POLITICS
Woke Witch Hunts of the 21st Century — Trial by Social Fire
The case of Graham Linehan
The will to purge humanity of some form of ghastly unsightliness has always been with us. Those doing the purging are confronted with a challenge to their worldview and core beliefs that is at once horrifying to behold and impossible to permit.
In a great many cases, only death will suffice to rid the world of the cancerous growth festering within the poor infected creature: the persecution of early Christians at the hands of Romans and Jews, the persecution of Jews and heretics at the hands of Christians, the Jacobin Reign of Terror, the Stalinist Purges, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and the Indonesian mass killings of 1965–1966 which involved some level of US complicity, to name but a few.
Then we have purges where the price was not a person’s mortal coil but rather their professional, political and social existence. Here we see McCarthyism and countless other red scares, and the Lavender Scare, where thousands of Americans were persecuted for their sexuality and forced to resign from the US federal workforce.
It is a sign of civilisational progress that we are no longer talking about a purge to the death across the Western World for the most part, but rather professional purgatory and social excommunication.
The lunacy of much of the right makes it pretty easy to see it for what it is. Moreover, it uses wokeism as a universal boogeyman to put the fear of God into its believers and scare the shit out of society at large.
And the woke left uses this very fearmongering as a smokescreen to mask its own horror. This has become the woke sine qua non in pre-empting any scrutinising and questioning of its views and values, justified or not, and I encounter this defence as much here on Medium as I do in traditional media.
Yet, cancel culture, ever-changing pronouns and the recalibration of language, radical notions on race and gender, transgender athletes, transgender children and the rabid shaming and silencing of anyone who dares to question woke ideology are not simply chimaeras cooked up by the lunatic right.
The woke left is just as consumed by the will to hunt out witches as the right, but being in the ascendency in many western countries, its transgressions and tyrannical tendencies are all the more perilous.
Comedy writer Graham Linehan has felt the thousand-ton weight of the pitchfork from on high as the full force of woke fury seeks to erase him from social existence.
Let’s take a look at the heretic and the heresy — firstly, the maledictions themselves and the content of the supposed crime, and secondly, let us examine the court and what its crusade means for society at large.
The crime
Graham Linehan is an Irish comedy writer who co-wrote what is widely considered one of the greatest Irish and British sitcoms of all time, Father Ted, and wrote and directed the cult favourites The IT Crowd and Black Books.
Graham Linehan has a very strong stance on trans and gender issues; he has been called a bigot, transphobic and anti-trans (to put it mildly) and has been kicked off Twitter twice.
Most recently, he was axed from two venues where he was due to perform stand-up at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, one of the biggest celebrations of culture and arts on the planet. He is considering legal action against the first, the Leith Arches, that cut his slot for his views, and, in the end, managed to perform a small set outside the Scottish Parliament.
This whole situation started in 2008 after an episode of The IT Crowd dubbed the ‘trans episode’ featured one of the main characters unknowingly dating a transgender woman. It was not well received by the trans community and was seen as sexist and transphobic. And this reaction was not, in turn, well received by Linehan.
And ever since, he has become ever deeper embroiled in a war with trans activists, many in the trans community and the woke left in general.
What are his views and what has he said exactly?
Firstly, he says there is a ‘moral imperative’ to be able to talk about all the issues associated with gender and how they affect society at large and each and every community. People should be allowed to empty into the debate without fear of being shamed, silenced and pummelled into submission.
Having seen both women and feminists being constantly harassed and bullied online, for standing up for their rights and the rights of their children, and for holding any opinions that go against radical trans ideology, he felt obligated to make a stand and use his platform to fight ‘such vicious misogyny’.
He resolutely believes that women have a right to single sex spaces and that transgender women should not be able to participate in female sports nor be housed in female prisons or rape crisis centres. Moreover, he fears even the word ‘woman’ is being erased.
He is sceptical of gender self-identification.
