This was how I opened my review of Jerry Sadowitz’s show for ScotsGay magazine in 2008. I described his performance as “an explosion of hate on stage”, but noted that the effect was both prurient and deliriously funny. That Sadowitz’s unending bile is often interspersed with adroitly executed magic tricks makes his routines all the more compelling. When critics quote his jokes out of context, it’s easy to see why so many are offended — but when it comes to Sadowitz, context is everything.

Such a distinction, however, is lost on many of today’s comedy aficionados. This week, the Pleasance — one of the so-called “big four” venues at the Fringe — cancelled Sadowitz’s show at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre. In an incredible feat of doublespeak, Anthony Alderson, Director of the Pleasance, claimed that it is “a venue that champions freedom of speech” and does “not censor comedians’ material” but has nonetheless cancelled this show because it “is not acceptable and does not align with our values”.

There is much to criticise in Alderson’s statement, not least his high-handed claim that “this type of material has no place on the festival”. In recent years, the doyens of the comedy industry have developed a tediously pharisaic approach to the artform. Critics, promoters, and even comedians themselves have behaved like a modern-day clergy, censuring acts who fail to conform to the diktats of the new morality. The comedy industry, in other words, is seemingly dominated by those who are not comedy-literate.

The Pleasance Theatre Trust issued a further statement claiming that “opinions such as those displayed on stage by Sadowitz are not acceptable”, thereby revealing how little it understands about the essential theatricality of stand-up. Are “jokes” and “opinions” now synonymous? To take stand-up at face value, to attempt to apply moral guidelines to a theatrical performance, is to misapprehend the experience. Denouncing Sadowitz’s onstage persona as racist, sexist, or homophobic makes about as much sense as condemning Macbeth for his ruthless ambition.

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Besides, Sadowitz isn’t the only one affected. The current trend of cancelling comedians is infantilising audience members by deeming them susceptible to corruption through their favourite shows. It is the identical view that underpinned Mary Whitehouse’s “Clean Up TV” campaign in the Sixties. For Whitehouse, it wasn’t sufficient that adults make choices about what they did or did not watch; authority figures were expected to intervene in order to prevent the spread of “dangerous” ideas that might lead the plebeians astray.

Anyone who has undertaken the least research into Sadowitz will know what they are in for. The Pleasance was certainly aware of his style and content (and his tendency to expose his penis) well in advance of the festival. Sadowitz had even posted a promo video in which he referred to himself in the third person, saying: “He’s gonna be funny. He’s gonna be rude. He’s gonna do magic tricks. He’s gonna do impressions. He’s gonna get his dick out. He’s gonna do every fucking thing.”

In another promo, Sadowitz said: “I might just do card tricks and say nothing for a whole hour or I might just do the usual ‘screaming fascist’ schtick. Or both. Patrons may wish to drink alcohol pre-show to avoid boredom, embarrassment and guilt.” His current show is entitled Not For Anyone. When I reviewed his show in 2008, it was called Comedian, Magician, Psychopath II. One can hardly accuse Sadowitz of false advertising.

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So why is it that a show explicitly marketed at adults who enjoy controversial comedy would need to be cancelled? I have been told that some of the complaints originated from members of staff at the Pleasance itself — reminiscent of the revolt at the Canadian branch of Penguin Random House, where junior employees apparently burst into tears and demanded the cancellation of Jordan Peterson’s book, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life. In Peterson’s case, the publishers refused to be cowed. At the Pleasance, the management capitulated.

This philistine trend gained momentum at the launch of the 2018 Edinburgh Fringe, when Comedy Awards director Nica Burns declared that she was “looking forward to comedy’s future in the woke world”. She went on to compare the current fashion for “woke” to the alternative comedians of the Eighties, claiming that “it is the woke movement which is setting an ever-evolving agenda as it seeks to establish a clear marker for what is unacceptable today”.

The implied decree was observed by up-and-coming comics in subsequent years; eligibility for awards or plaudits would be reserved for those who toe the ideological line. This is why I continually hear from stand-ups who are choosing to self-censor, who fear that their viability in the industry is contingent on maintaining the status quo. This is why we have seen so many second-rate acts promoted by the industry for conveying the “correct” message, one typically related to the new religion of Group Identity. This is also why so many television comedy shows are failing to attract viewers. For all the industry gatekeepers and their pretensions to moral superiority, comedy audiences would still much rather laugh than hear a sermon.

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Burns had it entirely backwards when she compared the “woke world” to the alternative comedy movement. The complaints we hear today about subversive comedians like Sadowitz are strikingly reminiscent of the anger against the alternative comics of the Eighties, those who dared to challenge establishment norms. When I co-founded Comedy Unleashed, a monthly night in London, it was an effort to provide opportunities to those comics who are by nature non-conforming. It wasn’t about being controversial, it was about creating a show in which ideas could be explored freely, and where the priority would be to be funny rather than preachy.

