 The right have been in government for over a decade, they enjoy a stranglehold on print news media and most of the political stories that you'll hear about in broadcast have their origins in right wing news media. So why are they complaining about being silenced all the time? This is about someone who had an opposing viewpoint that has been silenced in sideline and thrown away. What the mob have tried to do is to prevent me from going out campaigning. I remember sitting there having the message me and telling me because of your politics you can't be on our site anymore and thinking how am I going to pay the bills next month? Our culture is so universally attacked by this very screamy and very angry little minority of people. An influential minority of extremists has intimidated people into silence. We're all getting scared to say what we think. These kind of woke, you know, millennials. They are the establishment. We are now the rebels. Totally. You see what I mean? Yeah. I think you're talking about Owen Jones, aren't you? Exactly. It's been council cultures which find a general. The window of what you can acceptably say. That's getting narrower and narrower and it's shifting further and further leftwards. People who start to assault all of the representations of the past will start on people next. We're actually in a very, very dangerous period. It's now become almost a pandemic. Look, we all know that prestige media likes nothing more than to spend time talking about itself. But what about me, Marge? But way to take a quick glance at the timelines of Andrew Neal or Piers Morgan or Barry Weiss. You would be forgiven for thinking that the real scourge to humanity during a pandemic was left-ship posters on Twitter being overly sensorious and moralizing. So where does this idea of being cancelled come from? Like most things which have been ruined through overuse by columnists. It has its origins in black Twitter. When someone who was famous or once popular is seen to have done something which is fucked up, hypocritical or inauthentic, it would be said that XYZ person is cancelled. Now this was as much a joke about accountability as it was an expression of it. Obviously you can't really cancel someone the way that you would a Netflix subscription. All you can do is drive along a bit of social media scandal and enjoy it while you can. Now this is very different from what Andrew Neal thinks being cancelled is, where in his view it's when Owen Jones comes on your show and is insufficiently different. Or Bar Revices definition. What being cancelled means that you voluntarily quit your well-paid job at The New York Times because your colleagues don't rate your work. I've been trying to get Aaron Bostani cancelled for five years. Or Times columnist James Marriott, who complains about being cancelled every time people learn of his existence. So how did a concept from the deep dark pit of sand Twitter manage to haunt the halls of prestige media? We were cancelled before cancelling was a thing. Before it was a thing. This woke thing is out of control. Liberals have become completely intolerant, illiberal. They want us all to lead their lives. If you don't you have to be shamed, abused, cancelled and so on. Well one, there's nothing the media likes more than trying to sustain a conversation about itself until sweet extinction comes for us all. And two, it speaks to an interesting modern day phenomenon in which people who've got access to wealth, power and platform, the likes of which most people in society will never experience, present themselves as the most victimized amongst us. No, no, well I mean. And why is that? Well to find out a bit more I went to talk to someone who you might have heard of because he's the main character on Twitter most days. Many of them fear what they see as this horde of young millennial woke barbarians who are banging at the gates and waiting to just pour in and destroy all of the values that they hold dear. And they saw the 2019 election as them putting that generation back in their box. For many of them it was this idea of putting woke politics back in the box or what they call identity politics. The idea of anti-racism, LGBT rights and all the rest of it. What's been very aggravating is that hasn't happened and indeed the emergence of Black Lives Matter as a global anti-racism movement was just one example of how what they thought was a triumphalist we have won and given that generation their values a good battering isn't the case. Woke culture might be so vaguely defined as to be almost meaningless. Man you see how woke I was I called you out. Well you say you woke but the companies you work for I mean unbelievable Apple, Amazon, Disney. But what it does speak to is the fact that young people who tend to hold progressive values are able to shape and determine culture through informal kinds of power. The worker sinks to the level of a commodity. Eww he's a capitalist. Eww. Just dreaming. So what that means is what's often dismissively referred to as identity politics is actually quite powerful on the cultural terrain even if that power hasn't been translated into material socioeconomic justice in terms of race or gender equality. And a particularly shallow and bastardized version of identity politics one which is obsessed with victimhood and less concerned with questions of power is actually really amenable to those who have power but feel that their platforms are under threat. People are hurtful to me all the time. Try being an old woman if for goodness sake I'm not about to walk on eggshells. Where once upon a time intersectionality referred to the specific experience of being both black and a woman now refers to being both white and a colonist. The cancel culture moral panic has nurtured a sense of victimhood amongst the well-paid denizens of the media class and that means that if criticism comes from outside the bubble it's a form of social violence and not just what happens when you put your opinions out for a living and people share their opinions back. Wait a minute wasn't that called a marketplace of ideas? Now I'm not saying that everything that comes out of social media is good but the sense of threat that's being identified by many of these writers, journalists and columnists is the fact that social media has been a partial democratization of the public sphere. Now your reader doesn't just look at your column sit there and absorb it they talk back and it's just an unfortunate fact of life that if one is able to make good living spouting idiotic opinions in the pages of a broadsheet newspaper a similar right to free expression should be enjoyed by someone doing the same for free on social media. Maybe the all-pervasive sense of victimhood amongst prestige media outlets isn't because cancel culture is a threat to democracy it's because cancel culture is democracy in action.