Will somebody please politically persecute me?

Come on Woke, pull your finger out

The news this month that President Donald John Trump is considering offering political asylum for British ‘thought criminals’ went through me like a golden thunderbolt. I can think of no better destiny for myself than trotting around the Continental United States to appear on various Intellectual Dork Web podcasts to whinge about how dreadful Britain is.

I would have great fun having a Yeonmi Park style run of dystopian whimsy vis my ignoble place of origin. ‘The entirety of Londonistan has been subjected to Sharia law’, ‘even men cannot leave the house without being raped’, ‘all of the Cod ran out in 2009, since then, the fish in fish and chips comes from ground up white people’. If the success of FYP Pakistani slop accounts is anything to go by, American rightists will believe almost anything you say. Making it as ludicrous as possible will give me the crucial ‘it was all satire’ defence when Joe Biden steals the 2028 election from JD Vance and I am sent packing back to old Blighty.

So many of my possible futures depend on the conceit of ‘satire’ but this, alongside the erudition and esotericism, comes with a glaring drawback. J’accuse is not subject to any energetic attempt by state actors to shut it down. If I had, in 2021, simply misgendered JK Rowling under my own face and name I could have recorded the police banging down my door with their masks on. Instant, verifiable victimhood status. No messing about with ‘exceptional talent visas’, a golden ticket to Trump’s America.

But no, I had to go and become an anonymous internet zillionaire instead by starting this publication. Curse my generational talent! It will be Suzanne effing Moore who gets to swan about Austin Texas with Joe Rogan and Palmer Lucky while I am stuck in Pallet Town, writing ever more bullshit about the Wonks and Spinners around Wes Streeting until a final ill-advised drunken Lime Scooter ride finally kills me.

‘Trans’ was the best possible opportunity to get cancelled in a career friendly way. Large sympathetic right-wing press, no real social pushback if you are above the age of forty, supportive extant right-wing infrastructure (beginning in July 2017 with May’s self-ID). You could maintain a column at the Times of London whilst thundering against the Tavistock clinic. Many did. Even David Aaronovitch managed to do so until he was relegated to messing about with his blogs by Juliet Samuel. But that time has now decisively passed. The most obvious sign of this is the abrupt irrelevance of Kemi Badenoch at the precise moment she was made Leader of the Opposition. Her fronts in the culture wars, statues and Trans, have already been won. In Britain today a fifty-year-old woman could probably smash in the windows of the Tavistock clinic in front of a police officer without being subject to legal censure. I celebrate this, for all of the hypocrisies of the man hating TERFs, progressives were genuinely gearing up to mutilate millions of children through hormone therapy and invasive surgeries, and this hell was averted.

But this begs the question. What is the best way of getting safely cancelled today? Grooming gangs as a political problem is in roughly the same place that Terfism was in 2020. The ‘liberal establishment’ has been routed on the issue and no longer feel confident enough to mount the sub-intellectual defence of ‘talking about this issue causes Harms to vulnerable people’, swapping in Pakistanis for suicide prone teenagers with gender dysphoria. Elements of the genuine, non-media establishment have now taken a right-leaning position on the matter. The publication of David Bell’s internal report on GIDS in 2019, in the Guardian, had the same impact that Louise Casey’s audit into grooming gangs in July of this year, insofar as it forced an institutional reckoning. We can also trace rough parallels between the increasingly prominent political emergence of grooming gang survivors with the wave of detransitioners around 2019/2020 (e.g Keira Bell).