BY BEN PENSANT

It is just unfair that anyone other than us Leftists can use social media to stop funding hate. I am referring to the recent case of James Gunn and other cases that the right have won against us using OUR social media.

Sadly, mere weeks after Hollywood bosses correctly removed Scarlett Johannesburg from a transgender gangster biopic because she’s never possessed a twig and berries (of her own), they undo all that good work by firing a decent liberal for cracking jokes about sodomising young boys. I don’t know what rankles more, the brazen inconsistency or the thought of a poor progressive’s career ruined because of some off-colour gags they once made on Twitter.

Predictably, right-wing trolls suggested there was more to the story, citing a film hosted on James Gunn’s personal website which allegedly featured underage sex and was forwarded to him by a convicted paedophile. But frankly this was all hearsay and until I see the video with my own eyes I refuse to believe it exists. And please, if you have a copy, don’t even think about sending me a DM on Twitter, emailing a link to benspunkypants@yahoo.com, or leaving a DVD in a camouflage jiffy bag beneath the sycamore tree on Benton cemetery between the hours of 1 and 3 am. You’re wasting your time, not mine.

So this is what we’re up against. Everywhere you look, the alt-right are using our censorious tactics against us and it just has to stop. NOW. Because we can’t let the best thing about social media become the absolute worst.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s undoubtedly a good thing that a grubby corner of the internet most people couldn’t give two shits about has the power to force a Hollywood studio to fire a director. And every brave Gender Studies professor who’s ever sent a furious tweet or started an online petition has successfully earned the right to be mentioned in the same breath as Malcolm Luther King and that Rosa wife who threw herself under a bus.

But then this modus operandi starts being abused by the wrong kind of people you know we’re in trouble. Public figures and companies folding under the weight of honest-to-goodness left-wing activism is admirable and necessary. Doing it because of vindictive right-wing pressure is disgusting, cowardly and a stain on society.

If we’re to preserve the noble leftist tradition of hounding people for saying stuff we don’t like we can’t allow the right to do the same. It’s an attack not only on liberal values but our Marx-given right to be raving hypocrites. And the second we allow the likes of Ken Cernovich or Mary Joseph Watson to behave exactly like us we upset the very fabric of social media. Because the last thing the world needs is for people to start doubting the importance of Political Twitter. Go down that road and before you know it they’ll realise it’s nothing more than a worthless platform for left-wing cretins to wave their appendages at right-wing cretins while trying to get each other sacked.

By all means laugh at Toby Young, celebrate the hits taken to his bank balance, and bask in the warm glow of knowing that you contributed to a mildly right-wing gobshite being denied a seat on an educational board that no-one outside of Westminster gives a crap about. But spare a thought for Jamie Gunn: alone, frightened, banished. And all because a ragtag of alt-right rabble-rousers who can’t handle rape jokes, think it’s up to them who directs the next Justice League film, and were happy to hound a man whose only crime was being a principled liberal who enjoys a bit of banter about child porn.

Still, he’s white. He’ll bounce back. Pity the same can’t be said for Bill Crosby and OJ Simpson.

What a world.