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Showing posts with label Graham Linehan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Graham Linehan. Show all posts
Jim Duffy ✍ The media should stop interviewing and covering Graham Linehan. 

The issue is Not his views. I may profoundly disagree with most of his views, but I will defend his right to express them in a free society. The issue is that in his interviews he is increasingly coming across as unhinged, not rational, and showing signs of serious mental health issues. That can happen to campaigners on all sides of debates. People believe in causes so absolutely, and encounter such hostility that they become quite disturbed, irrational and show signs of a mental health crisis.

The media in the past would avoid covering some people here they showed increasing evidence of psychological disturbance, or alcoholism, or something that meant they lacked normal self-control - and were often not able to handle media exposure.
 
British politician Lord George-Brown, one-time British Foreign Secretary, was an extreme alcoholic. The media increasingly did not cover him as he was often not in control, unaware of what he was saying, and often could not cope with the pressures of coverage. Editors chose not to exploit a sick man for headlines.
 
The media struggled in knowing how cover Lib-Dem leader Charles Kennedy. Kennedy was brilliant, but a raging alcoholic. They did not know how to cover someone who was simultaneously leader of a party and in a dangerous state mentally and physically due to his alcoholism.
 
In Ireland, journalists struggled with covering Noel Browne in his latter years, as his worst characteristics (paranoia, a determination to get revenge, the breakdown in coverage) overwhelmed his many best characteristics. In 1990, furious that Labour had picked Mary Robinson and not him to become its presidential candidate, he began a vitriolic campaign against Robinson in press releases and letters to the editor. Much of what his said was provably untrue and heavily defamatory so could not be published. Journalists decided not to cover his behaviour at all - concluding rightly that he was not mentally well and covering it could make his situation worse.
 
I can think of a prominent journalist turned right wing campaigner who increasingly demonstrated serious mental health issues - so much so that their own family pleaded with them to get treatment. The media stopped covering that person. They were not being censored for the their views, as others with those views were being covered. It was that pretty much everyone realised that individual was not mentally OK, and needed psychological help, not press exposure.
 
I have listened to a few of Graham's interviews. I disagreed with much of what he said, but that is not the issue. I would be perfectly OK hearing someone else saying those things, and being challenged on them. However Graham Linehan is clearly not mentally well (I say this as someone with my own mental health issues). He has suffered the loss of his own wife, family and career over his behaviour, and both sides on the issues he pushes can be vicious and brutal. He appears to be in a bad psychological state. He clearly is not able to handle the stress.

As such he needs help, not media exposure or more attacks. The real fear is that in his vulnerable state he may end up driven to the ultimate act many with mental health issues try when they feel they cannot cope any more.

⏩ Jim Duffy is a writer-historian.

How A Serious Media Should Handle Graham Linehan

Labour Heartlands ☭ Written by Paul Knaggs.

Graham Linehan’s long, punishing clash with gender-identity activists has taken yet another turn. After years of being hounded, blacklisted, and professionally destroyed for speaking out on what he argued were material, sex-based realities, the Father Ted co-creator has now been cleared of harassing a teenage trans activist online, though Westminster Magistrates’ Court convicted him of damaging her phone.

The case stems from an incident outside a gender-identity conference in London last October, where Graham’s path collided with 18-year-old Sophia Brooks, a trans woman born male. The court heard that Graham “deliberately whacked” her phone from her hand before it landed in the road. Graham denied this was intentional, insisting it was a “reflex response” as Brooks filmed him aggressively at close range.

Prosecutors attempted to paint Graham as a relentless online pursuer, claiming he had posted abusive comments about Brooks across social media platforms. Yet on Tuesday the judge dismissed all harassment allegations, ruling that Graham’s posts, while critical and uncompromising, did not cross the threshold into criminal harassment. It is a rare institutional acknowledgement that criticising gender-identity ideology, or calling out activists’ behaviour, is not in itself a crime.

Continue @ Labour Heartlands.

Graham Linehan’s Years Of Persecution 🪶 Court Clears Him Of Harassment

Barry Gilheany ✍ On Monday before last, Graham Linehan, co-creator of the iconic TV comedy show Father Ted was arrested by five armed officers of the London Metropolitan Police at Heathrow airport (police officers at Heathrow are routinely armed) as he got off a fight from Arizona for allegedly inciting violence. 

