginalisation and exoticisation of indigenous peoples.

To anyone unfamiliar with the censorious jargon that is threatening to become the lingua franca of modern academia, the grounds on which Medicine Man was shut down must seem either incomprehensible or bleakly hilarious. The public was piously informed that the exhibition was “very much a product of its time”. That time being . . . 2007. Ah, 2007. A cruel and bitter age.

This is strange, isn’t it? A great many people will be prevented from seeing Medicine Man on the basis of views so esoteric and so far outside mainstream discourse that I’m willing to bet that many of the Wellcome Collection’s ordinary visitors have never even heard of them. How many of the families wandering around on the average Saturday afternoon could say what it means to “other” someone or explain what was wrong with prevailing morality in the year 2007

The exhibition has disappeared because, although a very large number of people would have quite liked it to stay, a very small number of people vehemently wanted it to go. We should get used to that equation. The case of the Wellcome is a small but characteristic tragedy of the modern age — the tyranny of the intolerant minority. We are used to the “tyranny of the majority” but in liberal societies a motivated minority with strong opinions can easily override the preferences of the majority of people, especially if those preferences are only mildly held.

Indeed, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb points out in his book Skin in the Game, there are many situations in which we rightly allow a strong minority preference to shape our behaviour. For instance, on a plane on which three people have nut allergies, a few hundred other passengers will refrain from eating Snickers bars during the flight.

Taleb suggests that some of the prevalence of fast-food chains such as Pizza Hut and McDonald’s may be attributed to the power of minority opinion. In any group deciding where to go for dinner there will be one or two people with strong objections — they won’t eat fish, for instance, or spicy food. The solution is bland compromise. Nobody hates pizza.

This may be merely unfortunate from a culinary perspective but when the same dynamic is at work in intellectual life, catastrophe looms. The academic Jonathan Haidt has described how his fear that one student’s complaint or infuriated tweet might ruin his career led him to the principle of teaching to “the most sensitive person in class”. Difficult, controversial ideas are out. Bland, universally palatable pap is in. Intellectually, everyone goes to McDonald’s. But shouldn’t a university be offering gourmet intellectual fare? The stinkiest cheeses, the weirdest fish?

Tolerant institutions are inherently vulnerable. The philosopher Karl Popper referred to the “paradox of tolerance” — a tolerant society must tolerate even those who wish to destroy tolerance itself. The blogger Scott Alexander describes the way the Quakers of 17th-century Pennsylvania “tolerated themselves out of existence”. By welcoming other sects, they faded into political irrelevance as more activist, intolerant faiths took over. Because humans like to join groups with powerful signifiers of identity (tattoos, flags, unusual beliefs), intolerant institutions are better at attracting followers than woolly, tolerant ones. The fading Anglican church may be another institution tolerating itself out of existence.

The intolerant are motivated and fanatical whereas the tolerant, by their very nature, tend to be uncertain, and cautious about their convictions. The belief that the Wellcome should close an exhibition because it is racist is vastly more potent than the belief that the exhibition should stay open because it would be nice if some people got to see Napoleon’s toothbrush.

Convinced of its moral superiority and certain that the urgent righteousness of the ends justifies the means, an intolerant minority is able to magnify its power with underhand tactics (public denunciation, hyperbolic accusations of racism on social media). The tolerant tend to view such methods as rather extreme.

Tolerance is hard, unrewarding work: repeatedly confronting objectionable views and deciding to put up with them on the grounds of an abstract principle is tedious. Intolerance, meanwhile, rejects thought and replaces it with jargon and slogans which have all the glamorous atmosphere of intellectual distinction while requiring none of the effort. It is an unfortunate truth that in every institution there are a great many people who do not particularly like thinking and who would much rather repeat a slogan than interrogate an idea, particularly if repeating that slogan means nobody will call them names on Twitter.

This is how intolerant minorities exert their power. It is how exhibitions disappear and curriculums narrow. It is how you end up condemned to live for ever in the McDonald’s of the mind. It is a blander, sadder and less nourishing place.

Most students are great. But when you're lecturing, it doesn't matter the averages, you have to teach to the most sensitive student. Because if you say anything or show a video that has one word that offends any student, you can be reported. So what do you do if you can't trust your class?

In an article published last year by Inside Higher Ed, seven humanities professors wrote that the trigger-warning movement was “already having a chilling effect on [their] teaching and pedagogy.” They reported their colleagues’ receiving “phone calls from deans and other administrators investigating student complaints that they have included ‘triggering’ material in their courses, with or without warnings.” A trigger warning, they wrote, “serves as a guarantee that students will not experience unexpected discomfort and implies that if they do, a contract has been broken.” When students come to expect trigger warnings for any material that makes them uncomfortable, the easiest way for faculty to stay out of trouble is to avoid material that might upset the most sensitive student in the class.

“One of the things that is a classic trope of the religious bigot, is while they’re denying people their rights, they claim that their rights are being denied. While they are persecuting people, they claim to be persecuted. While they are behaving colossally offensively, they claim to be the offended party. It’s upside down world.“

– Salman Rushdie

A culture of fear has taken over academia and the arts

www.spectator.co.uk|Nick Cohen

At the end of the second world war, George Orwell went to an event organised by PEN, a campaign dedicated to defending freedom of expression. He walked into a scene we encounter everywhere in 2022.

The meeting was meant to celebrate the tercentenary of John Milton’s Areopagitica, one of the earliest and still one of the best defences of freedom of thought in the English language.

Journalists, novelists and poets depend on that right. They should know that, if they lose it, they lose their soul. Milton’s cry from the 1640s should be their cry: ‘I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for.’

