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November 25, 2020 - 12:06am
Listen to the podcast version of the interview:
Suzanne Moore is one of the most famous columnists at the Guardian newspaper — or at least she was until she finally left last week, accused by colleagues of being a ‘transphobe’.
For the first time, she talks about her experience to Freddie Sayers — what it felt like to be rounded on how she felt couldn’t stay.
It’s a sobering story of an attempt to shut down freedom of speech at one of the world’s biggest newspapers.
Don’t miss her full essay on UnHerd here.
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SubscribeI found it interesting to hear her talk about libertarianism and the left. I have seen this same issue with lockdown support where I, as a libertarian left winger am very uncomfortable with the handing over of the opposition to the right libertarians. The left sometimes gets stuck in a certain orthodoxy and cannot show flexibility and are openly hostile to any challenge to it. Libertarianism must never be allowed to be seen only as a right wing philosophy.
I am sceptical as to the conceptual intelligibility of left wing libertarianism. Surely, to be left wing is to endorse the coercive redistribution of wealth, whether by the state or by a soviet acting on behalf of the workers. How do you reconcile endorsing coercion with libertarianism?
The Left, by every definition, is authoritarian, and never Libertarian. For someone on the left to claim Libertarianism is to wish to pick and chose from the good bits of other, conflicting, philosophies, which is the worst form of apostasy.
I must have read a different article.
How can the Left be libertarian? They want to increase centralised State control which is the opposite of being libertarian? Just another example of buzzwords being thrown around by people who don’t know what they mean. Bloody hell, the state of journalists in this country…
Can’t help but feeling how in 3 years time we will have the same interviews from journalists saying they couldn’t write about the nonsense of the covid handling.
I suspect that because newspapers do not really sell newspapers anymore they get most of their funding from private donors/organisations (she mentions a few here) and hence cannot really go against the idelogy of those funding them. In short, we no longer have an independent media but just gigantic marketing departments that sell their agendas under the disguise of neutrality.
This article has got nothing to do with Covid! Don’t try to co-opt it to that!
All through the interview I kept thinking about Melanie Phillip’s experience at The Guardian 30 years ago. Looks like Owen Jones could be cast out of the cult next.
How about getting them all together for a discussion?
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but is there really a left wing Twitter mob forming against Owen Jones?
But what of Seumas Milne? No real talk of the Guardian comment section can leave him out. May he return one day? Like Trotsky’s ghost haunting the Labour Party. I remember he merely left on leave to help Corbyn mould the Labour thought, and I cannot see him remaining under Starmer.
Good comment, although Milne is more of a Stalinist than a Trot, I would have thought.
The Guardian has long reversed its core value so that comment is now sacred and facts are free. Notably in respect of its treatment of antisemitism in the Labour Party and its espousal of the trope that the Jewish community is monolithic. Surely this is a topic that Unherd should be pursuing. Watch this https://twitter.com/DoubleD…
I had to keep jumping forward as she took a very long time indeed to dance around the topic, to qualify, re-qualify, say yes…sort of, but then not really, not so much, but maybe sort of, depending, although in my day it had a sort of different…. zzzzzzzz.
I get the feeling she is still one of them and cannot actually mention the crime which must not be named, which is woke-fascism, and one which is getting to the point it is devouring the woke ones themselves. Also, Libertarian? That’s like Alf Garnet defending his position by saying, ‘Look, I am a very broadminded man…’ The word is just not compatible with Suzanne Moore.
That’s the problem she’s been excommunicated but hopes to be readmitted to the body of the faithful at some time in the future. We heathen don’t need temporary allies if she’s not willing to join the dammed what good is she.
Great piece! What a loss to the Guardian.
did you ever wonder whether the issue is not left/right, female/trans, older/younger generation, Guardian/or what else, but that Suzanne Moore might have become (yet another) victim of agents provocateurs whose main profession it is to try and shut down or turn into towers of Babel all sensible public political debates?
It’s a shame that open discussion is not allowed at the Guardian but this has been the case for years. They used to have open comments but stopped because they were banning anyone who disagreed with them. Now very few articles allow commentary. Diverse opinion is unwelcome. I will say that I’m surprised that Suzanne Moore is in any way shocked by this.