MEDIAWATCH: Steve Braunias takes us on a delightful trip back to the cancel culture of 2016

Ahhh.

2016.

The year of the woke cancel culture Lynch mobs where people lost their job for not liking Chocolate bars in Māori, misusing pronouns and suggesting biological gender was a thing.

The middle class woke, their non-binary allies, fourth wave feminists and hashtag intersectionaism was in full outrage olympics mode and every heteronormative cis white male was a target.

What a glorious time to be alive as the holy trinity of identity politics declared they were here forever:

• All white people are cross burning racists.
• B-E-L-I-E-V-E ALL Women that ALL men are rapists.
• Anyone who supports free speech is a uniform wearing Nazi who hates the trans community.

Any jokes about that Trinity are automatically canceled.

It really says something about us as movement that the first thing we did when we had a tiny bit of power was to immediately turn on everyone and police their speech.

Into such a Season of the Coven comes Steve with this wonderful review of academic Professor Greg Newbold’s experience of being cancelled in 2016…

Feminist scorns attack in new memoir

A new memoir by a leading criminologist attempts to settle a score with a feminist critic—but the woman named in the book has thrown scorn on his claims.

In his book Dream Dealer, Professor Greg Newbold revisits a Canterbury University controversy about a 2016 seminar he presented that dealt with false rape complaints. It created a media storm, partly led by PhD student Kara Kennedy. Newbold writes in his book that he was subjected to “vitriolic” personal attacks and a “campaign” of misinformation designed to damage his reputation as well as derail a study he had published that year with New York-based firm Routledge: “My scholarship had ben impugned and my book internationally pilloried.”

It’s a strong, angry seven-page section towards the end of Dream Dealer. It casts Kennedy and the members of Canterbury University club UC FemSoc as radical maniacs determined to make his life hell. FemSoc staged a public forum, Rape and Silencing,  in response to his seminar. Newbold attended. “I sat there in silence, completely stunned by the vitriol of the attack,” he writes.  He was given two minutes to reply. “I was completely blindsided, and left with the feeling I’d been set up.”

The seven-page section is typical of the book’s forthright manner. Newbold is famous as an ex-con—he got banged up for dealing drugs—who became a serious academic. His jail time is the centrepiece of Dream Dealer. It’s a good, powerful read.

Newsroom

 

Poor old Newbold. I always liked him and always thought the attack on him at the time was pretty hysterical and ridiculous.

It wasn’t that men feared a witch hunt when it came to Me Too, (we had all seen Harvey Weinstein), what men feared was a witch trial where the new evidential threshold was whatever someone said on social media and where due process was a heteronormative white cis male privilege to be attacked.

I loved that Steve contacted the young PHD feminist who’d destroyed Newbold’s career (she’s now on laical Auckland Council) to get her side of the story and it’s what you would expect, total denial of any wrong doing and putting all the blame on him.

The best part of the review is that she went in to do her PHD in how female characters in Dune are really feminist Jedi.

I’m not making of that up.

To have been cancelled in the manner he was must have been pretty depressing, but hilariously enough, it was the mass  backlash to the extremes of the woke purges that put in motion MAGA and the Culture War semantics we have now.

The Middle Class activists ended up being hoisted by their own woketard.