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Showing posts with label cancel culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cancel culture. Show all posts
Weekly Worker ☭ ‘No-platforming’ and speech controls are rooted in the cross-class politics of popular frontism and only serve to strengthen the right, argues Mike Macnair. This is an edited version of his talk at CU 2026

Back in October 2024 I wrote an article in this paper, ‘Crushing it in the egg’.This was addressed to the view on the left that sufficiently violent action against the fascists at an early stage of their development could crush fascism “in the egg” and prevent it developing rapidly. I looked at where that idea came from.

It comes from a writer called Daniel Guérin, writing about the rise of Nazism in Germany. He quotes Hitler and Goebbels as saying that, if the opponents of Nazism had crushed it in the egg by sufficiently violent force in the 1920s, then it would never have succeeded. 

In reality, this Hitler and Goebbels story is complete nonsense, because actually the Nazi Party was one of a number of far-right parties that organised veterans’ groups to beat up leftists. They acted as external auxiliaries of the German state, with the support of the police and the judiciary, who protected them against the leftists who wanted to organise self-defence against them. 

Continue @ Weekly Worker.

Standing For Open Debate

Anthony McIntyre ☠ David Miller was the victim of cancel culture, an anti-democratic mechanism strategically designed to suffocate voices that dissent or seek to tell us something that partisan lobbies would prefer we do not hear. 

Cancel culture, an anti-intellectual weapon frequently utilised by fascists, runs against the grain of diversity, inclusion and equality on all counts: it seeks to exclude a diversity of voices and deny the owners of those voices a claim to an equal right to be heard. 

Cancel culture meets three, and possibly four, of the fourteen criteria set out by Umberto Eco as constituent elements of Ur-Fascism. David Miller's legal victory this week at a UK Employment Appeals Tribunal over this invidious phenomenon is not merely symbolic but hugely important for those activists opposed to Israeli genocide. It is a landmark ruling in the battle of ideas. 

Miller who had earlier left the British Labour Party after it had suspended him as a result of his accusation that the execrable Keir Starmer had taken Zionist money, saw his contract as a professor with Bristol University cancelled in 2021 because he spoke out against Zionism. He had described Israeli government policy as “all out onslaught… on the left globally.” He further called for “the end of Zionism as a functioning ideology”. He accurately described Jewish groups that sought to have him cancelled as pushing 'to stop anyone speaking out about Palestine”.

In a nine minute video he hit out at the Israeli state's policy of cancel culture being allowed to infiltrate and permeate campus life, asserting that 'no university should allow itself to be held hostage by the State of Israel’s campaign of censorship.' He also praised University College, London (UCL) for the decision by its Academic Board to recommend replacing the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, lauding the decision as the “beginning of the fightback”. As we are aware the government in this country too has sought to rely on the muzzling device crafted by the IHRA to cancel out anti-Zionist voices through resort to the antisemitic label. 

Miller outlined what the IHRA was aiming to achieve:

Manufactured controversies around Judeophobia — such as in my case — are being used to silence criticism of Zionism and Israel. That is the purpose of the IHRA definition in practice. If Saudi Arabia was engaged in a similar censorship campaign on British campuses, we would laugh it out of the room . . . We have to fight back . . . and the way to fight back is to organise proper debates to understand these issues and not to be fooled that there is some kind of liberal Zionist panacea which is not as bad as the IHRA… This is a problem for freedom of speech and also for academic freedom.

Proper debate is anathema to cancel culture so Miller lost his job. In 2024 he won an appeal against being fired, The university sought to defend its decision by claiming that Miller's views were political beliefs rather than philosophical ones and should not therefore be covered by the Equality Act. However, the chair of the Tribunal pointed out that there was:

no good reason why the beliefs relied upon by the claimant in this case should be excluded from protection simply because they related to an issue of social importance which might, broadly, also be categorised as 'political'.

The university lodged an appeal which this week also collapsed after a hearing in the Employment Appeal Tribunal. The upshot: it is now officially accepted that Professor Miller was the victim of wrongful dismissal and, of crucial significance, that anti-Zionism is a protected belief.

The EAT upheld the findings of the earlier tribunal that Miller “did not oppose or hold antipathy towards Jews or Judaism” and was not supportive of violence as a means of opposing Zionism. This drew a clear demarcation line between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism

The ruling is a crucially important legal victory in the battle against Zionist cancel culture that has become so prevalent throughout the academic world. It will prove a serious obstacle in the way of those who seek to muzzle anti-Zionist voices with the label antisemitic. 

