If the recent actions of a British parliamentary committee head are any indication, there’s now a new standard for justice:
Mere allegations of sexual assault are enough to get a man canceled and prevented from making a living.
Of course, applying this across the board and beyond Britain would mean removing Joe Biden from office, since he has long been accused of a rather brutal sexual assault (by Tara Reade). But such consequences are rarely visited on leftists. But this standard is being applied to entertainer-turned-commentator Russell Brand, which indicates that it’s not a standard at all.
It’s a double one.
Apropos to this, these allegations were never made when Brand was an out and proud left-winger — which he not long ago was — but only now that he’s an increasingly red-pilled right-winger. Coincidence?
The charges against Brand are serious, no question. But they’ve also been made by anonymous women who’ve not yet gone to the police. Moreover, so “far as I know, there is no contemporaneous evidence supporting the new charges against Brand,” writes commentator Andrea Widburg. “He vigorously denies them. The women making the accusations have not testified under oath, there’s been no discovery, and there’s been no formal trial (the due process part of ‘due process’).”
This hasn’t stopped the cancel cultists from playing the irrational mob. In fact, Widburg continues,
with remarkable speed, Brand found himself de-platformed and de-personed. YouTube demonetized him. The BBC, an uber-left outlet, removed some of his material from its online archives and podcasts. His agent publisher fired him, and his shows have been “postponed.” Well, one expects that from the tech tyrants, the BBC, and the entertainment industry. All of them have been chomping at the bit to disavow someone who left the plantation.
Of course, much of this is the work, no doubt, of cowardly, mercenary business interests aiming to value-signal their (faux) righteousness. It is troubling, too, that what’s essentially today’s town square (Big Tech platforms) can control information flow and suppress dissent by choosing whose words may be heard.
But perhaps even more worrisome is what one Dame Caroline Dinenage, chairman of the British Parliament’s Culture, Media & Sport Committee (CMSC), asked of Rumble, a video-sharing website that didn’t voluntarily join the cancel-culture phalanx of fakers:
She sent a letter to Rumble chief executive Chris Pavlovski asking him to demonetize Brand. This correspondence, along with Rumble’s response, can be seen below.
Obviously, a letter from a government official always evokes the fear that failing to comply could mean the force of law is nigh. The state, after all, could conceivably ban your platform from its shores or pursue some other punitive action.
This is why there should be zero tolerance for government officials making this kind of appeals, which, according to reports, Dinenage made to multiple organizations.
Note also that in Dinenage’s letter, she claims to care about not undermining “the welfare of victims of inappropriate and potentially illegal behaviour.” But she apparently overlooks something:
It’s entirely possible that Brand is the victim here.
This would be the case, mind you, if the allegations against him are fabricated.
This isn’t to say they are or aren’t — I do not know. But neither does Dinenage. This didn’t stop her from stating about Rumble that “we are concerned that he [Brand] may be able to profit from his content on the platform.”
Why should this be concerning? Does it have a bearing on the adjudication of any possible future criminal case against Brand?
If there’s any good news here (other than Rumble’s passionate rejection of the CMSC’s appeal), it’s that not all members of Dinenage’s committee signed off on her letter. What’s more, there has been pushback, too.
For example, GBN relates commentator and ex-UKIP MEP candidate Carl Benjamin as saying, “Caroline Dinenage has violated one of the few clauses of the Magna Carta which are still in effect, that an Englishman’s property may not be arbitrarily seized or stripped from him without the lawful judgement of his peers. She must resign or be fired immediately.”
Then, as GBN reported in a different article, conservative MP for Mansfield, Ben Bradley, said that the
judicial process is being “superseded by media”.
He explained: “I think it’s a really dangerous precedent to set, regardless of his guilt or innocence, where someone should be deprived of their income through trial by media rather than trial by the courts.
“We have a principle of innocent until proven guilty, and of being able to be heard by a jury that is fully informed of all the facts.
“Russell Brand clearly isn’t getting that right now.
“It’s easy to be part of the mob, but if those rights are eroded then you won’t like it when the mob turns on you.
Government’s role here is an important one: To maintain a judicial system that can try individuals accused of crimes under the rules of due process. But state officials have no business trying to catalyze mobs to intensify people’s punishment in the courts of public opinion and the market.
Unfortunately, we’ve seen even worse on our side of the pond. The release of the “Twitter Files” late last year revealed that the CIA and FBI spent years “meddling in content moderation,” as the New York Post reported at the time. (Talk about doing an end run around the First Amendment, using Big Tech as a speech-quashing proxy.)
So say what you will about Dame Caroline Dinenage, but at least she wears her censorial banners openly.