The unhinged reactions to our recent announcement of a Comedy Unleashed tour have been revealing. One of the acts, Reginald D. Hunter, was trending for the day on Twitter because he had dared to appear on the bill. One comedian tweeted: “If you do that tour: you’re a fucking scab” and “Comedians need to pick a side: I’m an anarchist”. The comedian in question has a show on BBC Radio 4, so his definition of “anarchy” seems dubious at best.

Up until now, Sadowitz has been able to evade the accusatory finger-pointing of culture warriors — those who are determined to see racists and fascists in every shadow — by dint of his status as a luminary among comedians. Stand-ups who have admired Sadowitz for years will baulk at the suggestion that there is no distinction between his act and that of Roy “Chubby” Brown. But for those who have succumbed to the new puritanism, words have a contaminative power. Racist epithets are always racist; context be damned.

In a statement released yesterday, Sadowitz wrote: “I don’t want to humiliate the Pleasance but they are doubling down on their position and I don’t want to be made the victim of that…  My act is now being cheapened and simplified as unsafe, homophobic, misogynistic and racist… A lot of thought goes into my shows and while I don’t always get it right… I am offended by those who, having never seen me before, hear words being shouted in the first five minutes before storming out without listening to the material which I am stupid enough to believe is funny”.

Sadowitz’s frustration is palpable, and rightly so. It is similarly frustrating to see him forced to break character publicly — possibly for the first time in his career — simply because a few know-nothings with too much power cannot comprehend the notion of an onstage persona and its function in stand-up. We have reached a point where the art of comedy has been demeaned by a “progressive” view of language and power relations. Consider how the tax lawyer and Twitter activist Jolyon Maugham responded to an opinion piece about the attack on Salman Rushdie. He claimed that when it comes to free speech, one should “engage with relative power. Who has a platform to speak — and for what purpose do they use it, to challenge or to embed power?”

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This is the basic formulation to which all artistic expression is now reduced. So when Sadowitz screams racial slurs, he is not doing so as part of an unhinged comedic persona, but is perpetuating power structures that maintain his privilege. That he is Jewish doesn’t seem to matter because, as David Baddiel has argued, Jews don’t count.

We have seen comedians investigated by police, members of the public prosecuted for jokes, and the Culture Secretary suggesting that the law ought to be changed to criminalise controversial comedy on streaming services. At each step on this road to Pandemonium, mainstream comedians have remained silent, as though it is of no concern to them that their craft is being subjected to continual battering. There is nothing particularly surprising about the cancellation of Sadowitz’s show; it was simply a matter of time.

Perhaps now that the new puritans are targeting respected comedians like Sadowitz, other stand-ups will wake up to the problem. Comedy cannot exist in an environment where words are deemed to be “unsafe”, and risk-takers are punished with cancellation. This is why Sadowitz deserves your support, even if you cannot stomach his performances. He is one of the few comedians who has been instrumental in pushing boundaries. God forbid we allow these pettifogging authoritarians to re-establish the parameters in accordance with their banal and bloodless creed.

The problem with codependence is that it feels like the right thing to do for many of us. We believe we are helping, supporting and empathising. We care about the wellbeing of those around us and about maintaining our relationships. We don’t want to discard people because they are troubled — we know everyone struggles, and who better than us to help? And actually, we have the solutions. Let us make you a list and set up an appointment and find you some hobbies and provide you with some constructive criticism and keep on loving you so much than you’ll have to love us back, and change into the person we know you can and should be, which would really make us feel a lot more comfortable.

Women are particularly prone to codependency, as we are socialised to be the sex that considers the feelings, needs, and desires of others before our own. Women who put themselves first are cold, selfish, bitches. We are meant to be caretakers, and stay in marriages no matter how much they hurt us. We sacrifice ourselves for what we tell ourselves is the good of the partnership. Some call it “emotional labour” — defined by the American sociologist Arlie Hochschild in her book The Managed Heart as having to “induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others”.

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Surely lockdown is a millennial's idea of heaven?

By Meghan Murphy

But the things we do to “keep the peace” do not actually make us feel more peaceful. They make us feel anxious and resentful; unheard, unseen, and misunderstood. Our lives become entirely focused on another — controlled by stress and fear attached to someone else’s behaviour. And rather than detaching, we stick around, trying to manufacture the perfect circumstances, behaviours, or scenarios, wherein we can finally relax.

In coming to these insights and revelations about some relationships in my life, it struck me that we’ve become enmeshed in one big codependent relationship with today’s modern activist — the “social justice warrior” we are now weary of hearing about. The young, self-righteous and woke.

Cancel culture, that ever expanding trend which sees individuals “called out” and burned at the virtual stake for various — usually insignificant — transgressions, from quoting someone else saying the n-word, to standing up for the rights of women and girls without acknowledging the men who are also women and girls, to tweeting a research paper showing that rioting does not tend to inspire public support, has left us all in fear. Rather than feel inspired by this activism, we feel controlled by it. We know the damage that can come from just one tweet; a text shared without context; an unflattering moment, caught on film; or the intentional or lazy misconstruing of one’s work, argument, or article. It takes so little to destroy a person’s life these days — it’s no wonder we all feel we are walking on eggshells.

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Why won't liberals defend liberalism?