Miller has crossed a line in the sand drawn by the Israeli state and its academic apologists in the UK.  Welcoming the verdict, he stated:

I am very pleased that the Employment Appeal Tribunal has dismissed the case put forward by the University of Bristol. It is a remarkable and extremely welcome vindication of my long fight to defend myself and all those who hold and express anti-Zionist beliefs. This judgment has now firmly established that anti-Zionist views are a protected belief under the terms of the Equality Act 2010.

Anti-Zionism is a protected belief in the UK. People can't be discriminated against for holding it. Anti- Zionist speech has won the day over the silencing efforts of hateful Hasbara.

⏩Follow on Bluesky.

Miller's Crossing

Gearóid Ó Loingsigh ☭ writing in Substack on 3-November-2025.

Photo: Harvard University

Mention the term Cancel Culture and you are likely to elicit as many shrieks and howls as saying any of the things that might get you cancelled. There are topics you cannot broach, words that cannot be said, regardless of context, and opinions that may not be expressed. But even saying that Cancel Culture exists, may in a very Orwellian sense get you cancelled. Now under Trump new life has been breathed into yet another wave of this reactionary phenomenon. This time round, the assault on freedom of speech comes mainly from the Right. So, I was taken by Greg Lukianoff’s latest book with Rikki Schlott The Cancelling of the American Mind, which looked at Cancel Culture before Trump and was published prior to his second term. The comparisons and contrasts are illustrative. I don’t intend to do a review of the book as such, though it is well worth reading, but rather to use the book on the pre-Trump period to talk about the current assault on freedom of speech. It will upset many liberals, who see themselves as holier than thou and draw no parallels between their own attempts to police thought and the Trump offensive.

The petri dish in which Cancel Culture was cultivated and came to the fore acquiring an immediacy unparalleled in the history of censorship and thought control was social media. It is a relatively new medium that the state has sought to control through limiting access to, or restricting what can be said by whom and about what. This is not new, as new media forms arise governments have tried to ban them or control them. It may seem laughable now, but as Lukianoff points out:

In 1538, Henry VIII desperately attempted to put the printing press genie back in the bottle by requiring a crown- approved license to operate a printing press in England. But the proliferation of ideas proved impossible to contain.(1)

But the printing press is slow and cumbersome, even now. It takes a long time for a book to travel the world. However:

Social media opens every institution, every individual, and every idea to the scrutiny of hundreds of millions of eyes. That makes them all vulnerable to being torn down. And it’s not always a bad thing. There are some institutions, ideas, and even people who need to be torn down—from Hosni Mubarak’s regime in Egypt to odious sexual predators like Harvey Weinstein.[2]

There are no peer reviewers on social media, no editorial committees. The decision as to whether a person is as odious and worthy of our opprobrium as Harvey Weinstein is taken in seconds, often by people with little experience in the matter and frequently behind anonymous accounts. It takes seconds, little skill, no thought and no consequences to edit a video clip, a tweet or reply on social media and ruin someone’s life. Lukianoff gives many examples. Who would have thought that a young woman who advocated in favour of the Black Lives Matter movement following the murder of George Floyd by the police found herself cancelled over a three second video clip she had posted years before at the mature, ripe old age of fifteen? But that is exactly what happened to Mimi Groves. She wasn’t a right winger, she wasn’t opposed to the BLM, she did something stupid. When she got her learner’s driving licence she sent a private snap chat video clip of herself behind the wheel, to a friend saying “I can drive niggas”.[3] This is a movement of virtue signallers, there is no way back for those who have sinned and the new bishops of the Spanish Inquisition can be anyone with access to a keyboard. It also says a lot about the nature of virtue signallers, they have no intention of changing society. In the Groves case it was more important to embarrass her than it was to build a movement against police brutality.

Many found themselves cancelled for joking or commenting negatively on a variety of issues. Now those who commented or joked about Charlie Kirk’s murder find themselves cancelled, often for very unremarkable statements. He was a vile, thoroughly loathsome individual, and such a description of him could get you cancelled. Killing him solved nothing, but I feel no sorrow at his passing given his own lack of compassion for murder victims. But Trump has now taken the Cancel Culture rule book and decided to enforce it through state actions and not just peer pressure. Suddenly, the liberals find themselves on the backfoot. What can they say? If this was ok before, why not now?

