The admirable Brendan O'Neill, free speech hero, editor of Spiked, writes:
"Disagree with the cultural elites and they will try to destroy you.
"An Oxford professor is provided with security guards after she received threats from trans activists who hate her views on sex and gender. Actors call on other actors to denounce and effectively blacklist Laurence Fox after he criticised the excesses of woke culture. A UK university employs conversation monitors to listen out for, and reprimand, ‘racial microaggressions’. And that’s all in just the last few days. Anyone who denies that there’s a crisis of freedom of speech is lying to themselves. The culture of intolerance is growing. It must be resisted. In 2020, let’s stand up for the right to think, say, write and tweet freely. For the right to dissent from orthodoxies old and new and to express our convictions openly, however unpopular they might be. The health of public life and of democracy itself depends on the free exchange of ideas and beliefs."
https://www.spiked-online.com/...
The ongoing fallout from Laurence Fox’s appearance on Question Time last Thursday is nothing short of staggering. It confirms, in a chilling way, how intolerant the cultural elites have become and how viciously they will pounce on anyone who deviates from their political and moral script. Actors, singers, artists and the rest of us, too, have been put on notice: ‘Disagree with us, the righteous woke people, and you will be destroyed.’
Fox, an actor and singer-songwriter, is now essentially a speechcriminal. Members of the actors’ union Equity have effectively called for him to be blacklisted, like PC incarnations of Joe McCarthy. Leading journalists have denounced him as ‘far right’ even though he said not one single thing that could be deemed ‘far right’. But then, the ‘far right’ insult is rarely intended to be accurate these days. Instead, it is a means of marking someone out as evil, as disobedient, as too questioning of correct-thought as defined by PC elites. Calling Fox ‘far right’ is another species of blacklisting, the foul intention being to discourage producers from ever employing him again.
And what, precisely, were Fox’s speechcrimes? This is where it gets genuinely scary. Everything he said on QT was perfectly reasonable. Great numbers of people will have been cheering him on. He said he was bored of the idea that the media criticism of Meghan Markle is driven by racism. He questioned the idea that the next Labour leader should be chosen on the basis of sex and said instead that we should judge politicians by their beliefs and achievements. He mocked celebs for lecturing everyone about climate change. He pushed back against an audience member who suggested he enjoyed white privilege, pointing out that it wasn’t him, Fox, who mentioned people’s skin colour, but them, his voluble detractors. ...