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Like those trapped in codependent relationships, many of us have stopped trusting our own judgments. We are afraid to say what we really think, no matter how rational. Having honest discussions, engaging in independent thought, and asking the wrong question may cause a trauma response. We have been made to feel responsible for the emotional states of others. It is our responsibility to make those around us feel “safe”, and that “safety” depends on our ability to fake it — to suppress ourselves. The truth is hate speech; words are violence. We must alter our vocabulary, twisting ourselves into knots to make it through a sentence without stumbling into a trap set by the woke Stasi, as Julie Bindel would say.

If we can simply play the game, uphold the facade, be sure never to let an unfiltered thought slip from our mouths, we believe we can avoid “drama,” maintain our relationships, and keep the peace. Ironically, these attempts to ensure a sense of safety and avoid conflict leave us feeling entirely unsafe. Can none of us admit how oppressive it feels to hide your authentic self? To not be able to have honest conversations with those around us or to express ourselves, and trust we will still be loved, respected, and valued?

If I were our culture’s psychologist I would suggest we free ourselves from this emotionally abusive relationship with the internet mob, and find ourselves again.

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As such, I have some advice for those wanting to disentangle themselves from what has become a toxic relationship with modern activist culture:

1) Stop apologising. Not unless you really, truly mean it. If you know you said or did nothing wrong, do not try to placate your bullies or attackers, no matter how intense they become. Your self-worth and integrity is worth more than whatever you hope grovelling will achieve. These people won’t leave you alone if you apologise, anyway. In fact, showing weakness makes it worse. Now they know they have you by the figurative balls (lady or man), and will only double down. Show no fear, show you will not cave, and eventually you will be left alone. There is no fun in bullying someone who does not give a fuck.

2) Detach. Physically and emotionally. Take yourself away from social media, which is where cancel culture thrives. Take yourself away from people who engage in this type of behaviour in real life. If someone is going to bail on you or turn on you, either because of social pressure, a desire to maintain status or popularity, or because you say something they disagree with, that person is not your person. Ask yourself whether you want to spend your life fearful that your true self will be discovered, and that those who are meant to love you, stick by you, and support you, will abandon you without a genuine conversation.

Do you want to hang out with a crew of cowards or do you want your circles to be made up of those who know you, know you are not perfect, know you will never agree on everything, and accept you anyway, and do the work of having sometimes uncomfortable, but honest, conversations? Be with people who will tell you the truth, to whom you can tell the truth; and move on.

3) Follow the advice we were given as kids, which most of us quickly learned we should not be followed at all: be yourself. Don’t hide your true self to protect others or yourself. Be the most authentic, open, vulnerable, honest person you can be (while also maintaining healthy boundaries).

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Soon we’ll all be cancelled

By Meghan Murphy

The more open and true you are, the less likely someone will suddenly realise that, in fact, you do have a mind of your own, and perhaps you say inappropriate but hilarious things, or still find Louis CK funny, or know all the words Big L’s “Clinic”, or still follow Meghan Murphy on Instagram, and that you therefore must be publicly denounced, or simply ghosted.

I have been trying to reveal my flaws, imperfect thoughts, and vulnerabilities over the years for just that reason. I don’t want a pedestal; I want you to know that I’m human. I want the freedom to be myself. This is what we should all aim for: flawed, truthful, diverse, humanity. Stop trying to please everyone by squashing yourself. It won’t lead to safety, security, calm, or happiness. It will lead to fear, anxiety, and misery.

We can’t simply blame those around us for this culture we are living in. If we aren’t being honest and aren’t being true to ourselves, it is our own responsibility to change, and to start doing things differently.

Maybe we all need to break up, detach, and come back together — truly ourselves and ready to have some hard, honest, real, probably scary conversations. I suspect this is where we will find love and security — not in the arms of those who keep us hooked in with fickle loyalty.

Tibetans are no longer à la mode, though the destruction of their civilisation by the Chinese state continues, and few opinion-formers consider the persecution of Christians in the Middle East worth mentioning. Little is heard any more of the Yazidi, despite their still being a target of genocide by Isis. The Kurds are receiving media attention following their betrayal by Trump, but it will surely not be long before they are re-forgotten. Being identified as a victim of injustice has become a kind of privilege, handed out to favoured groups and denied to others according to the shifting diktats of progressive opinion.

A certain arbitrariness goes with demands for social justice. Possibly for this reason, SJWs (social justice warriors) are intolerant of criticism. In the US, anyone who argues that despairing Appalachian proles might be more deserving of concern than middle-class student protesters is condemned as a white supremacist, and their views suppressed. The suggestion that individuals and groups may suffer different degrees and kinds of injustice is rejected as reactionary thinking. Overthrow the prevailing power structures, and injustice will simply vanish. Anyone who questions this vision is not just wrong but evil.