Before Trump there were also institutional measures taken against various people, many of whom lost scholarships, jobs etc. Years of such moves left the Palestinian solidarity movement vulnerable. It was accused of hate speech and the same tactics employed by liberal keyboard warriors and the boards of universities were now rolled out with a vengeance, though a lot of this was done before Trump. In the waning days of Biden’s decrepit rule, he and Holocaust Harris lashed out at anti-Zionists and universities clamped down on protesters.

This is not limited to the US of course. British universities, many of them so woke, they barely get to sleep ever were to the fore in clamping down on free speech. Two years after the genocide in Gaza began it was revealed that British universities had agreed to monitor student chat groups and social media postings on behalf of arms companies, some of them complicit in the genocide. Jo Grady, the Secretary General of the University and College Union condemned the universities[4] but saw no contradiction between that and her support for the hounding of gender critical feminists. One of the wokest universities is Edinburgh University. It had in the past suppressed gender critical views, going as far as to halt the showing of the film Adult Human Female. The film showing eventually went ahead after two attempts. Jo Grady’s union was to the fore in trying to ban the film. They demanded it be banned and both the university and the union have been sued by two academics on this precise point.[5] It was virtue signalling of the highest degree. The students relied on their own muscle but also that of the university, a university which according to Francesca Albanese is one of the most financially entangled in complicity with the genocide in Gaza. So much so, the students walked out of their own graduation ceremonies in protest.[6] Some may well have been involved in the attempts to suppress the film showing also. Cancel Culture is not about struggle or protest, and it is certainly not about debate. It is about virtue signalling and cosying up to the powerful to suppress others. People complicit in genocide are apparently fair allies for enforcing speech codes etc. It never occurs to the virtuous that this will come back to bite them.

DEI

Universities are thought of as hallowed halls of free speech and intellectual inquiry. They are not. Whether they ever were and to what extent is a matter for another day. Lukianoff gives us some surprising statistics on universities in the US. Some of the top US universities are heavily tilted towards the Democrats and at the same time have a low ranking in terms of freedom of speech. In general, the proportion of Democrats to Republicans is 8.5 to one. However, at Harvard the proportion of Democrats to Republicans in a number of faculties (anthropology-sociology, biology, chemistry, economics, English, mathematics, philosophy, and psychology) is a massive eighty to one.[7] FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) which is headed up by Lukianoff, carried out a survey of free speech at universities and ranked Harvard 170 out of 203 with a score of 34.52 describing its record as below average. The worst was Columbia University, which came in at 203, scoring 9.9 and rated as abysmal.[8] The students and liberals who were part of Cancel Culture there, got a rude awakening when it cracked down on the widespread pro-Palestinian protests on campus. Only one of the top US universities, Chicago, had a good speech climate. Not surprisingly, a majority of professors now self-censor in their classes, mindful of what spoilt brats on whom a university education is wasted might say of them. In comparison, only 9% said they did this during the McCarthy period.[9]

Trump attacked the universities with false arguments about antisemitism, being supposedly left-wing and went on the rampage against DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) initiatives. Part of this was the Charlie Kirk narrative that ALL blacks and Latinos and other minorities get their jobs despite not being qualified for them. There is no doubt that as part of his assault on DEI, Trump would prefer a world in which non-whites were just janitors. If he could, he would probably have Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio cleaning toilets and waiting upon him, rather than formulating right-wing policy. There are debates amongst black activists about the true value and impact of positive discrimination, but that is not what Trump is about, he is about racism. With positive discrimination, the holder of the job must be and is always qualified for the post. There are no pilots (Kirk’s example) who have not passed all the exams, or can barely ride a bicycle.

However, there is an element of DEI that gets less exposure and it is loyalty tests. Trump has implemented loyalty pledges across the board in new hirings.[10] He has now extended that to universities, who are asked to sign pledges which would see major changes to how the universities function, including their hiring process and caps on foreign student enrolment, amongst other things, in exchange for greater access to federal funds.[11] It is a completely reactionary proposal, though not any more so than what it replaces.

