CRYBABY snowflakes are currently screaming and wailing because big scary comedians triggered them with some nasty, cruel words. It’s another attack on free speech, more proof the thought police are crushing our liberties. Cancel this, cancel that. It’s all we ever hear … from the Daily Mail and assorted right-wingers, with the sense of humour of Mary Whitehouse and skins as thin as Rizlas.

The idea that cancel culture was cooked up by the left is one of history’s greatest gaslightings. The Daily Mail and its ilk have been screeching ‘ban this filth!’ about comedians, movies, songs, video games and just about anything which threatens its white-bread worldview, since before I was born.

Yesterday’s front page was almost a parody of Mail hysterics; the equivalent of watching a 1950s Vicar’s wife simultaneously clutch her pearls and reach for the smelling salts because she’d heard the word ‘knickers’.

‘Now BBC Comic Mocks Liz Truss’ the paper screeched. ‘After Have I Got News for You c-word jibe at PM, corporation’s new flagship show sparks fresh anti-Tory bias storm’.

I don’t have enough fingers or toes to count the ways this story – on a front page amid economic chaos – plumbs new depths of doltishness.

Basically, the Mail got its lily-white undies in a twist because the comedian Joe Lycett (who’s very funny and clever, unlike the Daily Mail) mocked Liz Truss on the BBC’s new Sunday morning show, fronted by that paragon of comic repartee Laura Kuenssberg.

Monstrous Lycett carried out an act of wanton ‘irony’. A crime against humanity. After a stultifying Kuenssberg-Truss interview – an event less entertaining that standing in the rain staring at a hedge – Lycett committed “sarcastic applause” (whatever that is) and said ‘fantastic, Liz’. He then faked supporting Truss (there’s a joke in there, right?).

How dare he! Beast! Jail him! Cancel the BBC! Not only did a comedian make some rather thoughtful jokes, piercing the media-political bubble – won’t someone please think of the children!? – but he gently mocked a powerful person. What’s Britain coming to!?

Assorted dullards took to Twitter denouncing the very idea of comedians having any role in political debate – completely missing the fact that comedians have been at the centre of debate since Henry VIII’s jester Will Sommers cracked jokes about the king’s daughter, later Elizabeth I, being a “bastard”. Henry did contemplate decapitation, but even this most tyrannical king didn’t go full cancel culture. Sommers remained at Elizabeth’s court, proving Tudor England was indeed much more merry than today.

Earlier, the Mail had another conniption fit over Jack Dee using the words “cosmic c**t” about Boris Johnson. Dee was quoting a Tory minister in The Times, though. So why not cancel Rupert Murdoch or the minister? Rage, however, was reserved for the BBC, because the BBC – in MailWorld’s halfwit mythology – is some Bolshevik conspiracy that would have LGBT flags flying like revolutionary banners across England’s shires if the paper wasn’t standing guard like a nun wearing knuckledusters.

You might remember some weeks ago when every right-winger with a keyboard was manning the barricades of free speech – or maybe it was ‘freeze peach’, you really never can tell what this mob is on about, as spelling isn’t their forte – when Jerry Sadowitz was cancelled at the Fringe.

Sadowitz apparently got his privates out on stage and called Rishi Sunak ‘a P**i’. I say apparently, as I wasn’t there, so unlike most idiots, this idiot you’re reading isn’t going to judge Sadowitz’s gig. I don’t know the context of what he was saying or doing, so I’m not going to shoot my big stupid gob off about it.

However, what’s notable is that if you drew a Venn diagram of the moral guardians losing their marbles over a naughty word, a newspaper quote, and some irony by a comedian on the BBC, then they’d be exactly the same people defending Sadowitz’s right to apparently get his junk out on stage and call Sunak ‘a P**i’.

A tad selective, no? But when it comes to cancellation the right is very selective. Check out the ‘anti-woke comedian’ Andrew Doyle, now earning his corn on GB News. He forever rails against cancel culture’s evils. Shame he blocks just about anyone he disagrees with on social media. Pot. Kettle. Etcetera. Funny how all those folk raging about cancel culture have TV shows, comedy specials, book deals and newspaper columns. Hello Neil Oliver!

For the right, free speech means freedom to say what the right approves of; if you’re sacked, silenced or ruined by the right, that’s just ‘defending British values’ from moral corruption.

Maybe it was the French poet Baudelaire, or perhaps just Kevin Spacey as Keyser Söze in The Usual Suspects, but this quote sums up the right and cancel culture: “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” The greatest trick the right ever pulled was convincing the world that the left invented cancel culture.

In truth, though, both the left and right are guilty of trying to cancel their ‘enemies’ – though in different ways. This column merely tries to point out the utter hypocrisy of claiming it’s all one-sided.

The difference is: when the right tries to cancel people, it does so from a position of power – with politicians and the press piling on. When the left tries, it’s bottom up: ordinary people saying they don’t like something. Both have the same objective, though the imbalance is clear. As the saying goes: “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”

I’m old school liberal on freedom of speech: I might hate what you say but I’ll die defending your right to say it, yada-yada-yada. However, freedom of speech doesn’t mean I must indulge, platform or listen to you. When the Enlightenment’s founders championed free speech it wasn’t so comedians could get their privates out, it was so ordinary folk weren’t jailed or killed for speaking their mind. Nor is freedom of speech consequence-free. You’ve every right to speak freely, but others have every right to say they detest your opinions. Freedom cuts both ways.

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