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How the liberal West is dismantling itself

By John Gray

The trouble is that the imperatives of social justice are inherently conflicting. Distributing the goods of society according to equality and merit are not just competitors in practice. Merit and equality are inherently antagonistic values. A number of recent studies have argued — correctly — that the meritocratic claims of western liberal societies are at best partly justified, if not actually fraudulent. But a society that was perfectly just by meritocratic standards would be extremely unjust in egalitarian terms. Some injustices may be worse than others, but no world is imaginable which all the demands of social justice are fully realised.

Markets are condemned because the distribution of income and wealth is partly random. But so is the distribution of genes. If you aim to correct randomness in human fortunes, you may end up in the dystopian world of L.P. Hartley’s Facial Justice (1960), in which people who are “facially over-privileged” are encouraged to have their looks surgically altered. Conversely, gross disparities in educational opportunity are accepted as long as they cannot be defended in terms of merit. In the 1830s Lord Melbourne declared he liked the Order of the Garter best of all his titles because there was “no damned nonsense about merit” attached to it.

Egalitarian thinkers take a similar line today. Selection by ability by grammar schools is rejected by large swathes of progressive opinion. Quite a few seem to find it less objectionable to send their children to schools where selection is by parental income.

Contrary to a familiar line of criticism, there are few signs of hypocrisy in these people. Hypocrisy requires a measure of self-awareness, and there is little evidence of that in them. When they buy an expensive education for their children, might they not be expressing their conscientious revulsion against the evils of meritocracy? No doubt egalitarians who send their children to private schools — or are well-heeled enough to buy a house in a catchment area containing a socially selective comprehensive — are stacking the life-chances of their offspring against those of the majority. But why should any child be denied the good fortune of having progressive parents?

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Who will resist the great awokening?

By Eric Kaufmann

When it does not lead to tragedy, the pursuit of social justice quickly turns to comedy. It is tempting to conclude that the very idea should be junked.

That was the argument of F.A. Hayek, strongly articulated in his magnum opus The Constitution of Liberty and reiterated in the second volume of his trilogy Law, Legislation and Liberty: The Mirage of Social Justice. Market processes emerge and operate spontaneously, and the resulting distribution of income and wealth does not correspond to any criterion of a just distribution. Markets reward luck as well as talent and hard work. Being in the right place at the right time is as important in determining anyone’s fortunes as their abilities or virtues. The defence of free markets turns on their superior productivity, not any theory of rights or justice. For the same reason, Hayek opposed any attempt to correct market distributions for the sake of fairness. In his later writings he showed some sympathy for John Rawls’s theory of justice, but this was because Rawls rejected the idea that justice meant redistribution according to what people may be thought to deserve.

Like Rawls and the egalitarian left, Hayek rejected any ideal of meritocracy. In conversations I had with him in the Eighties, he often observed that the fact that the free market operated without regard to anyone’s beliefs about the good life was for him one of its advantages. The price of a virtuous economy would be stagnation. A certain moral indifference was necessary for continuing economic progress. In praising the amorality of free markets, Hayek was influenced by the Anglo-Dutch economist and satirist Bernard de Mandeville, author of the early-18th-century poem Fable of the Bees, which argued that the driving forces of wealth creation and prosperity were needs and impulses that Christianity condemned as vices.

Because it invokes values that are inherently antagonistic, social justice is indeed a mirage. But so is Hayek’s libertarian ideal of a social order in which the market operates without any controls. It is striking how little Hayek learnt from the political disasters of his lifetime (1899-1992) in which liberal regimes were repeatedly swept away by malfunctioning markets. The Nazis came to power on the back of massive economic dislocation. Roosevelt’s interventionism and British social democracy were responses to the Great Depression and the experience of full employment during the Second World War.

Hayek opposed government intervention in the economy because he believed it to be a threat to liberal values. The message of history, however, is that the surest way to overturn a liberal regime is to let the market rip. Events after Hayek’s death confirmed this lesson. The anarchic capitalism of the Yeltsin era produced Putin’s authoritarianism, and post-communist Europe’s populist regimes came to power partly because former communist officials so often benefited most from the shift to a market economy.

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Why I've reported Douglas Murray to the police

By Titania McGrath

If capitalism is legitimated solely by its productivity, anyone who fails to benefit from the wealth it creates has no reason to support a market system. A free market regime will be stable only if it delivers more or less uninterrupted growth and most people benefit from it. Except for a minimum income that protected against destitution, Hayek rejected any kind of intervention in the distribution of income produced by free markets. Yet as he acknowledged in his nod to Rawls, policies that alter market outcomes need not serve ideas of merit or moral deserts.

At present, when large sections of society have failed to benefit from many years of economic growth, measures going well beyond securing people against destitution are required. The goal must be to ensure a decent measure of economic security to everyone. Such policies need not invoke any ideal of social justice. The NHS does not exist in order to transfer resources from the healthy to the unwell, or even to provide medical care to those who cannot afford it. It is there to enable everyone to share a part of their vulnerability in common. Institutions of this kind do not serve distributive ends. They promote social cohesion, and thereby political stability.

Thinking about common institutions in this way is not another iteration of liberalism. The liberal preoccupation with distributive questions is part of the problem. What is needed is to shift to a way of thinking that is clearly post-liberal. Security and the need for a common life must be acknowledged as values that are as compelling as personal freedom, and frame a more coherent picture of a liveable society than inchoate visions of social justice.