For many jobbing writers, alas, talk of souls and racing for immortal garlands is, well, a little too high-flown to move them. You might expect that the more down-to-earth need to put bread on the table would motivate them instead. Freedom of expression allows writers to sell their ideas in a marketplace. If one publisher does not approve of their views, they can shrug their shoulders and take their work to other publishers. Censorship creates backlists that take away their chance of paid work anywhere. Economic necessity should turn them into idealists.

But Orwell found that neither the speakers on the platform nor the audience would offer a wholehearted defence of liberty.

‘Out of this concourse of several hundred people, perhaps half of whom were directly connected with the writing trade, there was not a single one who could point out that freedom of the press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticise and oppose.’

The intellectuals of the 1940s were concerned about the British empire’s repression of the rights of conquered peoples. But they left the subject of free political speech in the UK alone. The left fanatics at the meeting believed that true freedom of speech could only exist under communism, when to use modern language, the privileges of the wealthy no longer ensured that their ideologies dominated the culture. They admired Stalin’s Soviet Union, even though it was cancelling writers in the most thorough manner imaginable by killing them.

Professional associations are amoral. I mean that as a compliment. Their officers defend members regardless of what they think of them. Officers at a writers’ organisation do not have to agree with the ideas of a novelist or think that a novelist is any good. They have a duty to defend freedom of expression and to combat rapacious publishers, just as trade unionists have a duty to stand up to the bosses on a worker’s behalf, regardless of whether they privately believe the worker is a shirker.

In moments of cultural revolution that commitment to a basic level of solidarity feels thin. Surely, there must be more to the job of leading a trade association or cultural organisation than defending the rights of the men and women you represent.

In these heady circumstances the job turns into a mission to fight racism, misogyny, transphobia, just as it was once a mission to defend communism and fight the bourgeoisie. That the intellectuals of the 1940s were overwhelmingly bourgeois no more matters than the fact that the men and women at the top of the arts are overwhelmingly white (and indeed bourgeois). Guilt drives them on, as does the fear that their advantages make them easy targets if they fail to display the required fervour.

The transition from professional organisations defending all members to only defending right-thinking ones is already underway, and I expect it to accelerate as the cultural revolution gains momentum.

Just before she resigned in 2021, I interviewed Kathleen Stock. I could hear the fear and the exhaustion in the philosophy professor’s voice. She was a gender-critical feminist, and her belief in the material reality of biological sex made her a target for vicious trolls. The abuse did not stay online. Her enemies protested on the Sussex University campus, near her office, saying her ideas endangered trans people. Posters on campus demanded her dismissal.

The police had advised Stock to install CCTV at her home. Security guards protected her. But far from defending her, or making a wider case about the need to uphold the academic freedom to argue and think, the University and College Union’s Sussex chapter said, ‘In light of recent events on campus and ensuing public response on social media, we extend our solidarity to all trans and non-binary members of our community who, now more than ever, should receive the unequivocal support of the university and its management.’

The union ‘has just effectively ended my career,’ Stock said, and resigned.

‘The right looks for converts, and the left looks for traitors,’ goes the old political wisdom. The Conservative government sensed a division on the left it could exploit. It duly awarded the radical, lesbian feminist an OBE. But no other philosophy faculty employed her. She was too dangerous to touch. As far as her career as an academic philosopher was concerned, Stock was on a blacklist.

In an echo of the PEN meeting from the 1940s, the Society of Authors recently voted down an attempt to criticise its chair. She was accused of not defending JK Rowling after her support for gender critical feminism earned her thousands of death and rape threats on Twitter. Nor had she stood up for Kate Clanchy, who was reviled for tiny linguistic faults in her book Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me (which won the Orwell Prize, incidentally). Her former students did not believe for a moment that she was racist. Why would Clanchy teach the children of asylum seekers if she were? Her critics called her a ‘colonialist’ for describing the ‘almond eyes’ of one pupil. Shukria Rezaei, the pupil in question, wrote in the Times that she did indeed have almond-shaped eyers and ‘Kate helped me find scholarships and helped me with my university applications. I owe all of it to Kate, and I am sure she has done the same for many of her students. I feel very privileged to have met her.’

No matter. Clanchy’s publishers dropped her and blacklisted her too.

The state is not censoring. The climate of opinion in the arts and academia is imposing a censorship of its own, and it is no less effective for that.

The position of our jobbing hack in the arts or academia no longer seems perverse. Ideally, she ought to defend free expression. But she can look around and see what happens to those who do. If she speaks up, she suspects that charges of guilt by association will endanger her chances of putting bread on the table. Milton and Orwell have become treacherous guides in the culture wars of the 2020s.

Last week James Marriott of the Times warned how a ‘motivated minority with strong opinions can easily override the preferences of the majority of people, especially if those preferences are only mildly held’. He did not realise that all ideas for change begin among small groups of people. John Milton was fighting the Presbyterians in Parliament, who wanted to reintroduce censorship after it collapsed during the English civil war. They were convinced they had the right to impose their views because they were the elect, God’s chosen. The Leninist-influenced leftists George Orwell fought saw themselves as an elect too, the vanguard of the working class who needed dictatorial power to bring a better world.

They were authoritarians. But democratic reformers seeking change by creating a new consensus also begin as minorities, who believe they know better than everyone else.

Maybe we will look back on the Terf wars of the early 2020s and conclude that gender-critical feminism was just bigotry. Or we may look back and see one of the great medical scandals of our lifetime. No one knows. Equally, it may be that the hounding of writers for minor linguistic slips heralds a better world where new, diverse voices finally receive the cultural prominence they deserve.

But here the concessions must stop. No one knowing how the trans debate will end is the best reason imaginable for allowing it to rage freely. And what is the point of having new voices if they are not allowed to say what they think?

