Gavin McInnes

‘They thought they were being gay as in homosexual but they were just being gay as in lame,’ Gavin McInnes, founder of the Proud Boys, tells me. Since Saturday night the #ProudBoys hashtag has trended on Twitter — accompanied by photos of gay couples snogging, LGBTs flaunting their gayness, and a fresh dump of those milquetoast, cringe-inducing memes of the political left. The ‘real proud boys’ gay campaign comes after the Proud Boys group made national headlines last week. During the first presidential debate on Tuesday, Democrat nominee Joe Biden and moderator Chris Wallace insisted that Trump condemned the multi-ethnic, pro-Trump men’s group as an example of rampant ‘white supremacy’.

Millennial journo-geeks have declared cancel culture over. Tim Pool cites Ricky Gervais’s ability to host the Golden Globes despite a campaign to stop him and J.K. Rowling’s refusal to apologize for insisting there are only two genders. TIME magazine’s resident black Muslim Sarah Hagi also claims that cancel culture is a non-issue and tells us, ‘While some powerful men may not have the status they once did, they have hardly been canceled.’ She then goes on to cite Louis C.K.’s recent sold-out shows. She ignores the fact that his sexual transgressions cost him $35 million and forced him into hiding for half a decade. Well, as someone who has been canceled, I can tell you this culture is far from over.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum, the Romans used to say: ‘Of the dead speak only good.’ We can speak nothing else of the friend and longtime Spectator contributor we lost in January. Sir Roger Scruton was a fearless and humane advocate for art, beauty, faith, peoplehood and tradition; a fierce defender of the right to free and honest speech; and a clear-eyed advocate for the legal inheritances and cultural unity of the English-speaking peoples. He was one of the first people to undergo ordeal by ‘cancel culture’, or persecution by progressives, which is why we dedicate this free-speech issue to him. In the early 1980s, Roger was effectively expelled from the academy for expressing conservative opinions in public.