In this he is replicating previous practice at leading universities were academics and potential PhD students had to sign a DEI statement in which they had to explain what they had done to improve diversity in their own area of expertise and this was a key element in the employment process. So, the lecturer in nuclear physics or cardiology had to prove how politically correct they were. What was meant by diversity was deeply troubling. Social class was not considered important, nor was diversity in opinions. The purpose of these statements was political. As Lukianoff points out:

Even if you completely agree with the importance of DEI, there really isn’t any reason to ask a potential physics professor to discuss their prior, past, and future “intellectual commitments” to “social justice”… other than to test their political outlook. Its purpose is obvious, and professors themselves know it.[12]

Faculty staff are vetted, just like Trump also does. People’s thoughts and speech are policed and there are real consequences to it. Sixty tenured professors have been fired for speech that “is – or in public settings would be – protected by the First Amendment”[13] with 2/3 of those sackings taking place since 2015. Trump will also sack professors for their speech. People have lost jobs in the US for failing to lick the unlamented deceased Charlie Kirk’s jackboots. Universities across the US have sacked staff and suspended students, one for describing Kirk as a reimagined Klan member. A controversial, though in my opinion a wholly accurate description.[14] Liberals are again on the backfoot, what they argued for over many years is now being used against them.

The cancelling of authors is well documented. There is no real need to go into detail here, though it is dealt with in Lukianoff’s text. We are all overly familiar now with the attempts to cancel JK Rowling over her comments on trans, the one issue you will never be forgiven for, ever. She was however, too big to cancel. Even liberal capitalists smell a dollar, no matter how many metres (or yards) away. Many other authors have not been so lucky. But cancel culture does exist in the publishing world. It is rife. That Rowling and others like Irish author John Boyne, author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas have survived and prospered does not mean they weren’t cancelled. It is as Lukianoff says:

Cancel Culture skeptics seem to think that someone isn’t truly canceled unless they’re completely obliterated forevermore. By this same logic, did the estimated 200 people accused of witchcraft in Salem have nothing to complain about because only about 10 percent of them were executed?[15]

Though there is one example from the publishing world worth looking at and it is that of Kosoko Jackson a misogynist who believed that women shouldn’t profit from gay men’s stories i.e. write about them professionally. He made his living as what is termed a Sensitivity Reader.[16] You have to give it to them, not even Goebbels was that imaginative when it came to spinning censorship. Could you imagine the Nazis having the brass neck to say their sensitivity readers have deemed the text to be un-Aryan? Jackson came a cropper when his own novel failed to meet the ridiculous tests he set for others. A certain sense of schadenfreude came over me whilst reading about him. I know that what happened to him is a as bad as the tripe and rubbish he heaped on others. But he was hoisted by his own petard.

Cancel Culture has always been reactionary; there are no good examples of it. It is not used against people who have actually committed crimes such as incitement to violence, hatred etc. It is used to stifle opinions that are not mainstream. It is also an industry in itself, with huge fortunes being made by the gatekeepers, the modern censors and witchfinder generals. Lukianoff is a liberal, his co-author is right of centre and the term Left is used throughout the book to describe liberals and more radical voices. Only in the US could the Democratic Party be described as left-wing. It is not. It is a right-wing party. It has led the US through many an imperialist war, coup d’etat, bombing and attacks on the living conditions of US workers to benefit Wall Street. Clinton, Obama, Bernie Sanders and AOC are not the Left. The Left are the socialists, those who believe in overthrowing capitalism, not those who think it is fine and some tinkering about the edges and slick PR is what is required.

And yet the Left has been to the fore in backing the liberal Cancel Culture and will now spout out contradictory nonsense about Trump’s version of it. Cancel Culture always had its liberal and its conservative wings. The Left should have said from the word go: a plague on all your houses. I would like to think that Trump’s offensive using similar language and tactics to the liberals might awaken them, but the woke are still profoundly slumbering at the wheel. Although Lukianoff is a liberal, his book should be a wakeup call to them. I couldn’t and didn’t even try to do justice to it here. But to quote Bertold Brecht, a man who would be cancelled were he alive today, “Reach for the book, it is a weapon.” Unfortunately, whole swathes of the Left don’t read anymore. They get their politics from Tik Tok and other social media platforms and whatever the middle-class mob are currently irked about before going back to work at mammy and daddy’s company. Lukianoff puts them all to shame in pointing out the reactionary and self-defeating nature of Cancel Culture.

References

[1] Lukianoff, G. & Schlott, R. (2023) The Canceling of the American Mind. New York. Simon & Schuster. para 5.45

[2] Ibíd., para 5.50

[3] Ibíd., para 26.3 to 26.17

[4] The Guardian (08/10/20205) UK universities offered to monitor students’ social media for arms firms, emails show. Daniel Boffey & Aaron Walawalkar. 

