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Evening Standard
Evening Standard
Comment
Anne McElvoy

OPINION - Anne McElvoy: An intellectually cowardly idea is spreading from Left to Right

My speech is free, but I am not so sure about yours. You are an annoying patriarchal male who expresses yourself clumsily about women. Or you are too obviously in the grip of your privilege for me to talk to you about my experience of race, class, gender, geography, history, politics, policy, art… and more to come. At worst, I think you are so “toxic” that the debate would be purer and the world a nicer place without your dim ideas frankly. They are uncomfortable and distressing. I feel offended and the more I feel this, the more burning my resentment becomes.

And once I have decided this for reasons which seem pretty good to me, I can advocate to have you cancelled from lectures, articles, social media or anything where I might have to actually engage with what you say. So go away or, at least, be prevented from having a platform where I have to hear from or see you.

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