Why the woke left loves dancing on people’s graves

There’s nothing the digital left loves more than an untimely death. And if it’s a violent one, even better. Charlie Kirk’s body was barely cold before his haters were chortling: ‘Bye, Nazi bitch.’ ‘Good riddance’, tweeted batshit hack Ana Kasparian following the death of US Senator Lindsey Graham. Even the revelation that Tory grand dame turned Reform UK spokeswoman, Ann Widdecombe, had been beaten to death with a hammer was insufficient to stem the glee of the death-laughers. ‘Racist old bitch’, said the madder ones. ‘Bigot’, said the more ‘moderate’ ones.

And now the ghouls are coming for Rod Liddle, the brilliant, contrary columnist who died on Sunday at just 66 years of age. Even before his grave is dug, they’re dancing on it. He was a nonce-defender, a racist and a raging ‘Islamophobe’, wail the humourless tossers of the prick left. That none of this is true, and that defaming the freshly dead is about as scuzzy as human behaviour can get, matters not one jot to the Liddle vultures. They’ve got virtue to display, and if they must do it from the soapbox of a beloved writer’s corpse, so be it.

It really has been gross. It’s been particularly bad over on Bluesky. That’s the social-media sewer to which liberals and leftists decamped en masse after X finally permitted women to say ‘he’ about cocks in frocks and the ‘gammon’ masses to say ‘I don’t like mass immigration’. As Joanna Williams reports, Bluesky’s riff-raff-dodging wankers have been posting laughing emojis and images of champagne corks popping. Imagine the depthless narcissism it must require to celebrate a man’s death because he said things you disagree with. ‘Nothing human is alien to me’ and all that, but I do struggle to fathom such industrial-scale self-regard that cheers the sudden passing of a much-loved husband and father because it means you and your piss-weak constitution will be spared his hurty words.

Liddle hate swiftly became the bloodsport of the bourgeois left. It descended into a dark arms race of digital cruelty, each lowlife trying to outdo the other. Don’t forget his ‘galloping racism’ and his ‘repeated defences of paedophilia’, said one author. He ‘relentlessly promoted racism’, said some yapping leftist. He was a ‘bloviating bully’, said a blogger. He wasn’t. If the fainthearts of the coddled middle classes felt bullied by his columns, that’s on them. What’s more, at least he ‘bullied’ people who were alive, and could defend themselves, unlike his own shame-free posthumous persecutors.

Mehdi Hasan joined in. Of course he did. That muppet’s never seen a digital mob he didn’t want to join. ‘The outpouring of love for Rod Liddle’s offensiveness’ is a ‘reminder of how mainstreamed and even encouraged Islamophobia is in UK political and media discourse’, he said. Jesus, the ethno-narcissism. Liddle wasn’t a fan of Islam – get over it. Not everyone has to like your religion. Hasan’s Zeteo published a piece titled: ‘Rod Liddle has died. Here he is in his own words.’ Every quote was cynically yanked out of context in a bid to depict Liddle as a horrible bloke. It was tantamount to misinformation.

It’s the humourlessness of Liddle’s frenzied critics that is most striking. These prissy midwits wouldn’t know a joke if it slapped them in the face. (Calm down, lads, that’s not an incitement to violence – it’s just a saying.) Consider the claim that Liddle was a defender of paedophilia. This stems from a self-mocking column in which he said he could never have been a teacher because he’d have been too tempted to shag the pupils. They never quote from the rest of the column, in which he clearly states that teachers having sexual relationships with pupils is ‘wrong’, ‘imbecilic’ and ‘exploitative’. Why leave that out, liars?

Then there’s the line that gets quoted all the time. It’s from the Spectator. ‘My own view is that there is not nearly enough Islamophobia within the Tory Party’, he wrote. Bigot! Racist! Oh keep your knickers on. He makes it crystal clear in that piece that he’s using the term ‘Islamophobia’ to mean criticism of Islam. People should be permitted, he said, to call Islam an ‘oppressive ideology’ that sometimes grates against the ideals of ‘secular democracy and equal rights’.

The arrogance of people who make up a bullshit term like ‘Islamophobia’ to police and crush criticism of Islam and then clutch their pearls when a writer uses ‘Islamophobia’ to mean criticism of Islam. As Liddle said, having ‘misgivings’ about an ideology is ‘not racism’. Yep. He also said in that column that Boris Johnson was wrong to say women in burqas look like postboxes, because ‘postboxes are bright red’. ‘They look more like Darth Vader.’ Oh shit, a joke. Ready the fainting couch. Call the police.

I know, to explain a joke is to kill it. But what else are we to do in the face of such inane scoldery? All this Liddle hate is proof that university now makes you dumb. A whole new generation has been trained to cherish their self-esteem above all else, including the hard-won right of others to speak freely and blasphemously. The self-idolatry of the credentialled classes has birthed a public realm that is violently allergic to humour. Liddle was a devil to these god-children who prize their own feelings more highly than freedom.

Wokeness has become a death cult. Hundreds of public-sector workers in the US were reprimanded for celebrating the murder of Charlie Kirk. Social-media posts ‘rejoiced’ over the death of Lindsey Graham. Even national-treasure status could not protect Ann Widdecombe from the macabre elation of leftish whackjobs. I hope her death was ‘extremely painful’, said one academic. Add this grave-dancing to the fact that trans activists frequently wish death on ‘TERFs’, and that the keffiyeh classes are horrifically chill about the rape and murder of Jews, and it becomes undeniable: the crazier sections of the left see death as a righteous comeuppance for ‘right-wingers’.

To my mind, this death-chuckling is a cancerous outgrowth of cancel culture itself. An activist class that considers brutish cancellation to be a just punishment for wrongthink will soon look upon that most brutish cancellation of all – death – as something just or funny or at least as an opportunity to remind everyone about the dead person’s horribleness. The shameless glee with which the ‘progressive’ mob speaks ill of the dead is a testament to the savagery of neo-censorship. Convinced they should have the right to glide through life without ever hearing a sore word about their BS trans identity or their daft Islamic beliefs, they come to feel almost relief when a ‘hater’ snuffs it. The cult of narcissism is the midwife to truly cruel ways of thinking.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.