The Statue and the Twitchfork Mob
Free Speech, Pugdogs and Weaponising Chickens
Will there be a statue for Captain Sir Tom Moore, the man who captured the imagination of a sick nation starved of heroes? His campaign to support the NHS swept social media and he unwittingly raised tens of millions of pounds for the health service. He was heralded, lauded and knighted. If it had been safe to do so, he would have been carried shoulder-high through the streets of England.
On Captain Sir Tom’s death, the Prime Minister said he would support the idea of a statue for this ‘a hero in the truest sense of the word’, referring also to his military service.
Here’s the big question: will the statue be funded and built in time for it to be torn down when someone raking through his past discovers he said or did something non-woke?
This is likely given he was born in 1920 when Britain still had an enormous global empire and that he was in his 40s when the 1960s began to turn all kinds of social norms on their head. His only main protection is that he didn’t start tweeting aged 86, when Twitter was founded.
Twitter is the battleground. A Church of England clergyman recently tweeted – and then deleted – “The cult of Captain Tom is a cult of White British Nationalism. I will offer prayers for the repose of his kind and generous soul, but I will not be joining the ‘National Clap’.” It became a storm in a Church of England teacup. One of those awful institutional thick greenish-blue cups. That’s how things are now. In the 17th century it was pamphlets. Now it’s 280-character tweets. I know which I prefer.
The Twitchfork Mob
The Twitchfork mob, as it is sometimes called, is brutal and ruthless. Should you promoted to any position of prominence, there will be people who are pretty sure they already hate you, what you stand for and the horse you rode in on. So they will rifle through your tweets from the very beginning, finding anything that could cause anyone the slightest offence. Even the retweeting of a joke will do.
The hope is that a vile tweet will show you to be on ‘the wrong side of history’ or some deranged extremist. This news can be published far and wide and cause a neat hysterical 12-hour media storm. Seven hours in, your potential employer, or a pusillanimous minister of state, will get cold feet and fire you before you’ve even put a biro in your desk tidy and been shown how the photocopier works.
Forces At Work
The main weapon of this culture war here is an ancient one: peer pressure. This is one of the great immutable forces of the universe. It is so ingrained in the fabric of reality that any day now they will see it in the Large Hadron Collider.
Leaders require a will of iron not to surrender to this short but intense pressure. During that time, they will be relentlessly attacked for being ‘out of touch’ and for not acting rashly and emotionally.
Peer pressure works. In words attributed to French politician and champion of the working classes, Alexandre Ledru-Rollin (1807-1874):
"There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader."
Pounding Pockets
If this ploy doesn’t work, the Twitchfork mob has more weapons in its arsenal to bend leaders, corporations and governments to their hot-headed, furious will. They know a well-aimed spike at the wallet can really hurt. Here, tactics are changing.
Previously, the boycott was the weapon of choice. But these tend not to work. If you’re a small operation, you can often benefit from the publicity and notoriety, although the pressure and the attempts at shaming are deeply distressing.
At the other end of the scale, huge multinational corporations barely notice the effects of economic sanctions by a few motivated customers. Recently, Netflix streamed a film which sexualised children. A number of people cancelled their subscriptions. Or at least they said they did. Somehow, Netflix muddled through, continuing to rake in billions a year in subscriptions.
Nonetheless, our spending choices can make a difference. We may refuse to buy things through Amazon because of views about taxation or monopolistic behaviour. (I personally don’t even think Corporation Tax is legitimate, but that’s one for another newsletter.) My point of thinly-veiled economic self-interest is this: we can support things we do like and want to encourage through changing our spending habits. I’ll write more on this next time.
Weaponising Chickens
Another unintended consequence when activists declare a boycott against this company or that, is the rallying effect for the opposition. For a time in the USA, every branch of Chick-Fil-A became a fortress to be defended by the conservative counter-revolutionaries.
Being Christian-owned and shutting on Sundays, this fast-food restaurant chain become more and more successful than competitors who were open seven days a week. They managed this despite continual media coverage of hollers and shrieks from those who didn’t like the non-woke charities the company contributed to. There were also comments on marriage by the CEO in 2012 that were conservative in nature. The conservative Christians took Chick-Fil-A into their hearts.
Despite this support, Chick-Fil-A bowed to the relentlessness of the first tactic: peer pressure. They stopped donations to those charities their opponents despised, and made mealy-mouthed statements to placate the placards.
In turn, of course, they received a backlash from the conservative Christians who felt betrayed. All this over a chicken sandwich. Which I hear is excellent. Especially with the dipping sauce.
But it’s not about the chicken, is it? It’s about power, politics and peer pressure. This is war. And the Twitchfork mob have found an even more effective way to hit the pockets of their enemies.
More Weapons
Why not just turn off the money at the source? There were concerted attempts to ‘debank’ eight Republican senators who voted to reject the results of the 2020 presidential election on 6th January. That means that people wanted the banks of those Senators to refuse to provide financial services to these controversial but publicly-elected officials. It didn't work that time, but they’re not giving up on this tactic.
