Portrait of the Artist as a Brave Man
By Mia Hughes
Graham Linehan’s arrest at Heathrow Airport for alleged “mean tweets” marks another chapter in the ongoing saga of his harassment at the hands of trans activists. He was returning to the UK from his home in Arizona to face charges of defamation brought by yet another trans activist. Today’s Post is dedicated to him for his bravery and unflinching support for free speech and women’s rights.
I Pushed Back and I Lost Everything
When Graham Linehan, one of the most talented and successful comedy writers of a generation had his life smashed “to smithereens” by trans rights activists, many people argued that he brought it all upon himself. His views were so toxic and harmful to a vulnerable, oppressed minority that he deserved to lose everything, his friends, his career, even his family, for expressing them.
So, what heretical views did Linehan dare express that so enraged the social justice witch-hunters? What could possibly have been so deplorable that the world needed to be deprived of Linehan’s comic genius for its own safety and moral purity? In a nutshell, Linehan said women deserve rights. He said they deserve the safety and protection of female-only spaces and the fairness of female sports categories. He also said it is a crime to tell gender-nonconforming children, who would otherwise likely grow up to be lesbian or gay, that they are born in the wrong body and need lifelong medicalization.
In his unflinching and deeply moving memoir, Tough Crowd, Linehan describes the naivety with which he weighed into the most radioactive debate of the 21st-century culture war. In 2018, already under Stasis-like surveillance for liking tweets in support of women’s rights, he describes flying “into battle full of beans,” thinking that once people heard what he had to say, once they understood the danger to women and children posed by modern trans activism, his friends in the world of showbiz would come to his aid. But, to his astonishment, “no one turned up to lend a hand.”
For those in the UK and Ireland, Linehan is best known for the sitcom Father Ted, with its hilariously quirky characters so beloved that they are woven into the collective consciousness of a generation. For those on the other side of the pond, his most well-known creation is Black Books, starring Dylan Moran and Bill Bailey. The IT Crowd was another huge hit that developed something of a cult following among nerds and computer geeks.
Thus, with this string of successes under his belt and a Father Ted musical in the final stages of development, Linehan thought his career was secure enough to take a stand for women, children, and the LGB community. Likewise, he thought his reputation as a good, progressive lefty would offer him protection from the mob. He was, after all, “Team Nerd, Team Geek, a good little progressive, a true believer, and on the right side of history.”
His side had “the artists, the coders, the gaming designers, the cool podcasters,” but he was about to learn that those “gentle nerds” he had cozied up to, whose corner he had fought, “were just like any other group of people, with sadists and psychopaths and misogynists (ooooh, so many misogynists) among them too. They’d just never had the chance to show it before the internet gave them the upper hand.”
One of the most heartbreaking aspects of his memoir is his poignant description of the sense of betrayal, as he realized one by one that his friends had abandoned him.
“I pushed back and I lost everything,” he wrote. “Each betrayal sits in my memory like crows dotted along a telephone wire.”
In the true spirit of today’s censorious mob, many have suggested that Linehan deserved to lose everything because of the tone he has adopted in the gender debate. He told me that, like so many, he initially weighed into the issue gently, being careful never to “misgender” a person who identifies as transgender and simply calling for a respectful conversation about how trans rights were negatively impacting the safety of women and children.
But the activists gradually wore him down. “They were so abusive. They said such horrible things to my family,” he told me when explaining how he became much more hardline in the debate. By way of demonstrating that the woke mob will viciously destroy anyone for the slightest deviation from their ideological position, Linehan gives the example of children’s author Rachel Rooney, who, back in 2019, wrote a gorgeous book, My Body Is Me, about how children should be happy in their body.
Linehan describes the book as being a beautiful poem “telling kids how their bodies are amazing.” And for it, trans activists destroyed her, accusing her of transphobia, spreading “terroristic propaganda,” and supporting conversion therapy. Rooney has never written another book.
Or there’s another British children’s author, Gillian Phillip, whose only crime was to like a tweet by JK Rowling. She was dropped by her publisher after the woke mob demanded she be punished for stepping out of line. This can hardly be considered what CNN describes as the “free market at work.” Phillips retrained as a truck driver and says her new industry is far less misogynistic than publishing.
As such, the examples of Rooney and Phillip serve as a counter-argument to those who suggest that Linehan, as a stubborn, occasionally brash, heterosexual white Irish male, somehow brought his punishment upon himself. “You can be the nicest person in the world, and they will do exactly what they do to someone like me,” he told me. “They’ll just destroy you.”
For Linehan, one of the greatest disappointments is the cowardice of his fellow comedians. He says he can forgive people in the music industry for their mob-pleasing behavior, but he cannot forgive those in comedy. He describes the role of the jester in society as being someone who speaks truth to power. “Comedians are supposed to be grappling with the world as it is; they’re supposed to be holding a mirror up to it,” but 99% of comedians are ignoring the madness of our world being captured by an absurd ideology that says males can be lesbians and tells distressed teenagers that the path to happiness is through body-part amputation.
Brendan O’Neill argues that we are living through “one of the gravest reversals of free thought and of Enlightenment itself of modern times,” and to call it “cancel culture” is like “referring to the Inquisition as information management or to Salem as accountability culture.” It’s certainly true that the term cancel culture just doesn’t do justice to what Linehan, Rooney, and countless others have endured for expressing beliefs that, up until five minutes ago, everyone held.
As the medical scandal that Linehan tried to warn everyone about continues to be exposed and come unraveled, there can be little doubt that his persecutors are destined to be condemned by history, joining the ranks of countless hysterical mobs across time and space who lost all sense of reason and persecuted truth-tellers in a vicious frenzy. Conversely, Linehan himself can hold his head up high, safe in the knowledge that he stands poised to be remembered as a hero who courageously sacrificed everything in a quest to protect the vulnerable. Perhaps there is even hope that his tribe, the descendants of jesters, will remember their raison d’être, to speak truth to tyranny, and Linehan will once again be allowed to bring laughter into people’s lives.
Watch Linehan on Beyond Gender
Graham Linehan will be speaking at The Bigger Picture Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico on September 27th and 28th. Tickets selling fast – secure your seat now.
