No-platforming

Friday

Ben Sixsmith

Conservatives talk about cancel culture too much

If you are on the right I suspect you have heard leftists saying something like this: ‘Thousands of people are dying from coronavirus, the Chinese and Indians are fighting, young black men are being killed on the streets and all conservatives can talk about is “cancel culture”. What is up with that?’Well, in the past few weeks there have been attempts, many successful, to force people out of their jobs for discussing social science studies and genetic research, for saying all lives matter, for questioning whether the killing of George Floyd was racially motivated, for publishing a US senator’s opinion piece, for making edgy jokes, for refusing to ‘walk around with a BLM sign’, for wearing blackface to a Halloween party two years ago et cetera.

canceled cancel culture

Thursday

Julie Bindel

Meghan Murphy’s war on Twitter

Canadian feminist writer, Meghan Murphy, who was permanently suspended from Twitter last November, is suing the social media site for deceptive trade practices and breach of contract. ‘Twitter would never have attracted the hundreds of millions of users it boasts today had Twitter let it be known that it would arbitrarily ban users who did not agree with the political and social views of its management or impose sweeping new policies banning the expression of widely-held viewpoints and perspectives on public issues,’ Murphy’s lawyers submitted. Good for her!

meghan murphy

Friday

Sam Leith

Conservatives are wrong about free speech

‘There. I said it.’ That phrase, and the attitude it strikes, says something pretty specific. It doesn’t just say: here’s what I think. It says: ‘Here’s what I think, and, you know what? It’s what nobody except me dares to say in public.’ It says: I’m brave. It says: I speak truth to power. It says: here I am on the battlements. It also says: I’m a grade-A chocolate-coated plonker. And though most people are too fly these days, too aware of the lurking threat of Craig Brown, to use that form of words, there’s a good deal of there-I-said-it-ism about these days. In particular, when it comes to the issue of ‘free speech’.