In any case, institutions are not censoring because they are true believers but because they are frightened. But when idealism fails to inspire your supporters, fear works just as well. Outsiders will fail to understand the convulsions in progressive institutions if they fail to notice the atmosphere of barely suppressed panic. Kathleen Stock’s colleagues in the Sussex philosophy department did not dare come to her defence. True Picador’s publishing director, Philip Gwyn Jones, told the Daily Telegraph he regretted not being braver in his defence of Clanchy. His words triggered such an internal backlash at the publisher that he was forced to apologise. Like a character from The Crucible, he promised that in future he would ‘use my privileged position as a white middle-class gatekeeper with more awareness.’

A little fear goes a long way. And cultural fear is dangerously stultifying. Artists and academics cannot challenge a consensus if they fear they will lose their incomes.

George Orwell left the PEN meeting worrying about the intellectual consequences. ‘At present we know only that the imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity,’ he wrote.  You need only inspect the cages of today’s cultural zoo to know he was right.

Sex deniers are the new flat earthers | Nathan Williams

Pseudoscience has become a serious problem. From Covid conspiracy theories to climate change denialists, the spread of scientific misinformation threatens our health and the health of our planet.

thecritic.co.uk

Pseudoscience has become a serious problem. From Covid conspiracy theories to climate change denialists, the spread of scientific misinformation threatens our health and the health of our planet. Now there’s a new pseudoscience as bogus as flat-earthism or creationism. But this time there’s something different: those who you might expect to fight against pseudoscience are turning a blind-eye — or in some cases spreading it. This is the phenomenon of sex denial: the rejection of one of the most basic facts of biology in the name of ideology.

I’ve spent much of my career fighting against pseudoscience. I worked with the legendary sceptic James Randi to debunk homeopathy; I’ve also battled climate denialists and anti-vaxxers. I know pseudoscience when I see it. Sex-denial is a classic of the genre, using all the same techniques to sow confusion and misinformation. Their target is the seemingly uncontroversial, indeed obvious, fact that humans can be female or male.

Here’s what the science says: there are only two human sexes. That’s because there are only two types of gamete (the sex cells — egg and sperm). Humans (like all mammals) can develop along one of two pathways: towards making eggs (female) and towards making sperm (male). If anyone ever finds a third sex it would be a discovery on a par with finding a new continent — with a guaranteed Nobel prize. Until you see those headlines, you can rest assured there are exactly two sexes.

A small number of people have disorders or variations in their sex development (VSDs) meaning some aspect of their anatomy or genetic makeup may be atypical. But most people with VSDs are still clearly and unambiguously male or female. Indeed, most would consider it offensive to say that just because some part of your body is atypical that you are less of a male or less of a female. In a tiny subset it can be difficult to distinguish whether someone is male or female — sometimes called intersex conditions — but these likely account for less than 0.02 per cent of births. So, the overwhelming majority of people are unequivocally female or male, with their sex fixed from before they’re born to the moment they die. None of this is remotely new or controversial (at least in science).

Biological sex exists and it matters — most obviously because the existence of the human race depends on it. You can’t make a human baby without a male and a female — yet the sex-denialists hardly ever mention reproduction. Which is odd since that’s precisely why sex exists. Sex also matters for a host of other reasons. It influences your height, weight, strength and lifespan. It determines your likelihood of getting breast cancer or testicular cancer, heart attacks, mental illness, even your chance of dying from Covid-19. Denying sex is dangerous as well as disingenuous.

So what exactly do the sex-denialists claim? Like climate-deniers or flat-earthers, there’s no single alternative theory — rather a hodge-podge of different claims designed to confuse the public and push an ideological agenda. At the most extreme there are those who flat out deny the reality of sex. “It is not correct that there is such thing as biological sex”, says Prof Nicholas Matte at the University of Toronto. Dawn Butler, a British MP and the Labour Party’s Shadow Minister for Women and Equalities, said on national television: “A child is born without sex.” What is so extraordinary about this claim is that it is so obviously untrue. At least the flat-earthers have some degree of everyday experience on their side: it’s easy to forget we’re on a spinning ball of rock. But to deny something that everyone knows and experiences every day is bizarre — and of course not supported by any science.

Another approach is to accept that the sexes exist but imply they’re a human invention, like faiths or football teams. For instance, Chase Strangio of the ACLU says, “The notion of “biological sex” was developed for the exclusive purpose of being weaponised against people.” This is a classic pseudoscience confidence trick. Of course it’s true that all scientific concepts are in one sense human creations. Mammals, atoms, temperature and earthquakes are all concepts created by scientists. However, those concepts are useful precisely because they describe real aspects of the physical world. Surely no one would claim that these exist purely in our minds. Similarly, the reality of biological sex is a fundamental fact about all mammals that existed long before humans did — just as gravity existed long before Newton.

A third approach is to accept that sex exists but claim it’s so complicated that you really shouldn’t bother your pretty little head about it. A recent article in The Skeptic took this approach — drawing an analogy between the concept of sex and the concept of species. It’s true that there are cases where the borderline between species can get fuzzy — for instance hybrid polar and grizzly bears can exist with the delightful name of pizzly bears. But such rare cases don’t invalidate the concept of species — indeed biology would be impossible without it. The overwhelming majority of vertebrate animals are members of a single species — just as most humans are members of a single sex.

Whereas most popular science articles are trying to take a complex subject and make it seem simple, articles like these strive to take a simple concept and make it seem complex. The evidence is clear in one of the most unusual corrections I’ve ever seen. “This article was updated as it previously omitted a reference to primary sexual characteristics.” That’s right — an article all about the reality of biological sex “forgot” to mention the primary sexual characteristics. This is deliberate scientific obfuscation.

