Burn the Witch!

Douglas Murray at The Spectator: Louis Smith’s ‘show trial’ on Loose Women is emblematic of our dimwit-run times

... Because of course if Smith and a friend had made some joke about Christianity not only would it not have made it to The Sun, it would barely have made it to social media. But thanks to more than a quarter of a century of internalising the Rushdie fatwa, even the most liberal parts of our society have volunteered to become the Spanish Inquisition of Islam.

When we read about societies in history which destroyed people for heresy we usually gasp in amazement. Yet here is a case of someone breaking a heresy of our own society because of beliefs which aren’t in any way central to our society and the result is to try to destroy the person’s career, ensure they can’t work again, publicly humiliate them, call them all the most damaging names possible and make them grovel to get back even a semblance of their old life. This is a sickness. And the fact that this type of show trial is on public television in the middle of the day and that the judges and jury are four ‘loose women’ make it only more emblematic of our dumb and dimwit-run times.

Grasp the distinction to which he points -- when our [insert pejorative of choice here] ancestors persecuted heretics, the heresy in question was generally one that was inimical to their society; when we "enlightened" moderns persecute heretics, it is the orthodoxy being defended that is inimical to their society.

There is a pattern here, it one will see it: the pattern is that everything the leftists do, all their enthusiasms, are inimical to their society.