The journalist, YouTuber and friend of the FSU Andrew Gold recently had an episode of his podcast Heretics taken down by the monetising platform Patreon – for, fans of irony will be pleased to hear, the sin of heresy.
In the traditional way, Patreon didn’t say at first why they’d removed the episode. Once they had, though, the ironies piled up still further.
Andrew was interviewing another FSU supporter, the comedian Andrew Doyle, and the pair discussed a 2009 video clip in which the late Chistopher Hitchens was emphasising the need to resist extreme Islam – and, as it turned out, predicting exactly what would happen to the two Andrews 16 years later.
Mr Hitchens told his audience:
This is urgent business, ladies and gentlemen. I beseech you, resist it while you still can and before the right to complain is taken away from you, which will be the next thing. You will be told you can’t complain because you are ‘Islamophobic’. The term is already being introduced into the culture as if it was an accusation of race hatred.
Sounding ever more prophetic, Mr Hitchens went on to say that the ones who’ll “hold open the gates to the barbarians for you” will be “your own multicultural authorities” – because “the barbarians never take a city till someone holds the gates open for them”.
To prove how right he was, here is Patreon’s delayed explanation of its ban:
Of course, Mr Hitchens was using the word “barbarians” – as well as “gates” “city” and “hold open” – in a metaphorical sense. But it seems that Patreon, which also sponsors a channel called Close Reading Poetry, failed to spot that.
And just in case that isn’t enough irony for one post, the main subject of the banned episode was the impingement on free speech by ideological tech firms.
To watch the Christopher Hitchens clip, click here.