So why would anyone want to deny something as important and obvious as sex? Perhaps it is the misguided belief that obscuring the reality of sex will help trans people. It is of course important to distinguish between sex and gender or gender identity (someone’s internal sense of who they are and the social roles they fulfil). There are people whose biological sex and gender identity do not match: trans people. I believe people should be free to self-identify as whatever gender they wish. However, one can no more self-identify one’s sex than you can self-identify your height.

This needn’t be a problem — we can celebrate that there are people who want to break out of the traditional roles and social expectations associated with their sex. But the new ideology says that a trans person doesn’t merely change their gender, they change their sex — even if they’ve had no surgery or hormone treatment. This means believing that someone can have a body identical to that of a typical male and yet in fact be female purely through the act of identifying as such. The only way to make that falsehood true is to demolish the very notion of biological sex.

Without the truth on their side, the sex denialists’ only option is to shut down discussion. Anyone who dares question the ideology faces insults, abuse and even violence. It’s an approach that has proven highly successful. Despite this being an issue of great public interest, very few scientists or science journalists have made any attempt to communicate what the science says. When I approached the Science Media Centre, which prides itself on being able to find scientists to talk on even the most controversial subjects, they said they were unable to provide a single expert. Places that once championed rationality and evidence like the Freethought Blog now explicitly ban those who dare present views on the existence of biological sex that they consider heretical.

When a biologist tweeted that stating biological facts is not bigotry, she was attacked by the very body you might expect to support her — The Royal Society of Biology — which labelled her comments as “transphobia”. Perhaps there was some detail of the science she got wrong — in which case you would expect this learned society to point out the error. But despite numerous attempts to find out what was incorrect about her statements, they have refused to answer. Even at its most censorious — the Catholic Church would tell blasphemers what their crime was. The modern witch-burners won’t even do that — they will rarely even discuss their claims with anyone who does not already share their beliefs.

Even one of the world’s best-known biologists isn’t safe. Prof. Richard Dawkins recently tweeted to ask whether there was a difference between self-identifying your race and self-identifying your sex/gender. This was the final straw for the American Humanist Association which duly stripped him of a 25-year-old lifetime award — something they’d only done once before when a recipient was accused of serious sexual harassment. Humanism is supposed to stand for rationality and freedom of thought, but for the AHA it seems heresy is still a crime punishable by excommunication. These are far from isolated examples. Many academics, particularly women, have faced threats and harassment merely for daring to talk about biological sex. There is no clearer demonstration that sex denialists are charlatans; their only weapons are creating fear and confusion. It’s time the rest of us stood up to them.

The new Inquisition must never win

There is more at stake in the case of Batley Grammar than the fate of one teacher

unherd.com|Andrew Doyle

Picture the scene: an idyllic summer landscape populated by those much-loved icons of goodwill, the Care Bears. These instantly recognisable figures, fluffy and colourful and surrounded by butterflies and tiny floating hearts, are indulging in a rare bout of mischief.

One is smashing up a laptop with a hobnailed club. One is dangling on a swing between two freshly hanged corpses. Another is idly reclining on a bed of skulls, while a pair are greeting each other by shaking the hands of two amputated arms. Nearby, one of their friends is having sex with a decapitated head. All are grinning in that cute little Care Bear way.

The Care Bears Movie was one of the first films I ever saw at the cinema, so you can imagine how traumatic it is for me to contemplate my childhood heroes engaged in such wanton depravity. Still, the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo isn’t known for going easy on its targets, and if I’m offended by their Care Bears cartoon I can always choose not to subscribe.

This particular image appeared in an issue last September, and was satirising the practitioners of what has become known as “cancel culture”. The censors of our time, the artist reminded us, are acting au nom du “bien”. People are harassed and threatened, livelihoods and reputations obliterated, and all by those who believe themselves to be allied with the angels. Their language is that of “inclusivity” and “compassion”, even though their ruthlessness and intolerance betray the insincerity of their stated goals — or, at the very least, the way in which self-righteousness can blind people to the evil they commit in the name of a noble cause.

The furore at Batley Grammar School in West Yorkshire is the most recent example of how the lexicon of “social justice” has been weaponised in the name of progress. A teacher who had shown a caricature of the Prophet Mohammed — either from Charlie Hebdo or the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten (reports differ) — has been suspended for causing offence, and has now gone into hiding. Protesters outside the school have stated that they will not disperse until he is sacked.

Given that blasphemy laws no longer exist in the UK, these protestors have largely couched their complaints in terms of “safety and wellbeing”. On Friday, a man arrogantly claiming to speak on behalf of “the Muslim community” read out a statement in which the school authorities were accused of failing in their “duty of safeguarding”, and the teacher himself was charged with “threatening and provocative” behaviour. The Muslim Council of Britain has deployed similar tactics, suggesting that the teacher “created a hostile atmosphere”.

As much as I prefer to take people at their word, it seems unlikely to me that the protestors or the MCB seriously believe that the children’s safety has been compromised by a Religious Studies lesson about free speech. Certainly the pupils don’t appear to agree with those who are speaking on their behalf, which is why some of them have created an online petition to have their teacher reinstated.

What’s striking, though, is that despite all their talk of “safeguarding”, the protestors seem to be oblivious to a far more dangerous trend: that as a result of the various Islamist terrorist attacks in France in recent years — from the massacre at the Charlie Hebdo offices in January 2015 to the beheading of schoolteacher Samuel Paty last October — the right to criticise and ridicule religion has been increasingly under threat.

