A hard-left “news” site called Novara Media was briefly cancelled by YouTube. Among those calling most loudly for its reinstatement were the people it most hates: “right-wing” and “libertarian” media commentators. Why?
Before answering the “why” let me first name and shame some of the guilty parties.
They include:
GB News stalwart Dan Wootton and leader of the Reclaim party Laurence ‘Lozza’ Fox:
TalkRadio presenter Julia Hartley-Brewer:
Brexit campaigner and podcaster Darren Grimes:
Some of these commentators are friends, comrades, or allies of mine. But that isn’t going to stop me saying that what they are doing here is tiresomely predictable and fatuously counterproductive. It’s the kind of glib, virtue-signalling response which explains why conservatives are losing the political argument and why they will probably always lose.
Novara Media is a horrible organisation of unrepentant communists advocating policies that would be the ruination of any country stupid enough to try them.
“I’m literally a Communist,” one of its leading lights, Ash Sarkar, once famously yelled on TV at idiot Piers Morgan. But why should the rest of us indulge the mainstream media’s pretence that communism is edgy and groovy and cool?
Why should we indulge the MSM’s outrageous double standards whereby anyone deemed “far-right” is mocked, reviled and shunned, while apparently firebrands like Sarkar, who share the same vile, destructive ideology as such mass-murderers as Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot get treated as a kind of lovable comedy turn to be invited back again and again?
The excuse invariably trotted out by conservatives, libertarians, and the like when they defend organisations like Novara is “muh free speech.” Free speech is an all or nothing principle, they’ll tell you. Just as you can’t be half-pregnant, so you can’t champion free speech only for those whose ideology you share: everyone deserves a voice.
Unfortunately, this defence seems to be a one-way street. That is, you’ll often hear “right-wing” pundits making this point, but rarely left-wing ones, except on those rare occasions when it is one of their own who is being censored.
The left’s double standards are as outrageous as they are relentless. Novara Media itself has shown zero sympathy for anyone on the right shut down by Big Tech. On the contrary, it has exulted in it, even to the point of trolling these censorship victims by using the supposedly conservative “free market” argument that private companies have no obligation to allow everyone on their platform.
This, indeed, was the argument put not so long ago by one of Novara’s employees, ‘Head of Video’ Gary McQuiggin:
“It’s not censorship when a private company decides to remove you from it’s [sic: Communists can’t do grammar] platform. You don’t have an inalienable right to a Twitter account,” declared our Gary in June last year.
Funny how he changes his tune when the boot is on the other foot:
“Whether or not you agree with what we publish, it shouldn’t be the whim of giant tech companies to delete us overnight with no explanation.”
But that’s EXACTLY what you were asking for last year, Gary. YouTube is a “private company”. You don’t have an “inalienable right” to be there — or so you used to think till it happened to you.
Maybe instead of rushing to demonstrate their support for Novara Media’s rights to free speech it would have been a better idea for all those virtue-signalling, “right-wing” free speech pundits to focus on Novara Media’s hypocrisy.
Failing that (perhaps they weren’t aware what Gary had previously said: why should they be? He only has a few thousand followers), maybe they should focus on the real problem.
The real problem is not that Big Tech is wantonly censoring voices on both the left and the right. Rather, the problem is that Big Tech, being at least as left-wing as the cartoon communists who work at Novara Media, is shamelessly biased against right-wing voices and is cancelling them one by one.
No amount of speaking out for the very occasional, very rare left-wing victim of Big Tech censorship — and Novara has already been reinstated, for the record — is going to change that. It just signals to the enemy (who hates you and always will) that you are a bunch of pussies who aren’t serious about winning.
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