Malcolm Gladwell Conquers Mt. Suck

What a world: Comedian Graham Linehan is arrested in England for telling truths Bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell was rewarded for concealing

From the National Review:

Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer for the New Yorker and one of those rare authors who shaped his own oft-imitated genre. Starting with The Tipping Point, Gladwell used recent academic research to coin phrases and introduce concepts in psychology and sociology into popular culture…

Earlier this week, Gladwell appeared on The Real Science of Sport podcast… Gladwell made the remarkable confession that when it comes to advocates of athletes born male participating in women’s sports, he found their arguments unconvincing for a long time — but only felt comfortable publicly saying so recently.

The story went on to explain how bestseller machine and fast-food philosopher Gladwell admitted that in a conference in 2022, he was “cowed” into taking the position that biological males have a place in women’s sports. “I’m ashamed of my performance of that panel,” he said, noting that he approached the discussion “in a dishonest way.”

On the flip side of this issue, there was this, from the BBC:

The head of the Metropolitan Police has called on the government to “change or clarify” the law following the arrest of comedian Graham Linehan over posts he made online… The 57-year-old was arrested under the Public Order Act on Monday on suspicion of inciting violence in relation to posts about trans people on X…

Linehan, who came to prominence after writing sitcoms Father Ted and The IT Crowd, and has since become a vocal activist who is highly critical of the trans-rights movement… Linehan said he was detained by five armed officers who were waiting for him at Heathrow Airport, where he was returning to from the US.

As noted in a story yesterday about the Minnesota Catholic school shooting and a lawsuit against OpenAI, Father Ted writer Linehan was arrested for three tweets deemed transphobic. The arrest was made not under the U.K.’s controversial new Online Safety Act, nor was it connected to European laws like the Digital Services Act. Instead, Linehan was picked up under a British law that dates to 1986 and prohibits use of words that cause “harassment, alarm, or distress.” Racket’s Greg Collard reached out to British authorities and received a supernaturally long statement (see accompanying timeline), and we made contact with Graham last night, with hopes of more details soon.

The arrest of Linehan spurred a series of pseudo-apologies from British officials, with Prime Minister Keir Starmer saying his government would henceforth make its priorities “clear,” and Health Secretary Wes Streeting saying the government wants police to “focus on policing streets rather than tweets.” This doesn’t mean the multiple layers of media regulation in Britain and Europe have changed, or will change. Two months ago, the U.K. media regulator Ofcom told GBNews it “must give airtime to claims that biological men are women when covering trans issues.” In March, the Court of Justice in the European Union ruled that Hungarian authorities erred in refusing to identify a born-female refugee as “male,” saying nations should prioritize a person’s “lived gender identity and not the identity assigned to them at birth.” Public opinion may have turned to the point where even a jellyfish like Gladwell feels safe saying a word or two, but you won’t see any of these folks standing up for those who’ve lost jobs or been publicly reviled.

To recap: one of the most influential and (he wrote with envy) best-selling and most richly compensted authors in English cheerfully admitted to being too much of a wimp to tell the truth. He’ll suffer no penalty and mass sales of his McBooks will continue. Meanwhile, a talented writer like Graham Linehan was removed from Twitter, lost his career, and suffered almost total social condemnation for saying true things Gladwell would not.

This is the same Gladwell with whom I squared off in the 2022 Munk Debates in Canada. Douglas Murray and I took him on along with New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, ironically over the subject, “Be it Resolved: You Should Not Trust Mainstream Media.” After everything that happened this week, I looked back at that performance. Gladwell just earned a spot on the Mount Rushmore of media asshats: