How bureaucrats destroy the careers of artists

The Jenny Lindsay witch-hunt

Whenever people say to me that cancel culture does not matter, as it only targets rich and famous artists like J.K. Rowling, I ask “what do you think of the treatment of Jenny Lindsay, then?”

If they are capable of learning, they learn a lesson when they reply “Jenny who?”

Like most people in the arts, like most people whose careers are destroyed, like most people everywhere, the Scottish poet is neither rich nor famous.  Yet activists still went for her after she publicly called out a trans-identifying male writer for urging attacks on lesbians at a Pride march.

Oppressors target the weak and the powerless. Who knew?

Now Jenny has achieved a kind of fame, although perhaps not the kind she wants.

An arts administrator in Scotland took it upon herself to phone bookshops and tell them not to stock Jenny’s new book Hounded: Women, Harms and the Gender Wars.

What kind of grubby, intimidating, tongue-biting, back-stabbing, witch-hunting society are we creating when bureaucrats feel they can deprive poets of a living? Surely, unelected administrators should have no right to impose political judgements on Shelley’s unelected legislators.

In Scotland, they do, apparently.

As Jenny’s story shows