[5] The Scottish Daily Express (03/04/2025) Protests at Edinburgh Uni gender-critical film screening were designed to ‘create hostile environment’. H. William, PA & B. Borland. 

[6] The Student News (06/07/2025) UoE shamed by UN for Gaza complicity as graduates protest. Dom Croot. 

[7] Lukianoff, G. & Schlott, R. (2023) Op. Cit. Para 12.34

[8] Ibíd., Apendix II

[9] Ibíd., para 12.38. Lukianoff deals with all of this in the book, however, greater detail is freely available from FIRE’s site.

[10] LA Times (25/01/2025) Loyalty tests and MAGA checks: Inside the Trump White House’s intense screening of job-seekers. Matthew Lee et al. 

[11] PBS (02/10/2025) Trump asks 9 colleges to commit to his political agenda for better Access to federal money.

[12] Lukianoff, G. & Schlott, R. (2023) Op. Cit. Para 12.7

[13] Lukianoff, G. & Schlott, R. (2023) Op. Cit. Para 12.43

[14] University Herald (20/09/2025) Universities Fire Staff Over Posts on Charlie Kirk’s Assassination. Chris John. 

[15] Lukianoff, G. & Schlott, R. (2023) Op. Cit. Para 34.11

[16] Lukianoff, G. & Schlott, R. (2023) Op. Cit. Para 27.58 to 27.64

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

Cancel Culture 🪶 The Trump Offensive

Right Wing Watch 👀 Written by Peter Montgomery,


Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts released a remarkable video Thursday defending Tucker Carlson’s friendly two-hour interview with far-right personality Nick Fuentes.

Carlson has been drawing some harsh criticism from right-wing political figures for platforming Fuentes, who has declared his love for Adolf Hitler and told Carlson that he has always been an admirer of Josef Stalin. Fuentes responded to those critics with an antisemitic rant saying his Jewish critics should “get the fuck out of America and go to Israel.” That makes Robertson’s decision to ride to Carlson’s rescue even more notable.

Fuentes is using his recent tour of right-wing podcasts to simultaneously downplay his bigotry and anti-democratic extremism while establishing that his racism, antisemitism, misogyny, and Christian nationalist fascism deserve a place at the conservative movement’s table.

Carlson’s interview was Fuentes’s biggest success in that effort – until Roberts gave it the endorsement of the enormously influential Heritage Foundation. No wonder Fuentes is grateful.

“I disagree with, and even abhor, things that Nick Fuentes says, but canceling him is not the answer, either,” Roberts said in his video.

Heritage Foundation’s Kevin Roberts 🪶 Conservatives Shouldn’t Cancel Nick Fuentes

Gearóid Ó Loingsigh ☭ writing in Substack on 22-August-2025.


(So who shall we put on the list?)

Fascism is on the march around the world. Donald Trump is on an authoritarian warpath both at home and abroad, the Zionist Nazis are brazenly, openly and proudly engaged in a live streamed genocide against the Palestinians, the British outlaw protest groups, the German police remind us all that they have lost none of the swagger of the SS by beating up women on Palestinian marches, arresting people for wearing Keffiyehs and bizarrely anyone caught speaking Irish. It is hard to imagine in this context that Fascism also creeps up on us, the groundwork is laid years before, by people who should know better and do, but also know what their bank balance, pension and health plan look like too.

The Irish poet W.B. Yeats in his bucolic poem The Lake Isle of Innisfree says of the place that

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

Peace for him was something that crept up on him, small things added up, creating an atmosphere, a context. If you read the mainstream media and listen to liberal handwringing, Fascism is an overnight phenomenon that they had nothing to do with in creating. It is all the fault of Trump and Netanyahu and it happened not quite overnight but in a short period of time. But no, there were lots of crickets singing along the path and many a linnet spreading its wings. There are many elements to it, the collapse of working-class resistance and leadership, the stranglehold of the trade union bureaucracy on workers’ attempts to fight, a loss of political perspectives and reference points and the NGOisation of a left that has become dependent on state largesse just to exist. Censorship and the stifling of dissent is one small, but important element and it didn’t come out of the blue, the groundwork was laid long ago by right wing forces, often with the support of liberals or their stony silence. You can’t say From the River to Sea without fear of arrest in Germany and many other places. But of course, there are lots of things you can’t say.

