It’s been a bad week for the ‘cancel culture is a myth’ lobby. For those woke bros of the pretend left who squawk ‘It’s not cancel culture, it’s consequences culture!’ every time someone is punished for their beliefs. Women hounded from their jobs, blacklisted by university campuses, set upon by heaving mobs of feral misogynists, all for the thoughtcrime of knowing men are not women, and still the censorship apologists say: ‘Cancel culture isn’t real.’ ‘This isn’t a witch hunt, it’s just God’s consequences’, these petty tyrants would have said in Salem.
The cancellation deniers were mugged by truth this week. First we had the extraordinary sight of the good people of Comedy Unleashed traipsing around Edinburgh to try to find a venue for their comedy night. Their line-up included Graham Linehan, you see, and his insistence that people with penises are men, not women, makes him a public enemy to the woke Joe McCarthys. Not one but two venues cancelled – yes, cancelled – these thoughtcriminals of comedy. Eventually they had to perform their set on the street, outside the Scottish parliament, a grim snapshot of the decline and fall of Enlightened Scotland.
Then we had the shaming of David Greig. The blacklisting of Linehan and friends is an incredibly important moment in cancel culture, but I hope it doesn’t overshadow the Stasi-style humiliation suffered by Greig for his wrongthink. He is one of Scotland’s best-known playwrights. His works have been performed everywhere from the National Theatre to the Royal Shakespeare Company. And this week he fell victim to the culture of denunciation, the frenzy for finger-pointing, that swirls through woke circles. He was snitched on, exposed, shamed, and pressured to recant his profane and wicked thoughts. What did he do? He liked two tweets posted by ‘TERFs’.
Read more: The rise and rise of trans McCarthyism