It isn’t simply the prospect of violent retaliation; it is the climate of intimidation that is fomented by the kind of protests we have seen in recent days. Cancel culture is sustained predominately by self-censorship, by those who see the consequences to others when they step out of line. After the events at Batley Grammar, how many teachers are likely to include the Charlie Hebdo cartoons in their lessons now?

Yet there has never been a more pressing time to engage with these issues in the classroom. If I were a teacher of Religious Studies, I would find it difficult to justify ignoring the question of the perceived conflict between religious faith and free speech, or not to discuss the murders of Samuel Paty and the satirists of Charlie Hebdo. While there is nothing wrong with acknowledging the potential offence that depictions of the Prophet Mohammed might cause, it is not a sufficient reason to avoid the topic altogether. I am sure that many pupils are disturbed by the anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda cartoons that are routinely included in history textbooks, but they serve an important function in the learning process. We know very little about the context in which the images of Mohammed were shown at Batley Grammar, but it is implausible that the teacher’s motives were anything other than educational.

Still, the protest itself is not all that surprising. As someone who attended a convent school as a child, I am all too aware that religious conservatives are often displeased at the contents of school curricula. When I became a teacher, there were often complaints from parents who disapproved of certain books or plays, either on grounds of religious belief or sheer prudishness. Angela Carter’s novel Wise Children was a particular bugbear for some parents, although at no point was the possibility of substituting texts or withdrawing pupils from class ever entertained. They had a right to be offended, but their offence was their own problem. I even taught briefly at a school run by an evangelical Christian who attempted to prohibit the teaching of novels that featured gay characters. It’s the reason I resigned from my post.

Teachers cannot be in the business of tailoring their pedagogic practices in order to appease the most intolerant elements of society. Nor should we be indulging those who feel that their particular worldview should be imposed on society at large. That is why there is more at stake in the case of Batley Grammar than the fate of this one teacher. With the immense publicity this event has generated, the outcome — whatever it is — will no doubt set an important precedent. If the school continues to capitulate to the demands of protesters, it will have a chilling effect on teachers in other schools who might wish to explore tendentious subjects.

But in the coming days, that won’t prevent the usual politicians, commentators and activists from emerging from their dens in Care-a-Lot, thirsting for the blood they can smell in the air. They will be saying things like “freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences”, and other mantras that act as surrogates for thought. They will assert that the teacher is “Islamophobic” and “hateful”, because they are invariably convinced of their own telepathic capabilities. They will accuse the teacher of “bullying” as they sidle up to theocrats calling for his ruination.

Already the protestors have demanded that he face criminal prosecution for “stirring up hatred”, a favoured formulation of today’s “progressives”. Cancel culture is the Inquisition of the digital age; it is how blasphemers are subdued, whether religious or secular. We mustn’t let the Care Bears win.

Why I Keep Getting Mistaken for a Conservative

I’m a lifelong liberal, but my team now thinks I’m the enemy.

www.nationalreview.com

One of my longtime survival strategies as a career freelance writer is a policy of saying yes to everything. This includes paid work, of course, but it also includes lunch invitations, since the only thing I love more than writing is eating. (These are also, incidentally, the only two things in the world that I am any good at.) My policy goes like this: If you invite me to lunch, I will come. Embedded in my policy is a second, equally important policy of asking no further questions about the purpose of the lunch, lest I accidentally trigger a series of events leading to the withdrawal of the invitation, which would be tragic.

This is how I came to be sitting across the table from National Review editor Rich Lowry at one of the nicer restaurants on Main Street in a small town in New England on a sunny afternoon in May. In keeping with my policy, I hadn’t asked what I was doing there — but he also hadn’t told me, and after nearly an hour, it was starting to get weird. The food was eaten, the plates were cleared, and we had covered all the obvious topics: our shared interest in writing fiction, our families, our respective trajectories out of New York City and into the suburbs. And then, finally, the penny dropped.

“I was hoping to talk to you about writing for National Review,” Rich said, apologetically. “But apparently you’re . . . a liberal?”

This was not the first time this had happened to me. The first and best (or perhaps worst) time someone mistook me for a conservative, I was interviewing live with a gravelly-voiced drive-time radio host whom I hadn’t bothered to google and who had evidently been similarly lax about googling me.

“How about these libs,” he said, conspiratorially. (The noise I made in response was somewhere between “nervous laugh” and “strangled cat.”)

It happened at the Edgar Awards, where I was a Best Novel nominee for my 2021 thriller, No One Will Miss Her. A fellow attendee smiled and said, “It’s just so great that a conservative like you was nominated,” prompting my husband to snort so violently that he nearly choked on his beer.

And of course, it happens online — and particularly in the darker corners of what is known as “bluecheck Twitter,” where those who mistake me for a member of the political Right are not conservatives but fellow lefties, writers and lawyers and academics. There, the allegations of conservatism aren’t a fun case of mistaken identity; there, they’re delivered with an accusatory snarl.

To explain why people keep mistaking me for a conservative, I need to first explain what kind of liberal I am and always have been: the free-speech and bleeding-heart variety. As a kid born in the early 1980s — now a Millennial in early middle age — I understood conservatives through the lens of the culture wars long before I knew anything about politics, which is to say (with apologies to my audience) that I saw them as the uptight control freaks trying to ruin everyone’s good time.

Ah, yes, conservatives: the ones who wanted to ban, scold, and censor all the fun out of everything. They were humorless, heartless, joyless, sexless — except for their bizarre obsession with policing what kind of sex everyone else was having in the privacy of his own home. Conservatism was Rudy Giuliani trying to shut down an art exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum on the grounds that it was “sick stuff.” It was Dan Quayle giving a campaign speech that condemned Murphy Brown, a fictional character, for having a fictional baby out of wedlock. It was some lemon-faced chaperone patrolling the dance floor at homecoming to make sure nobody’s hands were migrating buttward. It was my eighth-grade homeroom teacher, Mrs. Teitelbaum, calling my parents at home to report that she’d seen me doodling “satyric symbols” in the margins of my notebook.

