The death of free speech

Oh, to be in America, where cultural decay and self-destruction compete equally with hyper-feminist and anti-racist agendas. Gone with the Wind is now off limits and Robert E. Lee’s statue in Richmond is unlikely to remain standing (I give it a week at most). And over here poor old Winnie is also in the you-know-what. Why didn’t anyone tell me Churchill was a Nazi? The Cenotaph also has to go; those guys it honours were racists.

Two weeks ago in these here pages Douglas Murray said it all about a US import we can do without. Alas, when Uncle Sam sneezes, the British bulldog gets the flu. The scenes may be less dramatic in the UK, but the hypocrisy is the same, if not greater. (Get killed fighting for your country at Waterloo à la Thomas Picton, and have some thug tear your statue down.) Should we Greeks destroy our monuments to, say, Pericles because he had slaves? (Try it in Athens, assholes, and see how far you get.)

I don’t know why, perhaps because I’m a naive little Greek boy, but the outrage expressed by all these activists and celebrities rings hollow. I regularly speak to the film director James Toback who is in the Bagel writing his memoirs — his description of the first time he dropped LSD at Harvard, with cars flying through the windows at him, is brilliant — and even Jimmy, a man never at a loss for words, had trouble describing the disaster that is Mayor de Blasio: ‘Fossils dating from the sea bed 2.1 billion years ago would be more effective than this clown.’