The shift may be too great for liberal societies to accept. Protecting people from market-generated insecurity may involve some reduction of overall economic growth. In turn, any long-term slowdown requires high levels of solidarity among those affected. The social democracies of the past were all relatively closed societies — avowedly multi-ethnic but not radically multi-cultural. In practice, multi-culturalism is not so different from anomic individualism. Many are caught between communities and left without a common form of life. Yet that does not mean that large numbers yearn for release from the moral poverty of individualism. Many want greater security than they enjoy now, but not at the price of sacrificing the liberty to live as they please. It is a mistake to think most people in the affluent west want a different way of life.

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Taking on the Social Justice Warriors

By Eric Kaufmann

The largest obstacle to a shift in thinking on these issues is the zeal with which ideas of social justice are held and promoted. The goal of most SJWs is not to repair or improve society. Instead, they want to overthrow the existing social order. Accordingly, they are untroubled if pursuing social justice is actually socially divisive. Like Lenin before the revolution, they believe “worse is better”.

If there is anything approaching an iron law in history, however, it is that revolutions are followed by injustice worse than existed in the ancien régime. The French Revolution produced a war against the peasantry in the Vendée (1793-1796) which cost somewhere in excess of a hundred thousand lives. The Russian Revolution produced a lesser known peasant rebellion in the Tambov region (1920-21) in which similar or larger numbers perished. The American Revolution is no exception. For indigenous peoples, which under British rule were sheltered from settler expansion, it was an unmitigated disaster.

But history has no lessons for the “woke”. To accept that revolution only multiplies injustice would destroy the meaning of their lives. The social justice movement is not based on errors in fact or reasoning. It is a cult, whose chief beneficiaries are the SJWs themselves.

At this point we are back to Pascal. He was able to view the shifts and turns of human ideas of justice with equanimity because he was confident a higher justice existed. Lacking any such belief and incapable of living without a surrogate faith, SJWs find meaning in the fantasy of a secular millennium, a battle between good and evil followed by a world they cannot imagine.

I know what you’re thinking. Yes, it’s incredible but true: ITV really does have a comedy department. A quick check under the comedy category on the network’s streaming service reveals that the only new British comedy programme available at the time of writing is Keith Lemon’s Celebrity Juice, so quite what this department is filling its working hours with when it isn’t attending diversity festivals remains a mystery.

So taking issue with this decision to man-ban seems a bit churlish – rather like quibbling with the captain of the Titanic over the band’s set list for the night of 14 April 1912. But it shows where the heads of the television establishment stand.

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Unlike the BBC, ITV exists to make money by attracting mass audiences. It was designed from its very beginnings to get bums on seats, the more the better. As the number of platforms multiplies and popular culture fragments into smaller and smaller niches, how can ITV best respond? I would suggest by concentrating on making programmes (such as Love Island) that buck the trend, and not by focusing on spurious diversity initiatives.

The writers’ room for TV comedy is very much a US invention, and it has worked out very well for them. Over there, they are essentially hothouses where writers gather to hammer out ideas, arrange them into episodes, structure the stories and craft the dialogue.

In Britain, the ‘rooms’ tend to be reserved for storylining conferences on soap operas, and it’s almost unheard of for scripts to be produced the American way – over days of intense conferencing, idea by idea, line by line, scene by scene by committee. For one thing, there just isn’t the money in the system to hire that many people for that long. So what we’re talking about here are more like long meetings where people pitch jokes.

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“Too often the writing room is not sensitively run,” Schuster told the festival. “It can be aggressive and slightly bullying.”

But what does she actually mean?

Telling jokes carries an appallingly high risk of social embarrassment – not for nothing do stand-up comedians refer to a bad performance as ‘dying’ – and a correspondingly small glimmer of reward. It is competitive – and about pushing at boundaries of taste. Putting writing of any kind on the line to be judged is never a pleasant experience. As a script editor on a soap, I once had to pass on adding one of the greatest writers of his generation to the team because I knew he would be torn apart by it.

But I can’t think of anything less likely to produce good ideas, or indeed laughs, than to don the straitjacket of sensitivity and the safe space, of watching what you say, which tends in my experience to create a working atmosphere with all the easy, relaxed affability of Act Four of The Crucible.

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Schuster’s comments are also telling for what they reveal about how women are viewed by this culture. Anyone who has worked in television for more than a week, and particularly around television writers, will be amused by the notion that it’s a group populated by thrusting macho men and demure little ladies.

There are two implicit suppositions behind Schuster’s statement. The first is that women will civilise the rough and tumble chaps, a view of the sexes plucked straight from an Edwardian drawing room. The second is that different levels of employment of the sexes in any workplace are entirely because of male privilege and power. I think there are more male writers for the same reason there are more male criminals – because men are on average more likely to do stupid, irrational things that have a high chance of ruin.

