The pearl-clutching hypocrites were up in arms this week about a colourful writer and media commentator being exactly that, a colourful writer and media commentator…

Apparently, we need much much more censorship to protect us from mean words.

The rich masses of the West have been indulging their newfound love for nanny-state governments and general hatred of fat, old, straight, white blokes by condemning UK television presenter and columnist Jeremy Clarkson for comments he made about Meghan Markle.

This happened just as my kind-hearted teenage daughter had succeeded in convincing me I ought to have some tiny speck of sympathy for Meghan, given the revolting behaviour of the British paparazzi and the racial slurs of tabloid headlines early in her courtship with The Spare.

I must admit, I do. Whether the rationale that ‘they just want to tell their own story unedited’ justifies using a Netflix series to air details of their inner-most family dramas, is another matter.

But I think Clarkson’s hatred for Markle – which he wrote exists ‘on a cellular level’ – is a little over-the-top.

He wrote in the London tabloid The Sun that:

‘…at night, I’m unable to sleep as I lie there, grinding my teeth and dreaming of the day when she is made to parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowds chant, “Shame!” and throw lumps of excrement at her.’

Yes. Definitely O.T.T. Hyperbolic even. So much so, that if one possessed half a brain and a critical sense larger than that of a goldfish from the Remedial School for Intellectually-challenged Goldfish, one would have to conclude that the writer was being deliberately hyperbolic, for literary effect.

This used to be legal. In the Anglosphere, we used to chuckle at rhetorical exaggeration and pop-culture references. We even applauded it as a sign of wit and creative ability.

Not anymore. Now every word must be interpreted painfully literally through the lens of ‘acceptable speech’ as determined by the self-appointed monitors of what can and cannot be said in public.

The Sun has predictably taken down Clarkson’s column after it was condemned by London Mayor Sadiq Khan and Scotland’s Nicola Sturgeon.

And this is why Clarkson must never, ever, apologise.

If the sexist and misandrist ‘Third Wave’ feminists of the world are allowed to link offensive (to some) comedic writing to actual domestic violence in an attempt to continue their sterilisation of our culture, we’re stuffed. It is a licence to ban anything.

But yet again, we see the ridiculous far-fetched connections being drawn: Clarkson’s words are perpetuating a culture that leads to domestic violence and the deaths of women, the cool kids who went to uni and took social ‘sciences’ inform us ignorant plebs. Game of Thrones, the origin of the colourful language, received no such criticism for its treatment of women.

Women and men in intimate relationships use physical and psychological violence on each other for reasons that have much more to do with personal character flaws and socio-economic realities than a column in The Sun. The problem is so complex, that experts who’ve dedicated their lives to solving it have trouble agreeing on the true causes.

But the identity-politics-obsessed neo-Marxist chattering classes have it all worked out. It’s writing like Clarkson’s ‘normalising’ violence against women, that directly kills women.

Nobody does context anymore. Nobody has the common sense required to detect exaggerated prose. Nobody can tell hype from reality. No doubt these genius cultural police believe that Clarkson literally grinds his teeth and lies awake at night thinking about Markle. I mean, he wrote that down, so it must be true.

Most readers would have instantly recognised that Clarkson was using a popular culture reference to the famous ‘shame’ scene, well known to anyone who has watched the blockbuster TV series Game of Thrones, in which the queen villain is publicly shamed by another woman by being marched through town near-naked as the rabble throw excrement upon her. It was a particularly famous scene that many feminists wrote love letters about, praising it for the way it empowered Cersei Lannister and turned her into a fearsome queen.

If we are to believe that this imagery suddenly upsets the feminists, I wonder what they will write when they discover how Cersei exacted her brutal and violent sexual revenge on the woman who shamed her (ask any Game of Thrones fan – it ain’t pretty). But they’ll need to take that up with HBO and George R.R. Martin, not Clarkson.

While the feminists are at it, they should have words to the author of the 50 Shades of Grey series, famous for its explicitly erotic scenes featuring sexual practices involving sadomasochistic bondage and discipline, inflicted by the male lead character upon the female lead. So outraged were people at the time of the series’ release, that only a mere 150 million books were sold. No doubt these were only sold to virtuous women wanting to inform their feminist sensibilities regarding the despicable DV-inducing behaviours described within. Any simultaneous spike in AA battery sales should be regarded as purely coincidental.

Our media have enjoyed the usual bout of culture-destroying virtue-signaling with the Clarkson story. Seven News’ UK correspondent reported on Clarkson’s response to the drama by saying he ‘claimed’ it was a reference to Game of Thrones.

‘Claimed’ is the word journalists use instead of ‘said’ when we want you to doubt the person’s integrity in saying the thing they said. The fact that the Game of Thrones reference was a statement of objective indisputable fact, apparently escaped this particular TV himbo.

In the UK, there have been loud calls for Clarkson to ‘never grace our TV screens again’. So it’s perfectly fine to destroy the career and livelihood of a man who has brought entertainment to millions for decades, on the basis of the contents of one article.

Clarkson’s only error was to overestimate the intelligence and good sense of the modern British consumer.

We must all begin to publicly and loudly push back against this nonsense or we’ll have no free expression left. A free democratic society requires the permission of offensive speech. If it’s not tolerated in the context of art and socio-political commentary, we can hardly continue to consider ourselves a modern, progressive, free democracy.

The term ‘hate speech’ continues to be used by the left to justify political censorship. The Twitter files have proven this (as if we didn’t know already).

We need to take this threat to our basic liberty far, far, more seriously than we have to date.