“Satyric?” my mother said, her brow furrowed with confusion. “Like, half man, half goat?”

There was a long pause, a series of faint squawks from the other end of the phone. “Oh, you mean satanic,” she said, and put Mrs. Teitelbaum on hold so that she could shriek with laughter.

Here I will acknowledge that it was a different time; the “satanic panic” (a frenzy I now understand to have been as much a product of breathless corporate media coverage and the hubris of certain medical professionals as it was of the religious Right) was only barely behind us. Teen-pregnancy rates were skyrocketing; half of all marriages ended in divorce; violent video games were transforming the entertainment landscape and stoking fears of copycat crimes. If conservatives were anxious about the culture and their place in it, they certainly had their reasons. But to me, a teenager, their anxieties seemed ridiculous, and meddlesome, rooted in a wholly inappropriate yearning to control what was going on in other people’s bodies, bedrooms, and minds.

Of course, ridiculous and meddlesome are not the same as evil — and here, even early on, I diverged from the more strident members of my own political tribe. I had friends who didn’t share my politics, whose existence made it impossible to write off all conservatives as stupid and evil; these people, whom I loved, were clearly neither. I also had friends who did share my politics but whose existence was nevertheless a valuable cautionary tale about what a self-sabotaging trap it was to make “The personal is political” not just a rallying cry in specific moments, for specific movements, but a whole-life philosophy.

So, yes, I was a liberal. I just wasn’t the type of liberal for whom other people’s politics were a deal-breaker or even necessarily all that interesting. When in 2006 I met the man who would become my husband, the fact that he’d voted for George W. Bush was less concerning to me than another affiliation, infinitely more horrifying and far less defensible: He was a Red Sox fan.

In hindsight, the breakdown of the liberal–conservative, Left–Right binary happened like the famous quote from Hemingway about bankruptcy: gradually, then suddenly. By the time Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, the culture wars that animated my young adulthood had been roundly won by the Left.

Britney Spears, once the poster child for conservative purity politics and virginity pledges, had engaged in a three-way lesbian kiss on stage at the MTV Video Music Awards, gotten married and divorced twice over, and was fading into obscurity on the back side of a highly publicized nervous breakdown. The few conservatives still in the fight — over violent video games, high-school sex education, or the worrisome sexual proclivities of people on TV — seemed ridiculous as well as ancient, on the verge of obsolescence, like animatronic characters at Disney World still mouthing their lines from the 1980s through a decades-old patina of rust and grime. When Rush Limbaugh went on a three-day rant over the Affordable Care Act’s birth-control mandate, shouting about the “slut” who “wants to be paid to have sex,” it was less outrageous than pathetic, a front-lines dispatch from a battle long since lost.

From my vantage point — I was by now working as an entertainment journalist at MTV News — this massive cultural shift was best observed alongside the rise of a remarkable new age of television. Creators were reimagining storytelling on the small screen, while redefining the limits of what was considered appropriate to beam into the average American living room on a Sunday night. A show such as Breaking Bad, which debuted in 2008, not only reflected the evolving culture but also revealed from the first just how much had already changed. Here was a story that, had it been released just ten years before, would have surely raised conservative hackles for its violence, its glorification of drugs and crime, its foul language up to and including one uncensored use of the f-bomb per season. (The f-bomb! On basic cable!)

But when Breaking Bad came under fire for being a poor moral influence as it neared the end of its five-year run, it wasn’t because of foul language or graphic violence. The outrage was about toxic masculinity, male privilege, and “mediocre white men.” It was about the misogyny directed at Walter White’s long-suffering wife, Skyler, a topic on which actress Anna Gunn penned a New York Times op-ed in which she concluded that the venomous reactions to her character were symptomatic of a culture still permeated by deep-seated sexism: “Because Skyler didn’t conform to a comfortable ideal of the archetypical female, she had become a kind of Rorschach test for society, a measure of our attitudes toward gender.” It was about the show’s being too white, except for its villains. This was also — to use a buzzword — problematic.

The trajectory of cultural juggernauts such as Breaking Bad was an illustration of the gradual. The sudden, on the other hand, was a series of jolts. There was one in 2015, when the horrific massacre of Charlie Hebdo staffers was met with suggestions from left-wing journalists that perhaps the violence was not undeserved, given the magazine’s penchant for “punching down.” There was another in 2017, when folks swept up by the momentum of the #MeToo movement suddenly began to argue that due process was not just overrated but wholly unnecessary. There was the 2020 Covid-era meltdown over “misinformation,” culminating in the bizarre spectacle of a bunch of free-speech, free-love, Woodstock-era hippies demanding the censorship of podcaster Joe Rogan, one of the country’s most successful self-made content creators.

And the new moral authoritarians, the ones bizarrely preoccupied with the proclivities of fictional characters, the ones clamoring to get their grubby hands on the censor’s pen? They weren’t conservatives — or at least not the kind I’d grown up with. This scolding, shaming, and censoring was coming from inside the house.

This is a theory I’ve had for some time, but it crystallized in the writing of this piece: In our current era, politics no longer have anything to do with policy. Nor are they about principles, or values, or a vision for the future of the country. They’re about tribalism, and aesthetics, and vibes. They’re about lockstep solidarity with your chosen team, to which you must demonstrate your loyalty through fierce and unwavering conformity. And most of all, they’re about hating the right people.

Politics in 2022 are defined not by whom you vote for, but by whom you wish to harm.