When the US went after Julian Assange many liberals not only did not support him, but took at face value, not only the allegations of sexual assault and rape, which were bogus, but also the concern of those pursuing him on those charges. There are few presidents of the US, if any, who have not engaged in inappropriate sexual behaviour. And in Sweden, where the alleged assaults took place, politicians forced to resign over such issues demand severance payments even when it involves a minor.[1] The Swedes were not interested in the alleged assaults but in handing Assange over to the US and he was left to rot, first in the Ecuadorian Embassy and later in Belmarsh prison. It sent a message that we are not entitled to truthful information about what the great and the good do. Edward Snowden learnt that lesson too and had to go into exile, paradoxically to a country not known for its press freedom either. But when you flee persecution, beggars can’t be choosers and you go wherever affords you safety.

Aside from going after those who sought to put information into the public domain the dear leaders preferred we knew nothing about, there are those whose works, both fiction and non-fiction are subjected to attempts at censorship, sometimes not because of what the particular work says, but because of the authors views on unrelated matters. Liberals, conservatives, religious nuts and of course that moany self-obsessed cherub generation, that considers itself so progressive but hold many reactionary positions all engage in censorship in one form or other, sometimes of the same author but for different reasons. JK Rowling is criticised by trans activists for her defence of women’s spaces, whilst conservatives and religious nuts accuse her of promoting witchcraft. All have called for her books to be boycotted, banned, or otherwise suppressed. In the case of the conservatives, they actually managed to have some of her books removed from school shelves in Zeeland, Michigan and Nashville, Tennessee in 2019 over concerns about witchcraft.[2] A trans activist’s wet dream, though if witchcraft were real, well that would solve whether you can change sex or not.

The link between these attitudes and the current rampant attempts at or actual fascism (Israel is beyond doubt a fascist regime) is never made. In the US between 2001 and 2020 organised groups challenged 46 titles per year but in 2024 this reached 4,190 titles for that year alone. Conservatives, fascists and the deranged right challenge a wide range of materials, particularly LGBTQ+ titles, sometimes on the grounds of age appropriateness. Some of the books may indeed be inappropriate for children, but they really don’t want any positive books or discussion of LGB lives or TQ+. These are the people who in other periods across the world have banned books such as D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and also books such as the Joy of Sex. Prudes with issues about their own sexuality, who have perhaps never enjoyed sex, or a book, for that matter.

Liberals and conservatives like to think the authors they want banned, or those whose voice they would censor, fit into nice neat categories of reprobates. They don’t. Margaret Atwood is a case in point. She is a feminist and her novel The Handmaid’s Tale about a dystopian world where conservative attitudes towards women are taken to their logical conclusion is a feminist text and now thanks to the TV series a social reference point for all. It resonates with many women, as what it portrays is not a million miles removed from current reality. However, in 2018 she ran the gauntlet when she criticised the #Me Too movement. She didn’t disagree with women saying they had been raped, sexually assaulted or had their careers ruined because they had stood up to the powerful Hollywood men who tried to force them to have sex with them. She argued instead about the procedures of the movement and the idea that the allegation was enough to convict. She stated:

The #MeToo moment is a symptom of a broken legal system. All too frequently, women and other sexual-abuse complainants couldn't get a fair hearing through institutions – including corporate structures – so they used a new tool: the internet. Stars fell from the skies. This has been very effective, and has been seen as a massive wake-up call. But what next? The legal system can be fixed, or our society could dispose of it. Institutions, corporations and workplaces can houseclean, or they can expect more stars to fall, and also a lot of asteroids.

If the legal system is bypassed because it is seen as ineffectual, what will take its place? Who will be the new power brokers? It won't be the Bad Feminists like me. We are acceptable neither to Right nor to Left. In times of extremes, extremists win. Their ideology becomes a religion, anyone who doesn't puppet their views is seen as an apostate, a heretic or a traitor, and moderates in the middle are annihilated. Fiction writers are particularly suspect because they write about human beings, and people are morally ambiguous. The aim of ideology is to eliminate ambiguity.[3]

This seems a reasonable statement, a starting point for a discussion, but no, she was hounded and the usual calls for cancellation were made. She survived. She got back into their good books because she was on the side of the trans in the debate about women’s spaces. People are complex, have varied ideas that vary over time. This is not acceptable to the cherubs. Absolute uniformity of opinion is demanded on all issues at all times. Or at least on all the issues that the high priests of the dogma decide are important. This is easily seen on the right, where there is rarely a need for caricature. Frequently amongst liberals there is no need for caricature either, but some of the more sophisticated types are able to present themselves as being more nuanced, regardless of whether they actually are or not. Their position is that anyone who disagrees with them should be banished to some literary Devil’s Island, where like Papillon they may be allowed to escape many years later, if even then.

