Let's pretend for a second that your only contact with anyone under the age of 35 is

what you read about them in the Times, the Telegraph, or if you're stateside, the NYT

and the Washington Post. You'd thumb through the papers each morning and find yourself

totally baffled by the transformation of social norms by these younger generations. There

are all these new pronouns to learn, racial acronyms to absorb, and even the beloved works

of Ronald Dahl and Ian Fleming are being carefully pruned of offensive language.

University academics report being hounded out of their own seminars for trying to teach

difficult material, or having syllabi ripped up due to an overrepresentation of the pale,

the male, and the stale. Balege, a culture of sensitivity and censorship, gripping arts

and humanities departments across the nation, the students demands for recognition, representation

and right-on language becoming ever more burdensome. Some even become fixtures on news and

current affairs programming, figureheads for a movement who just want to be able to call

men, men, women, and corner shops. Well, you get my drift.

And it's not just the tweed jackets of the academy who find themselves besieged by the

furious youth. It's impossible to navigate the opinion section of any newspaper without

finding some columnist or other claiming to an audience of millions that they've been

cancelled. Something truly awful must be going on. If some of the most powerful people

in society, people with platforms and money and social status, find themselves terrified

of logging into Twitter in the course of the average day. Maybe the government ought

to step in. Maybe, in the interest of protecting free speech, they should do something about

the plague of no platforming and student protest.

OK, when you spell it out like that, the absurdity of claiming that civilisation is being

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