Consider this representative moment from the Covidian culture wars, the aforementioned weeks-long controversy that began when musician Neil Young attempted to muscle Joe Rogan off the Spotify streaming service. Rogan, a one-time reality-television personality whose podcast was bought in 2020 by Spotify in a $200 million deal, had sparked backlash for interviewing guests who made skeptical comments about the Covid vaccine. Young blasted Rogan for “spreading fake information about vaccines” and issued an ultimatum. Spotify, he said, could have “Rogan or Young. Not both.”

Spotify took Young at his word — his music was removed from the service within weeks — but the controversy, fueled by intense politicization of all things Covid-related, had ballooned by then into something bigger. Mainstream-media commentators argued in earnest that Rogan must be censored in the name of public health; Spotify quietly disappeared some episodes of the Joe Rogan Experience from its back catalogue while appending warnings to others; even the Biden White House weighed in, with then–press secretary Jen Psaki saying, “This disclaimer, it’s a positive step, but we want every platform to be doing more to be calling out mis- and disinformation, while also uplifting accurate information.”

Amid the kerfuffle over Rogan — which had begun to take the shape of a proxy war over independent media and free speech in times of national emergency — a list began to circulate online of all the guests Rogan had ever hosted, divided by perceived political affiliation. This list, created by journalist Matthew Sheffield of the Young Turks, attempted to undercut notions of Rogan as an equal-opportunity information-seeker by asserting that he “overwhelmingly” favored “right-wingers” as guests. Entries in Sheffield’s “right-wing” column outnumbered those in the left column by nearly four to one. But as multiple commenters (including me) began to note, a plurality of these so-called right-wingers were proponents of drug legalization, same-sex marriage, gun control, and other progressive policies. Many if not most were not just Biden supporters but longtime Democratic voters, dating back 20 years or more. One of them, Tulsi Gabbard, had been a vice chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee and then a Dem presidential hopeful in 2020. (This was before Gabbard’s recent announcement that she was leaving the Democratic Party, calling it an “elitist cabal.”)

In addition to their longtime progressive politics, many of these curiously categorized “right-wingers” had one other thing in common: In recent years, they had been critical of the Left for its censorial, carceral, and otherwise authoritarian tendencies.

As Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown noted, “the whole thing makes no sense — except as an exercise in labeling anyone out of step with progressive orthodoxy in any way at all as a right-winger.”

But of course this exercise is increasingly the preferred — and perhaps only — means for sorting people into various political boxes. And on that front, the whole thing makes perfect sense: This with-us-or-against-us ethos is how I, a woman who has voted Democrat straight down the ticket in every election for the past 20 years, found myself suddenly accused of apostasy by the Left at the same time that I began receiving invitations from right-wingers to appear on Gutfeld!

I said yes to those invitations, too, of course. I even had a good time!

But this is why conservatives so often mistake me for one of their own: not because I argue for right-wing policies or from a right-wing perspective, but because progressives are often extremely, publicly mad at me for refusing to parrot the latest catechism and for criticizing the progressive dogmas that either violate my principles or make no sense. I look like a friend of the Right only because the Left wants to make me their enemy — and because I can’t bring myself to do the requisite dance, or make the requisite apologies, that might get me back in the Left’s good graces.

On that front, I am not alone. There’s a loose but growing coalition of lefties out there, artists and writers and academics and professionals, who’ve drawn sympathetic attention from conservatives after being publicly shamed out of the progressive clubhouse (that is, by the type of progressive who thinks there is a clubhouse, which is of course part of the problem). It’s remarkably easy these days to be named an apostate on the left. Maybe you were critical of the looting and rioting that devastated cities in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by police in 2020. Maybe you were skeptical of this or that viral outrage: Covington Catholic, or Jussie Smollett, or the alleged racial abuse at a BYU volleyball game that neither eyewitness testimony nor video evidence could corroborate. Maybe you were too loud about the continued need for due process in the middle of #MeToo. Maybe you wouldn’t stop asking uncomfortable questions about the proven value of certain divisive brands of diversity training, or transgender surgeries for kids, or — come the pandemic — masking. Maybe you kept defending the right to free speech and creative expression after these things had been deemed “right-wing values” by your fellow liberals.

This is a fraught moment for those of us who aren’t reflexive team players, who struggle with reading the room, who remain committed to certain values on principle even when they’ve become politically inexpedient. The present climate leaves virtually no room for a person to dissent and yet remain in good standing. Attorney Lara Bazelon — whose commitment to due-process protections in Title IX cases puts her not just at odds with her left-wing peers but also, in a shocking turn, on the same side as the Trump administration — described the challenges of heterodoxy on an episode of Glenn Loury’s podcast in October 2022. “I have a tribe and they have a position, and I don’t agree with it,” Bazelon said, looking bewildered. “Why is it so poisonous and toxic and canceling-inducing to be able to say that basic thing?”

It’s also important to note that this isn’t happening only on the left. Many conservatives told me as much themselves, with a familiar mix of frustration and incredulity.

But admittedly, as recently as a few weeks ago, I still thought that the left-wing manifestation was something else, something worse. It was in the toxic high school–ness of it all, the way that people gleefully coalesced around a new target each day, as if their confidence in their own righteousness relied on the perpetual presence of a scapegoat to kick. The intolerance seemed particularly intense among the type of highly educated liberals who dominate the media sphere, who police the boundaries of their extremely online in-group with the same terrifying energy as the most Machiavellian high-school mean girl. When various polls were released in the aftermath of the 2016 election as to the willingness of various American voters to date across party lines, it did not surprise me at all to learn that liberals were far more likely to say they wouldn’t.