The arrest was made on the basis of three tweets cited by police, in one of which Linehan had written:

If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.[1]

Last month, Lucy Connolly, a childminder and wive of a former Conservative Party district councillor was released on license after serving ten months, twelve including time on remand, of a 31-month sentence for posting this tweet in the riots that followed the massacre of three young girls at a dance class in Southport and which were sparked by false rumours that the killer was a Muslim asylums seeker: “Mass deportation now, set fire to all of the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care”. The previous week Labour county councillor (though later suspended by his party) Ricky Jones was acquitted of “encouraging violent disorder” after telling a crowd in East London, also during the 2024 summer riots, that many of the anti-immigration protestors were “disgusting Nazi fascists” and “we need to cut their throats and get rid of them.”[2]

All three cases have provoked partisan comment depending on which side of the culture war issue one takes: be it transgender rights in the case of Linehan or immigration in the cases of both Connolly and Jones. Much of the debate has turned on the threats of violence (implicit or explicit) contained in all three pronouncements. Before exploring further, the deeper debate on free speech and whatever speech or expression is deemed permissible or not, it is important to establish certain facts about these cases. Firstly, Lucy Connolly pleaded guilty to the offence for which she was convicted on legal advice. Secondly, by contrast, Ricky Jones elected for trial by jury and was subsequently acquitted. Thirdly, the legal and judicial processes on the Graham Linehan have hardly begun to run their course so further comment is better abjured. However, it is worth noting that Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan police commissioner, has publicly voiced his opinion that officers should not be “policing toxic culture war debates” and that in relation to Linehan’s tweets, “policing has been left between a rock and a hard place by successive governments”, with the law offering officers no option but to investigate them.[3]

The framing of free speech has itself become a macro culture war divide enmeshed in the accusations by Reform and right-wing Tories of the operation of a “two-tier” justice system in the UK in which white or “indigenous” working class rioters receive more severe punishment from the courts than those from BME (and especially Muslim backgrounds). The poisonous legacy of the “grooming gangs” scandals in which police, social services and largely Labour controlled local authorities, at the very least, averted their gaze from the industrial scale sexual abuse of vulnerable white working-class girls by gangs of predominantly Pakistani heritage, to avoid accusations of racism has heightened this divide. This recent history has now merged into the narrative of the racialised opposition to “small boat,” “illegal” immigration in which single young men from “medieval cultures” are constructed as threats to native women and girls.

The “crisis” of free speech in the UK (and Europe) has been a staple of the Trump administration. Rather than attend the first PMQ’s of the new House of Commons term, the abstentionist Honourable Member for Clacton Nigel Farage testified before the House Judiciary Committee in Washington, DC on the state of play on free speech. Farage was invited by Justice House Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) during a hearing entitled “Europe’s Threat to American Speech and Innovation” with a specific focus on the UK’s Online Safety Act which places restrictions of media shared online. The context of this hearing was Donald Trump’s threats last month to slap additional tariffs on nations that maintain their digital taxes, contending that they are detrimental to US tech products and companies. Looming in the background was J.D. Vance’s scolding of European leaders in January for its supposed impositions on free speech.

Farage cited the cases of Lucy Connolly and Graham Linehan as examples of how online safety rules have created an “awful authoritarian situation in the EU and UK” and rhetorically asked of the Committee “At what point did [the UK] become North Korea?”[4] Absurd analogies to totalitarian states are not the exclusive property of right-wing confected free speech warriors, Ken Livingstone also invoked a North Korean comparison after his appearance in front of the sub-committee of NEC of the Labour Party to answer allegations of antisemitism but the hyperbole and hypocrisy really matters when the accuser has power or designs on power.

For, it is more than stating the obvious that the UK or any European democracy does not need to listen to lectures on free speech from a US Presidency which recently mandated a review of some of the Smithsonian museums and exhibits “in accordance with Executive Order 14253, Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”? This compulsory review, they added, was “to ensure alignment with the President’s directive” that museums say the things he wants them to say.[5] In other diminish or rewrite the role of slavery in US history and its generational legacies of racism, to take one example.

