Gathering the kindling: thoughts on the fascism of "liberals"

I see that the Wicked Dr Watson has now been suspended from his job as director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, as a result of his heretical comments on race and intelligence. He has also been banned from the Bristol Festival of Ideas, where he was due to give a talk next Wednesday. According to the festival's organiser Andrew Kelly, "James Watson's opinions were unacceptably provocative". Interesting, isn't it, that we now live in a society in which people talk openly about the need to silence "unacceptable" opinions? Meanwhile, I'm wondering how long it's going to be before the liberal lynch mob does what it clearly wants to do, and burns Watson at the stake...

Of course, to call these people liberals is perhaps somewhat misleading. After all, whatever else liberalism stands for, the word does imply a belief in the importance of individual liberty. And it is patently obvious that people who attempt to impose limits of acceptability upon freedom of conscience and freedom of speech, who have people removed from their jobs for transgressing those limits, and who seek to make the expression of opinions inimical to their own illegal, are not in any sense advocates of liberty. What they are is unclear. There are many words that might describe them - some of which are rather colourful - but the most accurate that I can think of is 'fascist'. So far as I can see, the people who are hounding Dr Watson today, the people who hounded Frank Ellis out of his job last year, and the people who, in the future, will no doubt hound many others for expressing the same opinions as Watson and Ellis, or for expressing other views that they dislike, are nothing other than fascists. Certainly they are deeply evil.

It is to be hoped that Dr Watson will not lose his job over this. As I understand it, America has laws designed to protect the right of citizens to express their opinions, without the threat of punishment, legal or extra-legal, hanging over their heads - surely these should operate in Watson's favour. But, whatever happens, I hope that this whole sorry business will cause at least some people in Britain to wake up and smell the proverbial coffee: to see to what extent freedom of speech and conscience has been eroded in this country, and to see the extent to which those we call liberals, are more commonly deeply authoritarian, and utterly opposed to liberty.

Update: The white-hating racists at BLINK, satisfied that Watson now appears likely to lose his job for his thought crime, have demanded that he also return his Nobel Prize as a mark of his contrition. Not because he did not earn it, but simply because these scum wish to extract as much blood money as they can from the wicked heretic - to bring him down to his knees in supplication before them - and because they wish to do all they can to intimidate anyone else who might harbour any politically incorrect thoughts into suppressing them. After all, if they can bring down a Nobel Prize-winner, who else is safe from their evil machinations? One wonders whether, should Dr Watson inexplicably refuse to return the honour, they will seek to have him stripped of it? As I said, these people are fascists, plain and simple.