Margaret Atwood has once again come under fire. This time from the right. How the liberals who pilloried her will object, I do not know, given their past record on censorship and on her specifically. In her native Canada, Edmonton’s Public School Board has decided to remove 200 book titles from the libraries, including Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale due to sexual content.[4] Amongst the titles to be removed is The Color Purple by Alice Walker, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou. It is laughable, but liberals and are ill placed to object given their own behaviour. They have asked for everything from Shakespeare to Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mocking Bird to be removed from school and even university libraries. The cherubs have even demanded that some books be removed from courses, or that they be given trigger warnings when reading Shakespeare, students of history can even demand that when studying WWII or the Holocaust that they be given trigger warnings. They were coddled for years by liberals. It went hand in hand with the notion of safe spaces i.e. areas in which you couldn’t be challenged by ideas that made you feel uncomfortable. This led in the case of Maryam Namazie, an Iranian feminist and an ex-Muslim, who was invited in 2015 to give a talk on blasphemy in the age of ISIS by the Atheist, Securalist and Humanist Society at Goldsmiths being shut down midway through her talk. She was interrupted by the Islamic Society, who even turned off her PowerPoint presentation. When she told them to be quiet, the head of the society shouted Safe Space! Safe Space! Intimidation! The Feminist Society on campus did not support the Iranian feminist’s right to speak but rather the Islamic Society’s right to shut her down. There is a hierarchy of opinions and the liberals accepted and argued that there are lots of liberal views that should not be heard, ever.

You would think that given the recent history in stifling opinion on Palestine the left and liberals would have learnt the lesson. But no. Not one bit of it. Trump is not the only idiot who doubles down on nonsense. Most of the liberals do it with a similar zeal and lack of reference to the facts.

John Boyne, the Irish author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is a case in point. His novella Earth, about sexual abuse, made the longlist for the Polari Prize, an award specifically for LGBTQ+ authors. He is a gay man and so qualifies. However, making even the long list brought howls of rage from the cherubs and their time worn elders. He should have been removed from the list they claimed, not on the basis of the literary merit of his novella about sexual abuse, but rather because of his position on trans, an issue not dealt with it in his work.[5] The uproar has led to the cancelation of the prize this year and its future is in doubt. Boyne himself was saddened by it all and asked the authors who withdrew their names to resubmit them and he would ask not to make the shortlist as he considered it a worthy prize for some of the new authors.[6] It fell on deaf ears. His sin in the matter was unforgiveable. Yes, even liberals talk like conservatives and have notions of sins: original, venial and mortal. His was a mortal sin with no redemption. He said biological sex was real, he as a gay man was attracted to other men, not genitals and less still some amorphous notion of gender and blue hair. I am paraphrasing of course, but that is about the measure of what he said.

What has all this got to do with fascism? A lot. The idea that some ideas are fought by suppressing them, is a common one in capitalist societies, mainly used by the state and the right. We have many examples of this, the most infamous of which is perhaps the McCarthyite witch hunt in the US, Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act in Ireland which banned interviews with Sinn Féin, the Ley Mordaza in Spain which banned the filming of the cops, laws in many countries that make insulting the royal parasites on the throne a criminal offence (Spain, Thailand etc). Now however, we have had about two decades of liberals demanding the state take such action, organising it themselves when the state fails to act, arguing for increased measures of suppression of free speech and even assembly, thought crime legislation and not just against right wingers, but also heretics from within their own liberal ranks.

Of course, were it just liberals we could dismiss them with the contempt they deserve and say no more. However, they are joined in their crusade by certain “Marxist” currents, some of which have been to the fore in this nonsense. Marx had a lot to say about censorship and why he opposed it. Trotsky also stated that “any workers ‘leader’ who arms the bourgeois state with special means to control public opinion in general, and the press in particular, is a traitor (bold not in original).”[7] Many of those demanding censorship and calling for cancel culture, such as the SWP in Britain and PbP in Ireland consider themselves to be Trotskyist, though they increasingly downplay their origins. Traitors all in the eyes of old man Trotsky. Lest anyone think, this is some particular aberration of Trotskyist groups, sorry to disappoint, many Stalinist groups and in an inherently contradictory manner Anarchists also call for such measures.