But in relation to the self-proclaimed free speech warrior and advocate for prisoners in the UK’s “woke” gulag; there are rather more pertinent questions for him to answer. He heads a party whose leader of Reform-controlled Nottinghamshire County Council has banned his councillors from speaking to the Nottingham Post, it’s online arm Nottinghamshire Live, or a team of BBC-funded local journalists over a disagreement over an article published in the Post. But this week, in the wake of a backlash against this act of corporate censorship, Dear Leader Mick Barton updated to say the ban only applied to himself.[6]

In a more sinister vein, David Maddox, the political editor of The Independent, has written about taking threatening calls from a member of Reform’s leadership and has reported that an aide of Nigel Farage has told him that his newspaper would be banned from all Reform events if they did not change a critical story or tone of questioning and coverage. One colleague was accused of being an “activist journalist” and a female colleague attending a Reform press conference (ironically on women’s safety) was verbally attacked by a male Reform staffer in the middle of the event.[7]

To return to Mr Farage’s trip to Washington, his confected free speech crusade was met with overwhelming scorn with a particularly excoriating attack from Democratic Representative James Haskin who accused him of “being a Putin-loving free speech imposter” and “Trump sycophant" who only protects free speech that he agrees with, such as fear-mongering attacks on immigrants and wants to abolish the Human Rights Act and Online Safety Bill. Rep Haskin said there was no free speech crisis in Britain; Sir Keir Starmer was not shutting down GB News where Farage frequently broadcast his have-a-fag-and-pint founts of wisdom. In contrast, the US was in the midst of a free speech crisis with LTGB+ books being taken off the shelves and the Smithsonian Institute being asked to rewrite US history to suit the commissars of MAGA. The whole clip is worth watching in whole.[8]

The “Putin-loving, free speech imposter” has also earned the obloquy of the then Science and Technology Secretary Peter Kyle of being an enabler for a future Jimmy Savile for his opposition to the Online Safety Bill and its anti-Child Sexual Exploitation measures. An additional term of opprobrium for the Fagash Fuhrer could be “traitor” or appropriate synonyms for appearing to collude in Donald Trump’s threat to levy tariffs on UK technology goods and services.

Amidst the orgiastic gloating at Reform’s conference at the resignation of Angela Rayner, Deputy Prime Minister, for in the words of the Government’s Ethics Chief Lawrie Magner, “acting with integrity” in admitting her mistakes over the payment of stamp duty on a property but which did “constitute a breach of the Ministerial Code." - Honesty and transparency which have been far from evident in the Abstentionist Member for Clacton’s response to questions about the purchase of a house in his constituency - were two alarming appearances at it. The first was that of Lucy Connolly (of whom more later).

The second was that of the vaccine sceptic British cardiologist Dr Aseem Malhotra who claimed that it was “highly likely” vaccines may have been a factor in cancers among members of the royal family. Malhotra told the conference in Birmingham that hundreds of studies showed the harms of mRNA vaccines and that they were interfering with genes. “It may be a risk factor for cancer,” he said at a talk entitled Make Britain Healthy Again.[9] Note the lack of declaratory definitiveness in this statement; following the anti-vax playbook of using the rhetorical device “may” to sow doubt in the benefits of vaccination while evading the responsibility that comes from making conclusory statements (founded on best available evidential practice). It was a tactic used by the disgraced ex-physician Andrew Wakefield in his debunked study into the link between the MMR vaccine and autism and which has had such harmful impacts on public health such as the return of measles incidences and the fall in vaccination rates below herd immunity levels.

During his 15-minute speech Malhotra said that having the Covid vaccine was more likely to cause harm than the virus itself; that the WHO had been “captured” by Microsoft founder Bill Gates and that over the past few years “it is very clear that, with the evidence, the drug industry are responsible for probably killing millions of people”.[10] Note the lack of a definitive claim again.

The link between Covid jabs and cancer has been dismissed by academics and oncologists after claims it led to “turbo cancers” but the appearance of this notorious anti-vax crank is another indication of the direction of travel of Reform towards the agenda of international Trumpianism. Malhotra is chief medical adviser to the US group MAHA Action, which is championing the agenda of US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr to “Make America Healthy Again”[11] Farage is a member of the International Action on World Health. As such he views the WHO in the same way as he did the EU, an incipient billion-dollar health empire that will take away the rights of governments to prevent future lockdowns. Accordingly, Farage opposes the Pandemic Preparedness Treaty agreed by WHO on 25th May 2025 which would give WHO power to mandate lockdowns and force the UK to give up 20% of its vaccines.