He does accept that gender dysmorphia is real and says that anyone in such a situation should receive help and support.
For Linehan, the experience of puberty is inherently one of gender dysmorphia, thus making its redress by invasive procedures fundamentally unwarranted, unnatural and dangerous.
Whilst he does laud the fact that trans people are finally gaining more acceptance, he does take large issue with ‘privileged white people saying you must accept anyone who says they are a woman’.
One of his strongest contentions is against transgender reassignment for children which he has called ‘mutilation’, symptomatic of a ‘child-harming ideology’, and something that carries ‘severe long-term implications’. For Linehan, the experience of puberty is inherently one of gender dysmorphia, thus making its redress by invasive procedures fundamentally unwarranted, unnatural and dangerous.
Overall, Graham Linehan summaries his stance thusly; ‘The discourse is broken, women’s rights are being stripped away, our children are not safe and we are not allowed to talk about it.’
This is Linehan’s position on the transgender issue mutatis mutandis.
Personally, I would share a lot of his views (more on this below) and I’m sure many others would too. I am also aware that many wouldn’t, don’t and take huge exception to what he thinks, often to the point of committing the most vicious verbal assaults on the man.
Yet, Linehan has also been extremely vicious in his pronouncements and chastisements, sometimes in response to attacks on his character, sometimes not. He has also done a fair share of things that should not in any way, shape or form be condoned. And whilst I would have much in common with regard to how he perceives the transgender issue and the woke left, Graham has said things that are way beyond the pale of anything close to social decency.
Here are some examples.
‘Go fuck yourself. Women aren’t a costume.’
He described Sam Smith as a ‘masturbating walrus’ for his appearance at the Brits.
‘A shitty, perverted, paedophilic movement’, is one of the phrases he used to categorise the gender identity movement.
He also compared the trans movement to a David Cronenberg film.
And lastly, and probably worst of all for a few reasons, he drew parallels between puberty blockers and the treatment of trans children to the eugenics of Nazi Germany (keep in mind that this link is from Pink News, which has written 92 articles on Linehan and represents the very trans activists he is at war with).
These are cruel, incendiary and mean-spirited things to say that only add a big barrel of hate to an issue which is already on fire (apart from the walrus comment; there’s nothing wrong with having a small pop at a celebrity, especially one as indulgent as Sam Smith).
Linehan’s has also received police warnings about harassment, be they justified or not. He has also pretended to be a transgender woman himself on a queer dating app, which is distasteful on a number of levels.
The punishment
Let’s address Linehan’s style of communication firstly and the way he goes about expressing himself, which has been called ‘bludgeoning’, which is certainly, at times, an understatement.
Freedom of speech in my estimate doesn’t mean you can just say anything. There is a complex matrix comprised of the rights of others and the ever-shifting sea of social values to take account of.
In isolation, some of Graham’s posts could easily be seen as something encroaching upon hate speech and potentially inciting violence against others.
To the degree that one’s words can be reasonably interpreted as inciting physical attacks against others, one’s freedom of expression can reasonably be curtailed. This is an area fraught with difficulties, but my position is that, generally, a person’s safety trumps a person’s right to express themselves.
And Linehan’s second Twitter ban pertains to exactly this after he threatened to kill trans activists. This seems to have been in jest and under duress, nonetheless, in an age where a million eyes can be reading whatever you say who will not be party to the context in which it was said, such language cannot be tolerated.
He was allowed back after serving his ban, which is fine and fair in my view; what he said wasn’t the worst thing in the world. Nonetheless, the ban was wholly justified: threats of violence should not be tolerated.
Linehan has also received multiple warnings for the language he uses. Personally, I would have banned him, and many others multiple times, many permanently, for the way they go about expressing themselves. My rationale would be that this sort of language would be in no uncertain terms be tolerated at a public meeting; ipso facto it should not be tolerated on Twitter.
For many living humans, for many and perhaps most cultures throughout the full breadth of human history, this is a statement of immutable fact; it is not bilious, it is not venomous, it is not radical and it does not incite violence.
