As I smiled my way through this weekend’s harvest of attacks on me on Twitter (ranging from people wishing I was dead, apparently without any feeling of guilt or trepidation at expressing this view, to crude swearwords, via unreasoning assumptions that everything I say must axiomatically be wrong, because I write for ‘The Mail’, to a woman who, gathering that her son would be attending a talk by me at his school sixth form, sought to inoculate the poor child against me by showing him YouTube films of my late brother. I wonder if she also hung a clove of garlic round his neck. Heaven forfend that he might think for himself), I thought this was a good moment to examine the question of bigotry.
I am ceaselessly accused of this fault. Well, any reasoning person, with access to the facts, can reach his or her own conclusion about the justice of the charge, though I’m not sure how many reasoning persons interested in facts there are these days. I’ll just have to hope they’re on the jury (if there is one) when I’m eventually hauled before the Thought Court on charges of WrongThink.
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