Here's Lucy: The Right’s Free Speech ‘Political Prisoner”

In the wake of her arrest for her post-Southport tweets, Lucy Connolly was charged with distributing material with the intention of stirring up racial hatred, a charge which carries a maximum sentence of seven years. She pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two years and seven months in prison, eventually serving less than a year. She has portrayed the episode as something that could have happened to anyone. After her release she styled herself as a “political prisoner” and argued that all she did was being “a bit shouty” and the “common sense” narrative developed by her supporters as expressed by a shopper in Nuneaton town centre runs something like:

You can’t have an opinion, you’ll get locked up like that Lucy Connolly. Look at her, poor woman, and anybody else who might say the wrong thing.[12]

However, court documents paint a different picture of Connolly who had a history of making what her trial judge called “racist remarks” in multiple other social media posts. These included a comment on a video posted by Tommy Robinson of a black man being attacked, which Robinson claimed was for carrying out a sex attack in public, on which Connolly had written “Somalian, I guess. Loads of them.”, followed by a vomiting emoji. Another tweet, five days after the Southport murders, implied “illegal boat invaders” were “unvetted criminals” who would lead to people “attacked, butchered, raped.” Regarding the post for which she was jailed for, court evidence that she deleted the offending communication had been viewed 310,000 times and reposted 940 times and only after she became aware of the public backlash. The fact that only days later a hotel housing asylum seekers was actually set alight seemed to have no impact on Connolly, who had “little insight into, or acceptance of her actions” according to the judge who rejected her appeal.[13]

Connolly believed she had personally been made an example off by Keir Starmer; a belief reinforced by her husband Raymond Connolly who later accused the prime minister of having “picked” his wife as the “poster girl of the far right”. Money started flowing towards Connolly from the right almost from the off. The Free Speech Union, founded by the Tory peer Toby Young, paid the level expenses for her appeal. The far-right, neo-Nazi, white supremacist group Patriotic Alternative said it sent her family £1,000 and £170,000 has been raised in a public campaign through a fundraising platform run by Reclaim the Media, an organisation run by the failed actor and right-wing activist Laurence Fox[14] (who is facing an upskirting charge and a possible two-year jail sentence).

For politicians of this ideological ilk, the Lucy Connolly case is evidence of a hypo critical “two-tier” justice system, a conspiracy theory that white people or people holding right-wing views are treated more harshly by authorities, for which there is no evidence and for which, in the words of Gavin Phillipson, professor of law at the University of Bristol, hinges on people just seizing “on one or two cases” and then building “a whole narrative about two-tier justice on that without looking at the whole picture.”[15] It is also the case that two tier justice existed when trade union militants, black people, Irish people and environment activists interfaced with the justice system. Nevertheless, in another sign of the growing convergence between the ‘traditional, mainstream’ right and the far right, Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary said on X: “The development of two-tier justice is becoming increasingly alarming”[16] Similarly, the denunciation of the verdict in the Ricky Jones case as “perverse” and “unacceptable” by James Cleverly, Shadow Housing, Communities and Local Government Secretary suggest both a less than assertive position on free speech and a hesitancy about jury trials if they return the “wrong” verdict.[17]

Connolly has continued to show the lack of awareness about the offence for which she was convicted in denying being far right, and furthermore denying the concept even exists, agreeing in an interview with former GB News presenter Dan Wooton in his contention that “It’s a way to deride patriots”[18] At the Reform conference, she was introduced to great fanfare by Alison Pearson, Telegraph columnist and Free Speech Union luminary as “Britain’s favourite political prisoner.” Perhaps being a little cognisant of the conditions of her release, Connolly said that she was “an idiot” for the social media post that got her imprisoned and also stated that Ricky Jones should not have been charged for the comments he made at the pro-migrant rally. Since in the words of Andrew Chadwick ... 

the right seem to very adept at kind of focusing in on individuals … on the voices of everyday ordinary people … who then become kind of figureheads, really, for a broader movement[19] 

... such as immigration and free speech scenarios emerge about the possible grooming and exploitation of vulnerable or gullible people for their nefarious agendas. But there is little if any evidence that Lucy Connolly falls into either category.

A framework for dealing with social media activity that attracts what many see as unnecessary and wasteful attention from law enforcement agencies such as the Graham Linehan post quoted at the start is proposed by Kenan Malik. Arguing that the legal threshold for incitement in Britain has become too low, Malik states his preference for the American “Brandenburg test” that speech must be intended to incite “imminent lawless action” and likely to produce such action – and that as vile as Connolly’s tweet was, she should not have been imprisoned.[20] Application of the Brandenburg test could possibly secure the dropping of charges against Graham Linehan and would cohere with the acquittal of Ricky Jones and with cases such as the acquittal of the Kneecap trio for support of a terrorist organisation namely Hezbollah. Could it apply to those accused of supporting the recently proscribed Palestine Action?

