Here's a nice wrinkle on cancel culture.

In Britain there is a journalist named Julie Burchill, now 61 years old. I say "now" because I dimly remember her from the 1980s as an interesting lefty, by which I mean a lefty who couldn't stick to the party line and sometimes said things that made you stop and think—a sort of female Christopher Hitchens, though not as smart.

Well, Ms Burchill has also written a book. It's about cancel culture, title: Welcome to the Woke Trials: How #Identity killed progressive politics. The inspiration for it was one of Ms Burchill's articles getting retracted by a respectable British newspaper because people claimed it was "transphobic."

The book was due to be released in March next year. However, Ms Burchill just recently got into a public row with a female Muslim journalist named Ash Sarkar [Tweet her]. In the course of some exchanges, Ms. Burchill referred to the Prophet Mohammed as a pedophile on account of his having married his third wife Aisha when she was nine or ten years old.

When the book's publisher heard about this, they canceled publication.

You get it? A book about cancel culture got canceled. Talk about a revolution eating its children!

In fairness to the publisher, I should note that they have agreed (though not without some prodding from free speech advocates) to pay Ms. Burchill's advance in full [Julie Burchill is paid her advance in full and gets her rights back for book after it was cancelled by publisher over 'Islamophobic' Twitter row, Daily Mail, December 23, 2020].

And don't shed any tears on the lady's behalf for having lost a publishing opportunity: the Daily Mail reports that five different publishers have offered to take on the book. With that much competition, I'm betting the advance she ends up with will be better than the original.

Ms. Burchill's comment on the whole business was, quote:

I've been upsetting bourgeois bed-wetters since I was 17. Now I'm 61 and nothing has changed.

I think I'm in love.