After hearing stories from conservatives who have been shunned, shamed, and estranged from loved ones over their lack of support for Donald Trump, I no longer imagine that this brutal breed of politics is unique to progressives. I think it just seems worse to me because the Left has always been my home — and a home where (as those ubiquitous, insufferable lawn signs say) we believed certain things, and behaved in certain ways. We were not censors. We were not scolds. We were not in the business of trying to shut down artists or meddle in people’s sex lives or deny health care to people whose lifestyle choices we disliked. That sort of vicious sanctimony, the boot-stamping-on-a-human-face-forever sense of self-righteousness, was what the Left stood as a bulwark against . . . until it didn’t.

On this front, the erosion of free speech in the creative and intellectual spaces that belong to the Left feels like a particular loss. It’s devastating to see the worlds of journalism, academia, publishing, and comedy all in such thrall to (or fear of) a culture that sees creative work as activism first and art second, a culture that demands conformity to progressive pieties and is always on the hunt for heretics. It’s also alarming to realize that virtually all of America’s cultural products are now being made in environments where admitting that you voted for Trump — a democratically elected president who was supported by roughly half the country — would be not just unusual but akin to professional suicide.

This sort of homogeneity is bad for art, and it’s also not good for people, for building community, for coexisting peacefully in a society sustained by social trust. And it’s not lost on me that expressing these thoughts publicly, especially in the pages of National Review, will no doubt prompt a fresh round of allegations that I’m some kind of faker, a double agent, a wolf in sheep’s clothing. This, too, is part of the way we do politics now: Even if something is true, we’re told, you shouldn’t say it lest it provide ammunition to the other side.

Within the past five years, this toxic variation of the no-true-Scotsman fallacy has become pervasive. In the span of just 20 years, we’ve gone from “The truth has a liberal bias” to “The truth is a right-wing talking point.” People who question the orthodoxy are no longer seen as gadflies but as traitors, and they’re summarily ejected from the club by some self-appointed arbiter of Who Is And Is Not Liberal. Commentator Bill Maher was the subject of one such defenestration this spring: “He prides himself on just asking questions (a lot of which sound suspiciously like GOP talking points),” wrote Molly Jong-Fast in an Atlantic article with the not-so-subtle title “Bill Maher Isn’t a Liberal Anymore.”

Maher’s suspiciously Republican-sounding questions in this case centered on whether the explosion of the number of people under 25 who identify as LGBT+ could be explained in part by social contagion, a psychological phenomenon that has lately been explored by such hateful right-wing outfits as Reuters, the New York Times, and (wait for it) the Atlantic. But Maher was guilty of broaching an uncomfortable truth too early — which is to say, before the powers that be stepped in to declare that Now It Can Be Said.

The title of this essay is “Why I Keep Getting Mistaken for a Conservative,” and it’s not lost on me that it would be an excellent setup for a tidily dramatic ending in which I suddenly realize that wait, no, the mistake was mine, and finally I see that I’ve been a conservative all along. But despite the occasional flirtation (or lunch) with members of the center-Right, and despite the lucrative career potential of a right-wing pivot, I shan’t be coming out of the closet or putting on a “Team GOP” jersey today. I still believe in liberal principles such as free speech, high social trust, and a government that provides a robust safety net for people in need while leaving the rest of us to live and let live. I support same-sex marriage, universal health care, police and prison reform, and an end to the destructive and foolhardy wars on drugs and terror — and while we’re abolishing things, I wouldn’t mind getting rid of the sex-offender registry and capital punishment, too. Like most people, I’ve seen some of my policy preferences evolve over the years (living through Covid has given me some pause about socialized medicine, for instance), but my values remain the same.

On the other hand, those values also still include sitting down for lunch and conversation with anyone who asks — not just because I love eating (although, man, do I love eating), but because I like people and find them interesting, even when we come from different worlds, or perhaps especially then. To be clear, I don’t think this makes me special; if anything, it makes me normal. Those of us who live in political bubbles, who work in political fields, who spend all day online obsessively refreshing Twitter and consuming news straight from the hose — we’re the weird ones, and it behooves us to remember how weird we are, irrespective of which side we’re on. Outside of my professional sphere, I could probably guess with 85 percent accuracy how any one of my friends voted, but I also wouldn’t do this, because it’s not the most important thing. Really, it’s not even in the top ten.

And within that sphere, where political affiliation resembles a team sport, a religious faith, and a recreational witch hunt, I remain more interested in watching the game than playing it. The work I love best is about analysis, not prescription; it’s about trying to understand what is and why, not what ought to be. And yes, granted, when talking about what the progressive Left is up to, sometimes I feel as if I’m standing inside a crumbling building that used to be my home, narrating the slow collapse of the walls as they rot and buckle around me. There’s also a sense that when the house is rebuilt, it might be elsewhere, on different foundations, so that all of us “suspicious” question-asking types are left standing outside.

But the way things are going, the folks who’ve been pushed out of the club will soon vastly outnumber those still in it. And if words such as “liberal” and “conservative” and “left” and “right” are increasingly meaningless tribal signifiers rather than statements of policy or principle, if all they convey is who you’re against rather than what you stand for, then maybe it’s in our best interest not to keep clinging to them. What are we without these labels? A tribe of the tribeless, unaffiliated and unfettered, with no choice but to get to know one another as individuals. This doesn’t sound so bad. Let’s have lunch.

Politics in 2022 are defined not by whom you vote for, but by whom you wish to harm.

Accountable means obligated to explain, justify, and take responsibility for one's actions, and to answer to someone, such as a person with more authority.

The state of being accountable is accountability.

“It must be very hard to be a man of a certain age who’s been able to say whatever he likes for years, and now suddenly there’s some accountability,” Norton said after naming Cleese. “It’s free speech, but not consequence-free.”