But legal arguments cannot override or sideline in any way the moral dimensions of the Lucy Connolly case. To suggest, as Alison Pearson does, that someone who incited arson attacks on migrant hostels with no regard for the lives of those inside should be a “figurehead” for “concerned mums and grandmothers” protesting “outside migrant hotels of the influx of undocumented males into our country which put their children and grandchildren at risk” is to legitimise hate speech. Those who defend free speech as an essential feature of free and democratic society must also take a stand against hatred and bigotry at every available opportunity. While overreach in the policing of the social media activity by high profile, gender critical figures such as Graham Linehan and the hounding of gender critical feminists such as Maya Forrester and Katherine Stock from their jobs because of their social media posts is troubling, the real free speech crisis is that confected by the trans national far right in order to buttress the power of tech titans and to supress free inquiry as part of the war on woke in the name of “free speech”. A modern George Orwell updating 1984 for the early 21st century might add another Party slogan: Free Speech is Censorship!.

References

[1] The Guardian 3rd September 2025, p.1

[2] Kenan Malik. Lucy Connolly isn’t a hero. Justice doesn’t mean a verdict you approve of. The Observer. 24 August 2025 p.24

[3] The Guardian, op cit

[4] Marina Hyde. If Farage and Trump are the free speech gods, all is lost. Guardian. Opinion 6th September 2025 p.3

[5] Ibid

[6] Ibid

[7] David Maddox. Reform media ban in Nottinghamshire is a disturbing glimpse of a future with Farage in power. The Independent.

[8] See.

[9] Catherine Nellan & Jon Ungoed-Thomas. Covid jab may have caused royal cancers says Reform speaker. The Observer 7th September 2025 p.8

[10] Ibid

[11] Ibid

[12] Robyn Vinter Southport. From racist tweet to darling of the right The Guardian 3rd September 2025 pp.11-12

[13] Ibid

[14] Ibid

[15] Ibid

[16] Ibid

[17] Kenan Malik Lucy Connolly isn’t a hero. Justice doesn’t mean a verdict you approve of. The Observer. 24th August 2025 p.24

[18] Guardian. 3 September, op cit.

[19] Ibid

[20] Kenan Malik Lucy Connolly isn’t a hero. Justice doesn’t mean a verdict you approve of. The Observer. 24th August 2025 p.24

⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.

Free Speech 🪶 Police Or Permit

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Eight Hundred And Six

Labour Heartlands ☭ Penned by Paul Knaggs.

In Oceania, thoughtcrime was punishable by death. In Starmer’s Britain, it merely requires five armed officers, a prison cell, and a court order banning you from social media. Graham Linehan discovered this week that George Orwell’s dystopian fiction has become democratic reality, complete with the kind of bureaucratic absurdity that would have made the author weep at his own prescience.

The comedy writer behind Father Ted found himself living through a scene from 1984 when five armed Thought Police intercepted him at Heathrow for the crime of posting three tweets about transgender issues. His arrest for “on suspicion of inciting violence” through words on a screen demonstrates how hate crime legislation has evolved into the perfect mechanism for criminalising wrongthink while maintaining democratic facades.

The Metropolitan Police’s charge of “inciting violence” for social media posts represents classic Newspeak, language deliberately designed to obscure meaning rather than communicate it. When criticising someone’s presence in a “female-only space” becomes incitement to violence, when expressing unfashionable opinions transforms into criminal conspiracy, we witness the destruction of language that Orwell warned would precede the destruction of thought itself.

The tweet itself trades on a dark irony: the spectacle of a man self-identifying as a woman while still possessing testicles. It’s gallows humour, a satirical jab at the clash between self-identification and material reality, the very contradiction that hate crime laws now decree must not be laughed at.

Thoughtcrime At Heathrow 🧠 From Father Ted To 1984 The Chilling Reality of Starmer’s Britain

Gearóid Ó Loingsigh ☭ writing in Substack on 8-October-2024.


Graham Linehan, has undergone quite a transformation, or perhaps he hasn’t, maybe I just didn’t notice. He started out as a comedy writer, famous for Father Ted and then got cancelled, had his show Father Ted the Musical basically sequestered and work dried up. The reason was his stance on the issue of men’s access to women’s spaces. Yes, the dreaded trans debate, where many fear to tread. He took a brave position at the time and paid a high price. Now he takes very cowardly positions on everything and lines up with the bullies. He is still right about the trans debate, but his tweets on Palestine, genocide, racism are vile. He is no longer concerned about being right, but rather about being on the Right of the political spectrum.

