Delingpole: Black Lives Matter – the Show Trials Begin…

If Black Lives Matter are the good guys, how come they are so censorious, aggressive, bullying, closed-minded and intolerant of free speech?

Toby Young’s Free Speech Union is highlighting the terrifying case studies of journalists and academics in the U.S. and the UK who have been recently been cancelled merely for showing scepticism or insufficient crusading zeal on the issue of Black Lives Matter.

The witch hunt victims are:

Grant Napear – fired by his radio station and resigned as the Sacramento Kings TV play-by-play announcer after he tweeted ‘All Lives Matter’.

Gordon Klein, UCLA professor – placed on leave after he refused to cancel a final exam following George Floyd’s death.

Stu Peters, a Manx Radio presenter, suspended after he challenged the concept of ‘white privilege’ in a debate with a caller to his radio show.

Martin Shipton, chief reporter of the Western Mail: forced to step down as a Wales Book of the Year Judge after he complained that the Black Lives Matter protest in Cardiff broke the Welsh Government’s social distancing rules

James Bennet – New York Times editorial page editor, resigned under pressure from coworkers after defending an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) calling for the military to be used against Black Lives Matter rioters.

Stan Wischnowski, the top editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer: forced to resign because a headline on an article in the paper about buildings destroyed in the riots read ‘Buildings Matter, Too’.

Henry Bienen and Willard Bunn – President and Board of Trustees Chair of the US Poetry Foundation: hundreds of poets have signed an open letter complaining that the foundation’s statement last week that ‘it stands in solidarity with the Black community, and denounces injustice and systemic racism’ didn’t go far enough.

David Collum, Professor of Chemistry at Cornell University. Students are demanding he be fired for tweeting that an incident in Buffalo, NY, in which a BLM protestor was pushed over by a police officer and hurt his head was not an example of police brutality.

W. Ajax Peris, USAF veteran, Political Science PhD at UCLA: now under investigation after complaints that while giving a lecture on racism and reading aloud from Martin Luther King’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ he refused to censor the ‘n’ word.

Adam Rapoport, Editor-in-Chief of Bon Appetit, forced to stand down after a piece he wrote genuflecting to BLM was deemed insufficiently pious by his staff (and he wore an inappropriate Halloween costume 13 years ago).

None of these men said or did anything that could reasonably construed as ‘racist.’ Indeed, in several cases, they paid obeisance to the Black Lives Matter movement by offering up grovelling pieties on the awfulness of racism. But it made no difference for the simple reason that it never does. They don’t want your contrition: they want your destruction.

As Vox Day puts it in his SJW Attack Survival Guide, the third rule is ‘Do Not Apologise’.

Normal people seek apologies because they want to know that you feel bad about what you have done and that you will at least attempt to avoid doing it again in the future. When SJWs push you for an apology after pointing-and-shrieking at you, what they are seeking is a confession to bolster their indictment. They are like the police down at the station with a suspect in the interrogation room, badgering him to confess to the crime. And like all too many police these days, the SJWs don’t really care if you did it or not, they’re just looking for a confession that they can take to the prosecutor.

The other lesson for us all is that unless you work for an avowedly, aggressively and unapologetically conservative employer — ideally yourself — your freedom of speech is effectively at an end because your employer will cave at the merest hint of a complaint from the radical left.

For example, Manx Radio is based on the Isle of Man which, apart from being a tax haven for the very rich is one of the most socially conservative places in Britain. It was, for example, the last jurisdiction to continue using the birch (ie a birch beating stick) as a punishment for minor crimes. The last birching took place in 1976 and the law wasn’t formally repealed until 1993. So it’s highly unlikely that all but a tiny minority of listeners would have taken the side of the race-baiting grievance monger who called in to protest about radio presenter Stu Peters’ remark that ‘All Lives Matter’. Most would have backed Peters wholeheartedly. Yet still Peters’s craven boss Chris Sully suspended him.

James Delingpole hosts the Delingpod podcast. You can support his Patreon here.