De-platforming fascists works

First they came for the Nazis*, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Nazi.

*Well, a very odd one

An absolute beauty of a column from Declan Lynch here:

https://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/declan-lynch/declan-lynch-piers-come-to-ireland-to-see-what-liberals-have-really-done-38433865.html

Declan Lynch: 'Piers, come to Ireland to see what liberals have really done'

He was clearly proud of it, was Piers Morgan, this line of his in an interview which had got millions of "views", under the heading: ''The left have become unbearable.''

"I seem to have struck a chord," he tweeted, deeply satisfied that he and his far-right host Ben Shapiro, of Breitbart fame, had nailed "the PC culture" and "snowflakery" and how "liberals have become utterly, pathetically illiberal".

So we'll stop it just there, to make a couple of observations: first, though the heading said that ''The left have become unbearable'', Morgan clearly must mean the cultural left, because of course economically and politically, several of the formerly great democracies have now gone so far to the right they may eventually be meeting the left at the other end.

As for the bits about PC culture and snowflakery and liberals being illiberal, I would suggest that about 15 years ago it became unacceptable for any journalist to put forward these views as if they were interesting or clever or original - unacceptable not in the sense that these views should be somehow disallowed, but morally and intellectually unacceptable in the sense that so many other hacks had already pounded out those desperate blatherings so many times, you'd be embarrassed as a fellow human being even to read someone else writing them, let alone to write them yourself.

Yet Morgan is still at it, another of these hacks, these terrible, terrible hacks.

Hackery, indeed, has done much to create the current omnishambles - Morgan's hackery is no more shameless than that of Boris Johnson or Michael Gove. But even before those spectacularly shameless hacks were hacking their way to glory, the road to hack heaven was packed with columnists bellyaching about liberals being, in fact, illiberal.

A feeling of peace would descend upon them, as they whipped that one out again, admiring themselves for the Wildean reversal which they are about to lay on the reader for the 197th time: liberals, you see, should be liberal… but you know what? They're not liberal at all!

And so in 2019, Piers Morgan, the former tabloid hack, the hack who would give instructions to other hacks on how to hack, is still doing the old PC-gone-mad bit, and the snowflake bit, and the liberals being illiberal bit.

And not only is he not prostrate with shame, he is proud - though he seems to have some small awareness that it is not, in fact, the left which is entirely shaping our destinies at this time, when he argues that "populism is rising because people are fed up with PC culture". So they are "gravitating to forceful personalities".

Interestingly, he goes on to describe the liberals telling everyone how to live, as being "fascist". He does not see the "forceful personalities" as being fascist, though his mate Trump was about to indulge in an actual anti-Semitic trope - they always get there eventually, the forceful personalities.

But Morgan sees himself as a liberal type - which is also wrong. He is a hack, so he was loving the pure hackery of "this environment where everyone is offended by everything", this culture that is leading us to disaster.

And with Shapiro sitting there loving it, Morgan identified one of the main disasters that has been landed on us, by the liberal "fascists" - thanks to them, you can't get a proper awards ceremony any more.

"If you said a joke 10 years ago that offended somebody, you can never host the Oscars. So now there's no host for anything. The Emmys now just said they're not gonna host either. So hosts have gone.

"And soon every award winner will go, because everyone's human and they're all flawed - so no one can win awards any more. So then no hosts, no stars. Then no one can make any movies because we're all flawed. So no actors, so suddenly, where are we? The liberals get what they want, which is a humourless void…"

Now I don't know if Morgan has ever actually seen a movie, but on the whole, it is probably better that they have been made by "liberals" than by the lads from Breitbart.

The awards ceremonies though… he might not be totally wrong about that one.

"Hosts have gone," he mourns, and for him this seems to have all the tragic resonance of the fall of Constantinople.

"And soon every award winner will go," he adds, presenting us with a vision of imminent catastrophe which reminds us that he is half-Irish, and perhaps given to our unusual forms of melancholia.

We can help him here though, because culturally Ireland is now one of the most liberal countries in the world. And how is that working out?

Well… it's OK isn't it?

I mean, the old conservative traditions in Ireland required things like the incarceration and torture of poor and unwanted children. Under the illiberal liberalism which Morgan sees as fascistic, we may have to re-imagine a few awards ceremonies.

So it's Letterfrack and the Magdalene Laundries on the one hand. A few tweaks to the IFTAs on the other.

It's better now.