These liberals and erstwhile Marxists, of various hues, are not to blame for the rise of Fascism, but they did contribute to it by legitimating censorship and the very notion of thought crimes. They argued for states to have the tools they now use against pro-Palestinian activists and they have left the wider movement ill-prepared to challenge such attacks as their disagreement with the state is not whether thought crimes exist, or free speech should be curtailed, but about who the state should target. In their reformist cretinism they thought they had the state on their side. A genuine unforgiveable error. Perhaps it crept up on them, but now they see the monster in all its putrid decadence, they marvel at their baby instead of learning the lesson.

References

[1] The Nordic Times (11/04/2025) Swedish expolitician demands payout info after pedophile scandal. 

[2] The Guardian (23/08/2025) Banned! The 20 books they didn’t want you to read. Steven Poole.

[3] The Globe and Mail (13/01/20218) Am I a bad feminist? Margaret Atwood. 

[4] Global News (29/08/2025) Edmonton Public removing more than 200 library books to comply with provincial rules.

[5] Author statement on the Polari Prize Longlist. 

[6] The Telegraph (19/08/2025) Here’s what happened when they tried to cancel me. John Boyne. 

[7] Trotsky, L. (1938) Freedom of the Press and the Working Class. 

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

Fascism Comes Dropping Slow

Irish Times ☀ Written by Ella Creamer.

Ten authors nominated for this year’s Polari prizes, a set of UK awards celebrating LGBTQ+ literature, have withdrawn from the awards over the longlisting of John Boyne, who has described himself as a “Terf” – the acronym for trans-exclusionary radical feminist.

Two judges have also withdrawn from the prize process, and more than 800 writers and publishing industry workers have signed a statement calling on Polari to formally remove Boyne from the longlist. Boyne, who was longlisted for the main Polari book prize for his novella Earth, is best known for his 2006 novel The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and also reviews books for The Irish Times.

Author Nicola Dinan, who won the Polari first book prize last year for her novel Bellies, resigned from this year’s jury for the debut prize. Guardian journalist Jason Okundaye asked for his book Revolutionary Acts to be removed from this year’s first book prize longlist, while Andrew McMillan withdrew his book Pity from the longlist for the overall Polari book prize for non-debuts.

Heartstopper author Alice Oseman along with the writers Nikesh Shukla, Julia Armfield, Naoise Dolan, Seán Hewitt and Kirsty Logan are among the hundreds to have signed the statement.

Continue @ Irish Times.

Polari Prize 📚 Nominees And Judges Withdraw Over Inclusion Of John Boyne On Longlist

The Guardian 🗞 Written by Charlotte Edwardes. Recommended by Gearóid Ó Loingsigh.

Recommended by It’s been 11 years since she published a novel. In that time, the author has lost both parents, seen Trump become president twice – and finally returned to fiction after a bruising reaction to her comments on gender.

I arrive early to meet Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the Nigerian-American writer, feminist, author of Americanah. Her home, just outside Baltimore, looks Scandinavian somehow amid the snow crust and woodland. Adichie is mid-photoshoot, but the stylist shows me through to the kitchen, telling me to help myself to roast chicken and rice. 

At a desk in the corner, Adichie’s nine-year-old daughter is wearing headphones and absorbed in what looks like homework. In the middle of the room, watched over by a nanny, are two smiling, 10-month-old boys, one sitting in an activity centre, shrieking with joy, the other gnawing a toy.

I’d read a lot about Adichie’s life in the last few years: the sudden death of her father, Nigeria’s first professor of statistics, in 2020, the second shock of her mother’s death months later in 2021. I’d heard her on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour in 2023 discussing how motherhood is a glorious gift that comes at a cost: “I could probably have written two novels had I not had my child.” Nowhere had I heard that she’d had twins.

“You’ve met my babies,” Adichie laughs when she appears in a vibrant orange dress. She sits to remove the hair extensions she has worn for the shoot. “I want to protect my children. I’m OK with having them mentioned, but I don’t want the piece to become about them.” Later, she tells me that for a long time people didn’t know she had a husband, either – she married Ivara Esege, a hospital physician, in 2009. “So, here’s the thing, Nigerians are … ” Nosy? “They want to know about your personal life. Because of that, I am resistant. I very rarely talk about it.”

Continue @ The Guardian.

‘Cancel Culture? We Should Stop It 🪶 End Of Story’

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