Last year following the commencement of the genocide in Gaza, Linehan came out firmly on the side of Israel. He even repeated lies about video footage, reposting a claim from someone who claimed to have seen Hamas bodycam footage![1] He repeated the nonsense that would soon become standard Zionist propaganda about human shields to justify every hospital bombing.[2] He recently doubled down on this, saying that the 20,000 dead children in Gaza just had the misfortune to be used as human shields by Hamas.[3] But he didn’t limit himself to just supporting Israel, he nailed his colours to the mast with Tommy Robinson and other vile, loathsome racists. One of his most recent tweets on the subject is revolting. He states that he stands with Israel in its bombing of Lebanon because:

They're fighting the men who killed little girls in Manchester, concert goers in Paris, thousands on 9/11 and countless numbers of their own people. Israel is fighting for all of us.[4] 

Palestinians did not carry out those attacks, though former CIA agents like Bin Laden did. But the point is not about the nationality of those murderers but his use of those events to justify genocide, in fact anything Israel decides it will do, even going as far as to joke about the pager bombs,[5] which are a violation of International Humanitarian Law.

In 1982 Israel invaded Lebanon and people like Linehan stood over that invasion at the time, though he was too young to make any public comment, the same age as myself. But I remember it clearly and I remember the Sabra and Chatila massacre in which 3,500 people were murdered by Israeli proxies with the active support of the Israeli military. The issue led to the resignation of Ariel Sharon, who would forever after be known as the Butcher of Sabra and Chatila, but nevertheless go on to hold various ministerial posts and serve as Israeli Prime Minister (2001-2006). An international commission led by Seán MacBride issued a report on it, finding Israel guilty of a whole series of violations of international law, many of which we have seen in Gaza and now in Lebanon again. On the question of the massacres the Commission stated:

From the evidence disclosed, Israel was involved in the planning and the preparation of the massacres and played a facilitative role in the actual killings.[6]

But Linehan’s whole point is part of the racist clash of civilisations discourse popularised by Samuel P. Huntington, of picking up what Kipling termed the white man’s burden, which was not about Africa. Kipling wrote the poem to back the US invasion of the Philippines as a civilising mission, a force for good, in the face of the indolence of the locals. A common theme amongst racists and imperialists, not to mention men who justify domestic violence “Look what you made me do, I did it for your own good”, a topic a bit closer to Linehan’s heart.

Take up the White Man's burden—

The savage wars of peace—

Fill full the mouth of famine

And bid the sickness cease;

And when your goal is nearest

The end for others sought,

Watch Sloth and heathen Folly

Bring all your hopes to nought.[7]

Mark Twain wrote a reply to Kipling and others of his ilk in, To the Person Sitting in the Darkness, which is still valid today.

And as for a flag for the Philippine Province, it is easily managed. We can have a special one — our States do it: we can have just our usual flag, with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and cross-bones.[8]

Twain’s message was clear that it was an imperialist act of plunder, there was no lofty cause involved, just like Gaza and Lebanon are also acts of plunder, murder and domination. Linehan and Kellie Jay Keen have disgraced the gender critical cause. For a long time KJK said discussions about her links to the right were a distraction from the issue of women’s spaces and so refused to discuss it. Now she runs around saying Vote for Trump[9] and it doesn’t matter that he is an abuser, and points out that she is Not a feminist.

Looking over Linehan’s verbiage on Palestine and Lebanon, it is difficult to see that he was once right about an issue: defence of women’s spaces, just not maternity wards in Gaza if the men doing the violence were Israeli bomber pilots. Now he is just a vile, loathsome individual on the Right. The Posh Boy comes round and the river returns to its source. One day the house of cards that is trans ideology and Cancel Culture will collapse and he will emerge again as a comedy writer and though he was treated badly, it is hard to feel sympathy for a man so bereft of common human decency that he overlooks genocide. I look forward to the day Cancel Culture is no more, but not to the return of the Posh Boy gloating at the misfortune of Palestinians.


[1] See 

[2] See 

[3] See 

[4] See 

[5] See

[6] MacBride et al (1983) Israel in Lebanon: Report of the International Commission to Enquire into Reported Violations of International Law by Israel during Its Invasion of the Lebanon. Journal of Palestine Studes, Vol 12. No 3 pp 117-133 

[7] See 

[8] See

[9] See 

⏩ Gearóid Ó Loingsigh is a political and human rights activist with extensive experience in Latin America.

Graham Linehan 📝 From Being Right To Now Being On The Right

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