Brendan O’Neill

The worst thing about 2016 — an otherwise bracing year of political upset and oligarchical tears — has been the mainstreaming of the insult ‘fascist’. Anyone who sticks it to the status quo, whether by rejecting the EU or plumbing for Trump over Clinton, risks being smeared with the F-word. Even the normally measured New York Times flirted with the idea that loads of Americans and Europeans might be fascists, or at least facilitators of fascism. Trump’s victory speaks to a possible ‘revival of fascism’, it said, echoing the fears of an army of observers and tweeters who see in Brexit and Trump the stirrings of a kind of Nazism. The terrifying casualness with which the F-word is now flung about could be glimpsed in the Michael Sheen controversy.

The one good thing about Twitterstorms is that they tend, witlessly, to prove the point of the person they’re hounding. In the very act of whipping up fume and fury against someone who’s said something you’re not meant to say, these virtual pitchfork gangs confirm that person’s point, which was normally something like: ‘Have you ever noticed how risky it has become to express your thoughts on [some heated issue]?’ ‘You can’t say that!’, hollers the Twittermob in response. Well, yes, quite. So it was for Simon Jenkins this week. He wrote a column in the Guardian saying the one group of people you’re allowed to hate these days is old white men.

The Twitch-hunters, those antsy, intolerant guardians of what it’s permissible to say on Twitter, have claimed another scalp. Eric Bristow’s. The former darts champion, lovably known as the Crafty Cockney, will now probably be better known as hate-speaker thanks to the offence-taking army that took umbrage at his tweets about child abuse. For this quarrelsome mob has the power to destroy reputations, and it looks like it has successfully destroyed Bristow’s. Bristow’s speechcrime, or tweet-crime, was to gruffly express his views on the child-abuse scandal rocking football right now.

Intolerance wears a progressive mask in the 21st century. Students hound political undesirables off campus in the name of ‘protecting diversity’. Adverts are banned from the London Underground in the name of women’s rights. Rappers and other hotheads are barred from Britain on the basis that their utterances are ‘not conducive’ to our good, progressive way of life. And now assorted leftists and tweeters are seeking to punish tabloid newspapers, to starve them of big revenue, in the name of promoting tolerance. Yes, intolerance - in this case of the redtop press and its right to say what it wants - is tolerance.

Who’s more hysterical: the Daily Mail for branding three judges ‘enemies of the people’ or the Dailymailphobes who have spent the past three days promiscuously breaking Godwin’s Law and accusing the Mail of being a paper-and-ink reincarnation of Hitler, an aspiring destroyer of judicial independence, and a menace to British civilisation that ought to be boycotted by all decent people and no longer handed out on British Airways flights because it is ‘against democracy and the rule of law’? I’m gonna go out on a limb and say it’s the latter. And that the irony is delicious: the very people accusing the Mail of being unhinged have themselves given new meaning to the word unhinged. Seriously, someone should take their temperatures.

This week, national treasure David Attenborough joined the post-Brexit pile-on of the plebs. Should the little people really be trusted to make decisions about complicated matters like the EU, he asked? You know the answer: of course we shouldn’t. We’re too dim. We don’t have as many degrees as him. The point of parliamentary democracy, he says, is that ‘we find someone we respect who we think is probably wiser than we are’ and then we trust them to ‘ponder… difficult things’. That’s far preferable to asking people who’d prefer to go to a funfair than the National Gallery — he really says this, in reference to a quote from Ken Clarke's new book — to decide the fate of Britain's relationship with the EU.

If you thought the public shaming and punishment of people for ridiculing religion was a thing of the past — a dark past when you’d be put in the stocks, or worse, for failing to bend your knee to certain gods and beliefs — then think again. Just look at the treatment of Olympian gymnast Louis Smith. Since a video of him taking the mick out of Islam was leaked in October, he’s been pilloried in the press, pressured to recant his heretical humour, dragged on to TV to repent before the Loose Women (the new guardians of public morality, apparently), and now he’s been suspended from his job for two months. All for having a laugh about a religion.

How did mocking Islam become the great speechcrime of our times? Louis Smith, the gymnast, is the latest to fall foul of the weird new rule against ridiculing Islam. A leaked video shows Smith laughing as his fellow gymnast, Luke Carson, pretends to pray and chants ‘Allahu Akbar’. Smith says something derogatory about the belief in ‘60 virgins’ (he means 72 virgins). Following a firestorm online, and the launch of an investigation by British Gymnastics, Smith has engaged in some pretty tragic contrition. He says he is ‘deeply sorry’ for the ‘deep offence’ he caused. He’s now basically on his knees for real, praying for pity, begging for forgiveness from the guardians of what may be thought and said.

Just when you thought the trigger-warning trend on campus couldn’t get any more bonkers it’s reported that archaeology students are being allowed to dodge discussions of ‘traumatic’ historic events. Yes, students  whose entire academic mission is to dig up bones, pore over old stuff and work out what the hell mankind was doing / thinking a thousand-odd years ago are being warned that such excavations can uncover ‘disturbing’ stuff that might ‘traumatise’ them because 'bones can be scary'. So they should feel free to nip out of class if it gets too much. Archaeology students being told archaeology is a scary pursuit — I think we’ve reached peak campus madness. The students in question are at University College London.

Is it a crime now to tell rubbish jokes? The bizarre and frankly cruel treatment of Paul Gascoigne suggests it might be. Yesterday, at Dudley Magistrates Court, Gazza was found guilty of using ‘threatening or abusive words’ and fined £2,000. His crime was to say the following about a black security guard who had been assigned to look after him during his show An Evening With Gazza at Wolverhampton Civic Hall last year: ‘Can you smile please, because I can’t see you?’ Some people might find that funny; I, personally, don’t. But a court case? A criminal record? A fine? For cracking a joke? The precedent set by this case is terrifying.

Should it be a crime to hate women? This unfortunate question is thrown up by the news that misogyny might soon become a hate crime across England and Wales. Two months ago, Nottingham Police launched a trial ‘crackdown on sexism’, investigating cases of, among other things, ‘verbal harassment’ and ‘unwanted advances’ towards women. Now top coppers from across the country are looking into criminalising misogyny elsewhere. I find this terrifying.