Schuster has founded a campaign called Comedy 50:50, whose aim is to reach perfect equity between the sexes in writing comedy. Encouraging women to write and removing barriers to entry are laudable goals. Schuster’s group has assembled a list of hundreds of female comedy writers, which is a concrete, valuable resource. An aim of perfect equity, however, is restrictive, an attempt to stuff individuals with wildly differing experiences and backgrounds into equal-sized pens marked M and F as if that were the most important thing about them.

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The writer Brona C Titley – fabulously for a woke individual, she has the kind of name dreamt up by the Carry On team for Barbara Windsor – told the Festival: “If you have the same type of writers in terms of race or sexual orientation or gender, then you’re only getting one kind of joke.”

What a limiting view of people and of her fellow writers. Men do man jokes, women do woman jokes, homosexuals do homosexual jokes, black people do black jokes. Nobody has imagination or empathy or fellow feeling. We are apparently parrots loaded with one set of phrases, defined entirely by an arbitrary characteristic.

There is certainly a problem with the same kind of people telling the same kind of jokes, as anybody who’s watched or listened to any of the multiple shows “taking a sideways look at the week’s news” such as Mock the Week will know – the people employed are overwhelmingly middle class and Left-wing. But nobody seems in a hurry to understand or address this most glaring lack of diversity.

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It’s also interesting to consider why this is happening now. The unspoken supposition is that television comedy writer is a prestige job with, in another grossly overused term imported from academia, a ‘platform’. But this is a shrinking sector, with fewer hours being produced than ever before: the days of ITV producing at least one half-hour’s worth of sitcom every night of the week – yes, younger readers, this actually happened – are long, long gone.

It’s just about possible to argue that the many tens of millions of viewers who tuned in to Only Fools and Horses or To the Manor Born were inculcated with monolithic cultural norms by John Sullivan or Peter Spence – but does anyone seriously think that coming up with gags for CelebAbility on ITV2 (highlights include the comedian Nathan Caton throwing cheese at people’s bare feet) is pushing society’s understanding of itself in any direction, and thus needs urgent gender representation?

This reflects a modern cultural quirk in the arts: an obsession with process rather than outcome. Think how often you hear theatre or television people proudly describe their adherence to quotas and fashionable nostrums of social change and representation as ‘important’, when the opposite is the case.

All art, even the desperately silly and trivial, is now regarded as political and with a mystic power to remodel society. The language of HR courses and inclusivity awareness workshops has cemented around the very daftest things. Somebody should write a comedy about that.

Right now, if academics dare to challenge orthodoxy in the hot-button areas of race, sexuality and gender, their job may be on the line. But each time opponents of reason and free enquiry win, our society loses a little more of its hard-won liberty. That’s why I applaud the young researcher, Noah Carl, and have donated to his campaign to raise the legal funds needed to challenge his wrongful dismissal by St Edmund’s College, Cambridge. 

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How the woke inquisition broke Cambridge

By Eric Kaufmann

Noah won his place at the university rightfully, in an extremely competitive process. But he didn’t reckon on the influence of the ‘social justice’ Left. They wield extraordinary power as they mobilise flash mobs and perform on camera to win plaudits from their international, social media, ‘social justice’ subculture. They targeted Noah and his so-called ‘racist pseudoscience’ and mustered 1500 to sign a letter calling for his dismissal. Cambridge bowed to their demands.

These activists, and people like them, justify themselves and their actions with a worldview constructed from two conceptual sleights-of-hand.

The first involves expanding the remit of words – what psychologist Nick Haslam terms ‘concept creep‘ or political scientist Giovanni Sartori would call ‘conceptual stretching’. The meaning of ‘harm’ is extended to encompass the psychological ‘harm’ of hearing uncomfortable ideas. Often the harm that such ideas pose may not be clear to their supposed victims, so activists must work hard to frame these ideas as ‘offensive’ to a protected group.

The second trick is to take ‘justice’ and apply it, not to equality of opportunity, but to equality of outcome. This means that they can take any group differences of outcome – i.e. white people earning more than black ones – as evidence of ‘systemic’ discrimination.

In this way, the shadowy notion of fighting ‘systemic’ or ‘structural’ racism becomes the end, which justifies the suspension of reason and the violation of the liberty of the ‘oppressor’ (read: white, male) who stands in the way of righting historic wrongs.

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Why aren't illiberal universities challenged?

By Nigel Biggar

In short, their perfectionist, no-holds-barred vision justifies their illiberalism and unreason – much as fascism once did, and as socialism continues to in North Korea and Venezuela. Though sometimes violent, more often they use the perceived wrongdoing to gun for people’s jobs, reputations and livelihoods. 

Failing this, they aim to make the purported offender’s life as uncomfortable as possible in the hope they will be forced out. One way of doing this – and something I’ve encountered on several occasions – is by bombarding a university’s social media account with complaints in order to force a (mandatory) investigation by administrators.

The net result is to purge the campus of wrongthink. And the activists have almost succeeded: cultural conservatives in the social sciences and humanities in the anglosphere are nearly extinct, and libertarians are scarce outside economics. 