You maybe have heard about what happened when Twitter threw Trump off their platform. Many moved over to Parler. This was essentially shut down by Amazon and the app storekeepers who refused to support this ‘free speech’ platform. The publisher/platform debate is one for another time but the point here is that Parler was successfully strangled by Big Tech.
What about Gab? Remember that? It’s a social media set that’s been running since 2016, founded by a Christian worried about the direction of travel on other social media. It’s still running. I recently joined it to see if it really is the right-wing echo-chamber I’ve been assured that it is.
I can’t get the App, because it was deplatfomed. Well played, Apple and Google. I can use a browser which is less convenient. But how would I get a Pro account or support it finanicially? I’d have to pay with Bitcoin. Seriously. They don’t take any other currency. Why? Because they have been debanked. Their last regular payment option, Visa, refused to give them financial services in June last year. Banks won’t do business with them. They simply can’t operate financially without using a completely unregulated cryptocurrency. (Although for some, that’s part of the appeal of Bitcoin.)
Meanwhile, Back in Blighty
All of the above is happening in a country which has a First Amendment guaranteeing free speech. We don’t have that in the UK. In fact, we have quite the opposite. We have laws specifically curbing free speech and have done for nearly twenty years. And we’ve had successful prosecutions under those laws. It’s just no-one notices and nobody cares. We probably should. Especially those of us who are Christians.
Originally drafted to curb radicalisation for the purposes of terrorism, Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 refers to ‘Improper use of public electronic communications network’. In this legislation, “a person is guilty of an offence if he sends by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character”.
It’s shocking isn’t it? Talk about sexist. Who says this guilty person is a ‘he’? Okay, I’m missing the point (and it probably is a ‘he’) but given that these days, everything is on a ‘public electronic communications network’, you can see how this law can easily be used against anyone saying anything you don’t like. The only bar to clear is whether you are ‘grossly offended’. And offence itself is a grossly subjective emotion.
Note also that a person is technically guilty of this offence if the message is obscene. Remember that word? ‘Obscene’? It’s now only used in polite society in reference to money. But isn’t it curious that there is plenty of explicit pornography on Twitter, which technically breaches the 2003 Communications Act? But, apparently, that’s fine.
The Pug Dog of Doom
Despite this glaring double standard, the 2003 Communications Act was used to prosecute a man known as ‘Count Dankula’. He made a YouTube video in which he taught his girlfriend’s pugdog, called Buddha, to do a Nazi salute whenever the dog heard extremely offensive terms referring to the Holocaust. Let us be clear. The video is undoubtedly in poor taste, even if it works as a joke. In fact, it’s the poor taste that makes it funny.
YouTube would have been justified in removing it. Oddly, they didn’t. The video stayed up for a long time and no-one complained. But eventually they did, called the cops, Dankula was arrested and appeared at Airdrie Sheriff Court in 2017, charged with perpetrating a hate crime. He was found guilty and fined.
That same year, a preacher was detained in a shopping area in Bridgwater ‘on suspicion of a racially or religiously-motivated public order offence’. He was released without charge, having only recently appealed successfully against a similar public order conviction. Leon Da Silva claimed the preacher told him that he was going to hell for his sexuality. Presumably Da Silva thought this statement was untrue and absurd, but he was grossly offended and that’s all that matters.
In The Sacred Art of Joking, I look at how jokes work, and how they go wrong, especially in the realm of religion. In so doing, we see the profound shift from what the law used to say and what it says now. I use the legal action around Jerry Springer: The Opera to highlight this issue.
Despite being personally offended by it, I’m relaxed about that controversial satirical stage production. I understand why the BBC broadcast it for reasons I explain in the book. I didn’t complain at the time, and haven’t changed my view. Do order the book, and another copy to give to a friend, but while you wait for them to arrive, I’d like to make one general observation.
The Honour of True King
We live in an age when the Twitchfork mob feel very powerful. They can bring pressure to bear on leaders and small businesses, and debank the big ones. And in the UK the law gives them the strongest weapon of all since all you need to prove is ‘gross offence’. This could, presumably, be caused by reading out numerous chapters of the Bible, and not just the obvious ones that leap to mind. It’s entirely subjective, remember?
This is a profound change in our society which has mostly gone unnoticed. We used to have blasphemy laws. They were rather byzantine and existed in some form or other until 2008 when common law offences of blasphemous libel were formally abolished in England and Wales. The concern of those laws was to protect the good name and honour of our true king, the Lord Jesus Christ.
Those laws have been scrapped. In their place, we have laws which protect the feelings of individuals, created by the aforementioned True King, who perceive some kind of offence against them and their self-certified identity. The identity and majesty of Jesus Christ as King is officially and legally of no consequence whatsoever.
The only thing that matters legally is the feelings of those who feel slighted or dishonoured by a speaker, preacher or Tweeter. We have lifted the crown from the head of Christ and placed it firmly on our own heads as the ones worthy of honour. Anyone who will not bend the knee to the Spirit of the Age expressed in individuals is a traitor, guilty of a hate crime.
Soon, Sir Captain Tom will be thrown down with everyone else. And we will be compelled to applaud. And be happy about it.
The Sacred Art of Joking, by James Cary, is published by SPCK. A signed copy can be purchased direct from the author here.