Some punishment up to and including permanent bans for Graham Linehan and the countless others who repeatedly spit bile into a world that is already veritably drowning in bile is justified in my view.
Yet, and here we come to a series of yets, despite all these warnings, the straw that broke the camel’s back was Linehan’s statement that ‘men aren’t women tho.’
For many living humans, for many and perhaps most cultures throughout the full breadth of human history, this is a statement of immutable fact; it is not bilious, it is not venomous, it is not radical and it does not incite violence.
Linehan has also been harassed himself. Following his recovery from testicular cancer and upon an early post about the trans issue, he received this message; ‘I wish the cancer had won.’ It is reasonable to surmise that he has received thousands of such messages.
And it wasn’t just Linehan himself who felt the weight of woke fury. His wife and her family received threats, with her address even being released online.
This led to his marriage breaking down and his estrangement from his children.
His career is in tatters and he has not won commissions in years. The Father Ted musical he had planned to make is impossible with him involved to any degree. All that is left for him is stand-up in small venues, which are likely to be cancelled, and a book where he was allowed tell his tale.
His contagion is so infectious that even the presenter Jonathan Ross and the comedian Richard Ayoade were torn to shreds for daring to praise his book; ‘get in the bin both ffs.’
Róisín Murphy, the uncompromising and iconic Irish singer, was excoriated for sharing her horror at the notion of puberty blockers following the fallout from Linehan’s Fringe cancellations. A deluge of hate followed and she was forced to bow before the storm.
In his own words, Graham Linehan has lost everything for refusing to back down. Some say that it is his own obsession that has cost him everything, but one does have a right to express one’s views on the matters they feel the strongest about, obsession or not, and this is sacrosanct in the Western World.
The court and the crusade
The purge and the punishment goes far beyond Twitter and Graham Linehan. It is not merely the ‘way’ he said things, which should be condemned where and when it descended into cruelty and the invocation of violence; it is the content of his views and undying refusal to bow before the woke mass.
The woke movement did a lot of good whether some want to admit it or not, but now it has metastasised into something far uglier — wokeism.
A small radical segment of society is highly active in policing the mainstream in order to extirpate it of anything it deems not in keeping with the tenets of wokeism. Blasphemy is once again alive and well, and the centre, as of yet, is afraid of incurring the wrath of the wokerati.
Express views on race and gender that depart from woke orthodoxy and you risk a flood of bile and venom coming your way. And if you refuse to repent and stick to your guns, you risk your career, most especially in certain industries, your family and social excommunication.
Many westerners think of China and Russia as being places where you can’t say what you want for fear of punishment, yet certain types of views are being repressed and those wo express them shunned and suppressed across the West.
Gender is far more complex than this bifurcation allows, but to think a small elite suddenly has all the answers is arrogant, misguided and just plain mad, to put it at its mildest.
Linehan’s permanent ban from Twitter until Musk bought the company was for saying that men aren’t women and Murphy was eviscerated for deriding puberty blockers. You may not agree with these opinions but suppressing them hurts us all and represents a fundamental assault on freedom of speech.
That there exists discrete binary gender is what most of the Western World thought for most of its history. Gender is far more complex than this bifurcation allows, but to think a small elite suddenly has all the answers is arrogant, misguided and just plain mad, to put it at its mildest.
And the long-term effects of puberty blockers are not really known and what is known seems to be more negative than positive. More to the point, the first country in the world to introduce gender reassignment, Sweden, has already banned it for minors.
These beliefs are not radical and they are not shocking. They are slap-bang in the middle of acceptability, whether you espouse them or not. Yet, the woke moral court will burn anyone who dares voice them at the stake until they repent and retract. This is moral tyranny; there are no other words for it.
Franz Kafka once said: ‘Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.’ The woke witch-hunters of the twenty-first century and their court of high morality are the slime which remains after the woke revolution has long evaporated.