Their struggle for ‘social justice’ is a sacred one, as are its sites of resistance. Noah Carl’s presence at Cambridge was held to profane the sacred, since it violated the role the social justice Left demands of the modern university: that it act as a progressive safe space from the unjust world beyond.

Hence the open letter signed by numerous academics and students – a tactic which Jonathan Haidt remarks is now a staple of progressive activism – in which Noah was attacked as a ‘race scientist’.

But scrub away the patina of guilt-by-association, conceptual stretching and innuendo, and the radicals’ case quickly evaporates. What emerges is a thoroughly dishonest smear campaign, in which ideologues created a superficial narrative and used political pressure to ruin an individual’s career. 

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The righteous anger of youth

By Gerard de Groot

Noah does a nice job of responding to his critics point-by-point, but for brevity’s sake, I’ll summarise their stitch-up. The signatories’ defining charge is that Noah is a ‘race scientist’. This is incredible given that Noah hasn’t worked on, or made any definitive claims about, the relationship between race and intelligence. What he has done is to make the libertarian and rationalist case that scholars should be free to seek the truth, however uncomfortable. 

We won’t know whether race really is connected to intelligence until the gene-level relationships that define the two are mapped at some point in the future. I suspect the data will show a mess of weak and contradictory correlations, which may be why current work has difficulty with anomalies such as why black Americans are so much more successful than (ostensibly more intelligent Asiatic) Inuit and Eskimo. In any event, inter-racial marriage and – who knows? – gene-editing mean race and IQ is unlikely to be much of a talking point a century from now. 

But this is beside the point. Noah’s argument is that university researchers need to have the freedom to conduct research on all manner of subjects – indeed, James Flynn, who argues that environment rather than genes is responsible for race-IQ differences, has decried the stigma attached to research in this area. How else could he prove his case? 

Indeed, there is nothing nefarious about this research. Even measuring skulls is not inherently sinister. The early 20th-century eugenicists who used this technique to argue that southern and eastern European immigrants to America were inferior to the ‘Nordic’ natives were hoist on their own petard by Franz Boas, who showed that the US-born children of non-Nordics had the same skull sizes as American-born Nordics.

And a properly functioning scientific culture would have just as swiftly debunked the ad hoc excuses used to explain away African-Americans’ lower criminality rate (than whites) in the early 20th century. 

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Taking on the Social Justice Warriors

By Eric Kaufmann

Noah also points out that the Nazis actually opposed the study of race and intelligence because the results favoured Jews. Instead they, like all ideologues, cherry-picked what they wanted from both religious and secular belief systems. The fact anti-minority eugenics won out wasn’t due to science, but to dominant ideologies which stood in the way of rigorous analysis.

Today’s social justice ideologues are much closer to the spirit of the Nazis than social scientists such as Noah whose methods are transparent and findings falsifiable.

If someone tries to broadcast the claims of race science, a case can be made that this harms the self-efficacy of black people and so should be discouraged. We know that when methods of suicide are widely publicised in the media, suicide goes up.

But this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t study suicide methods. As African-American linguist John McWhorter argues, the subject of race and intelligence can be quietly investigated without broadcasting the results. When progressives kick up a storm about this, they publicise the very findings they claim to be harmful. 

Of course, one may disagree with all this using data or logic. But disagreement is Noah’s point. He has not done work on race and intelligence; he has only defended the right of other academics to do so. He is a libertarian and contrarian, but – and I say this as one who has lost relatives in the Holocaust – he is certainly not a racist. His interest in academically taboo subjects stems from his contrarian curiosity and belief in the importance of academic freedom.

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He was also accused of attending a ‘secret’ conference on intelligence to discuss race science; but it turns out to have been an innocuous invitation-only event (common in academia) attended by a multiracial array of scholars studying numerous aspects of intelligence, few of which concern race. The supposedly ‘far Right’ journals he published in, also cited as evidence of his unsuitability, turn out to be publications with similarly global editorial boards and varied interests. 

Furthermore, the allegedly ‘shoddy’ methods used in some of his lower-tier publications are actually the standard methods used in thousands of academic papers that focus on country-level data. Finally, in contrast to the charge levelled by his critics, he didn’t hide any of his published work from the evaluation committee.

The links in the progressive activists’ join-the-dots story of ‘race scientist helping the far Right’ are spurious – based on guilt-by-association or outright ignorance. Like his Oxford doctoral supervisors, I’ve been fortunate enough to meet Noah, and to know that he is an honest, personable scholar. He has done nothing wrong and his struggle is vital if we are to restore reason and freedom in academia and beyond. 

The Associated Press report which followed that headline related one of the records now regularly being broken in women’s sports. That these gains (in college and professional sports) are coming from male to female transsexuals is a detail you can either celebrate or find troubling.  Though woe betide you if you choose the wrong reaction there.

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Trans athletes make a mockery of women's sports

By Meghan Murphy

For if you find such developments remotely troubling you will simultaneously find yourself in a majority and yet exiled. Martina Navratilova chose to raise her concerns about transsexual athletes, and instantaneously a woman who has been a trailblazer for women – especially gay women – in sport was accused of undermining LGBT rights and expelled from an LGBT activist group.

