Talking of has beens, we need to talk about cancel culture. That is, unless you’ve already cancelled me. (Is there a replacement satirist service? Actually – and this is true – I read the other day that Southern Rail* had not only cancelled all trains between Chichester and Havant – lucky it’s not called Have – but also the replacement bus service, without so much as providing a replacement replacement bus service. Which kind of makes the ‘replacement’ word redundant. Like the management should be. But I digress).
For, as we all know – and forgive me if you find this patronising – it’s one of the well-known laws of human behaviour that Behaviour (B) is a function of the person (P) and their environment (E), thus B = f (P,E).
Put more simply, in words viewers of GB News** can understand (snowflake, woke, illegal, back, control, taking, pitbull…nope, that’s it), when a Right Wing person of tiny IQ with unpleasant, trenchant views objects to un-Right Wing persons of humungous IQ no-platforming them*** they believe they have carte blanche**** to do the same thing, whilst at the same time ranting on about the importance of ‘free speech’.
Let me give you some examples:-
A few years ago on Twitter, I asked Katie Hopkins – who had, at the time, numerous public platforms (don’t start) in print and on TV, in which she spouted the most outrageously distasteful garbage as part of her campaign to further the interests of absolute free speech – if she was scared of disappearing up her own arsenal of invective. Which was a perfectly innocent question. Her response? She blocked me.
After that, when Laurence Fox was in his Shouty Megaphone Period (mid-way between his Actor Period and his Unhinged Burning of Flags In The Back Garden Period), I happened to encounter him on the same forum, and enquired politely as to why he was yelling at tennis fans queueing in an orderly fashion for Wimbledon tickets. And do you know what happened? That’s right! He blocked me!
Most recently, in the wake of Laurence Fox’s appalling sexist ‘unshaggable’ outburst against Ava Evans, a female political journalist, on Dan Wootton’s show on the aforementioned GB News (see my piece on that in Central Bylines, link below) Fox was cancelled by the station (something pretty difficult to achieve, and let’s face it, usually people cancel themselves on there [reference Andrew Neil, Simon McCoy, Colin Brazier, Alex Phillips, Mark Steyn, and Guto Harri’s right knee]). Pretty swiftly, so was Wootton, for colluding with Fox by not shutting him down and apologising on air, as he was being directed to do in his earpiece.
Calvin Robinson, another GBeebie contributor, and deacon in the Free Church of England (having been rejected for ordination by the better-known Expensive Church of England, who took exception to him being, well, him), then issued his own statement on the snowballing events, saying he would not appear on Dan Wootton Tonight without Dan (quite right, ‘cos then it would only be, er, Tonight), proclaiming:
“Standing up for Dan is standing up for the very idea of GB News. If he falls, we all fall.”
Oh, don’t get my hopes up, Calvin, you little tease.
The diatribe went on (and on, and on) about ‘hate speech’, ‘racism’ and ‘sexism’ being nothing other than “smear terms”, so I asked him if they weren’t, in fact, ‘absolute terms’, as prescribed (and proscribed) in law?
Guess what happened next? Yep. Another darling of the free speech brigade blocked me.
Though only slightly before GB News suspended him, too.
Which is more than a tad ironic, as I think you’ll agree, as it means anti-cancel culture Calvin cancelled after cancelling anti-Calvin cultured satirist.
There has to be an equation for that somewhere.
*
*A cancellation, er, rail company
**An internet broadcasting service, where careers go to die
***I hear Southern Rail have a few redundant platforms gathering dust
****Shit, that’s French, isn’t it? Just pretend you didn’t read it
*
Here’s my piece in Central Bylines about misogyny in the broadcasting industry.
Notes From Cuckoo Island 
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