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This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Those who want me canceled should probably admit that their efforts have been mostly unsuccessful. I have been banned from Twitter for speaking about the impact of gender-identity legislation on women’s rights, but I haven’t been silenced. Long before I began on trans issues, I’d already fallen into disfavor among those who claim progress as their own, on account of my opposition to the sex trade. The New New Left, for those not in the know, believes the invisible hand of the market will regulate the global sex trade, mysteriously transforming one of the most dangerous and exploitative industries in the world into something ethical, despite all evidence to the contrary.

For an ordinary girl from Florida whose Twitter presence is largely focused on her rescue pets (shout out to Jolene, Dixie Belle and Mean Cat) and her love of pop culture, I get trolled a lot. Perhaps people don’t enjoy my hot takes on J.Lo’s Oscar snub as much as I’d hoped. Or maybe the internet has lost its appetite for cute pictures of dogs — a sign of the apocalypse if ever there was one. But it’s probably because this Florida Man is my older brother. For the record, I wouldn’t have it any other way. Though, like most siblings, we don’t agree on everything, I love him and am deeply proud of him.

What was the most entertaining part of the first day of Donald Trump's impeachment hearings? Was it George Kent's twee but tragic bowtie? Ambassador Taylor's podcast-worthy tone? Adam Schiff claiming he didn't know who the whistleblower was? Frankly, there weren't too many moments to choose from. Which is perhaps why Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona decided to make his own fun. Read the first letter of each of his tweets from the proceedings... https://twitter.com/RepGosar/status/1194708768149430272 https://twitter.com/RepGosar/status/1194698583922098177 https://twitter.com/RepGosar/status/1194693002872184837 https://twitter.com/RepGosar/status/1194689552004321287 https://twitter.com/RepGosar/status/1194676222300696576 https://twitter.

It was a season of complete insanity and boredom. At least that’s how Virginia Woolf recorded the year 1932 in her diary. Her friends kept dying. Europe stared into the abyss and the abyss marched past its windows wearing brown shirts. ‘All England’, she wrote, was ‘spoiled.’She recorded her husband Leonard, as he tended to the flowers in their Sussex garden, muttering: ‘Things have gone wrong somehow.’For liberals today, as they did for Mrs and Mr Woolf many decades ago, things have gone wrong.

Dramatic accusations of ‘doxxing’ online annoy me no end. It may seem like a petty complaint to rail on about, but as a devoted fan of communicating in coherent ways, I continually insist that words mean things and that we use said words as accurately as possible. Today’s postmodern youth claim that disagreement is violence, men who enjoy femininity are literal females, and the reading of words that challenge their preferred narrative causes PTSD. But our dictionaries have not yet been burned, and so many of us know better.

Controversial social media star Donald J. Trump has jumped to the defense of controversial social media stars Alex Jones and Paul Joseph Watson after controversial social media company Facebook banned them from Facebook, Instagram and other key institutions of the political-media complex. ‘So surprised to see Conservative thinkers like James Woods banned from Twitter, and Paul Watson banned from Facebook!’ Trump tweeted on Friday night. This is fake news. Twitter haven’t banned Woods. The digital nannies have only put him on the naughty step for appearing to suggest that Robert Mueller and his fellow reporters should be hanged. Woods and Watson are only ‘Conservative thinkers’ in the ‘Easter worshippers’ sense.

My first thought as news broke of the catastrophic fires raging in Notre-Dame Cathedral yesterday was, ‘I need to find the pictures of my trip to France.’ As the 856-year-old church creaked and crumbled, and smoke billowed over the French capital where Parisians had gathered to sing hymns, watching their beloved landmark burn in horror, my attention turned to the true victim of this tragedy: me, an American woman with an Instagram account. People don’t understand how much pressure there is as an American to hijack global heartbreak and personalize it. As a social media user, it’s imperative that in such dark times for humanity, you let everyone know you have a connection to this particular disaster, no matter how obscure or far removed in the past.

A while back, a friend in the San Francisco Bay Area confessed to me in a hushed tone that she was thinking of buying a gun. The neighborhood was a safe one. But she and her husband, no-nonsense tech executives with reasonably public profiles – the kind that might draw attention from internet crazies – but far from the means to hire private security, had calculated just how long it would take for police to reach their home in the event of an emergency, and they weren’t satisfied with it. With the Bay Area’s real estate market being what it is, giving up their below-market-value lease seemed more outlandish than exercising their Second Amendment rights.