In a world where born-men beat born-women at women’s sports and everybody is meant to just shut up about it nobody could possibly be surprised if reality and satire begin to grow thin and one eventually begins to resemble the other.

Perhaps it is for this reason that the art of satire has developed a new platform and a new audience. In recent years, real satire has emerged not on the tired, stale and ‘safe’ platforms of the BBC and other mob-vulnerable old media platforms, but in places which allow people to be nimble, swift and independent as they hover over every necessary target of our time.

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Liberal smugness will destroy the Left

By Giles Fraser

A couple of years ago, Twitter discovered the genius of Godfrey Elfwick. The “genderqueer Muslim atheist”, though born white claimed to be black, and became famous for his ability to fudge the boundaries between the zeitgeist and the inventions of his head. Among his masterpieces was his contribution to the Social Justice Warrior movement’s brief post-Trump election qualms over when and where to punch people you suspected of being Nazis. Elfwick answered this question with the statement: “I’d rather punch 300 innocent people and 1 genuine Nazi, than punch no Nazis at all”.

And then there was his response to the pussy hat protests:

“When the next generation ask: what did YOU do when Trump came to power?  I’ll proudly say: ‘I called him a Nazi while dressed like a vagina.'”

The boundaries between fantasy and reality sometimes blurred so close that Elfwick fooled even the wisest of minds. In November 2016, the Guardian published a piece titled “‘Alt-right’ online poison nearly turned me into a racist.” The anonymous author described his descent as starting at the work of Sam Harris until, “On one occasion I even, I am ashamed to admit, very diplomatically expressed negative sentiments on Islam to my wife.”

I must shamefully admit that I was among those who fell for this piece, assuming that the Guardian had only gone slightly further down a trajectory it had long been on. But the piece turned out to be the work of Godfrey Elfwick, who had ‘punked’ the Guardian into running a piece from an anonymous writer sending up an argument the newspaper so desperately wanted to hear.

Much more of this, of course, and a lot of serious people from all sides begin to look silly. And so, eventually, Elfwick became a victim of his own success and was barred from Twitter last summer for reasons that only a multi-billion dollar public platform could justify or successfully keep private. But from the rubble emerged Titania McGrath. For a time it seemed as though McGrath and Elfwick might be one and the same person.  But sources suggest otherwise, pointing to the fact that there may be more than one person on the planet able to use social media against Social Justice Warriors and the old media that seems so supine before them.

Like Elfwick, some of Titania’s critics assumed that her arguments must be for real, so close did they come to arguments seriously put forward by real people. Private Eye – the relict of what used to be British satire – even put Titania in ‘Pseud’s Corner’, unaware that Titania was heading for targets Private Eye could barely even see. She was there for her claim that people should buy her book Woke: a guide to social justice not for her own sake, but for ‘the sake of humanity.’

Her book is now out, and extends in long-form the style that Titania has perfected on Twitter. As her freshly revealed creator, Andre Doyle says:

“She is named after the queen of the fairies because I think all of this ‘woke culture’ is an utter fantasy world. The people who promote this hyper inclusive culture are fantasists.”

Titania is a creation of genius. The lady herself is truculent, privileged and incapable of self-reflection. She scythes her way through Twitter like an avenging SJW angel. Anybody who suggests that there are biological differences between men and women will find Titania coming down on them from the greatest height, berating them and demanding that Twitter remove them from the platform for “hate speech”.

The joke is partly on the platform, for Twitter has been willing to suspend people for precisely this sin, although Twitter executives have attempted to simultaneously deny and defend precisely these actions.

Wow, the entire interview is fascinating & disturbing. @joerogan @Timcast catch Twitter in multiple lies/misrepresentations. Illuminating.
pic.twitter.com/TkGs9CDPHo

— Rita Panahi (@RitaPanahi) March 6, 2019

Like Elfwick, Titania has found herself the target of Twitter’s efforts to police its own platform. Last December she was suspended from Twitter for a day. She returned with a Tweet pointing out that her suspension demonstrated the systematic oppression of women in our society, and wrote a piece pointing out that after her 24-hour suspension from Twitter “I now understand how Nelson Mandela felt“.

Though in this latter piece Titania explained that “If anything, my ordeal was even more damaging. Mandela may have had to endure 27 years of incarceration, but at least his male privilege protected him from ever having to put up with mansplaining, or being subject to wolf-whistling by grubby proles on a building site.”

The way in which Titania has broken out from Twitter is a magnificent thing to behold. Finally, the plodding, establishment satire of recent years might have finally been subject to the disruption it has so badly needed. For decades in Britain, being brave in satire has consisted of making jokes about the Duke of Edinburgh, or saying “the Tories” or “Thatcher” and expecting a great panto boo followed by a forced laugh at whatever inanity follows.

Titania, like the now resurrected Elfwick, show what true disruption of a tired genre looks like. For just as the legacy media and social media make claims which are maddening, presumptuous and untrue, so these creations of the new media have emerged to shine a light which is not just funny, but fatally accurate and true.