The media mogul Rupert Murdoch is and has been for decades, a bogeyman for the Left. The left hates Mr Murdoch with an absolute passion and he was blamed for just about everything by leftists, including keeping the working classes in the dark about socialism and making them right wing. Leftists could not see that Mr Murdoch didn’t create a social conservative attitude in the working class nor was he to blame for the working classes rejecting socialism, most of the time he was merely catering for an already existing audience, not creating an audience.

The leftists were partially correct in having a dislike of Mr Murdoch as it has been plain for years that Mr Murdoch doesn’t really like the Left either. It was the Left after all and in particular the Trade Unions that prevented the British newspaper industry from modernising and which kept some publications from allowing journalists to directly input text to the print line and stuck in the ‘hot metal’ print era long after other nations had abandoned such technology. Back then the union demarcation lines were so horrifically solid that I as an NUJ member, was not allowed to use a wire machine, a glorified fax machine for younger readers, to send pictures to my newsroom because this device had to be operated by a member of the National Graphical Association or a SOGAT member.

Mr Murdoch has been quite silent over the past year about the current culture war battles and despite being a friend of Donald Trump has also been taciturn about the travails of the former President. However recently Rupert Murdoch has come out fighting over the issue of the woke cult and has spoken out against it.

I was alerted to Mr Murdoch’s comments about the dangers of wokeism by a post on the Twitter feed of Laurence Fox, the founder of the Reclaim Party and searched out Mr Murdoch’s actual words which were reported by the Daily Mail. Mr Murdoch said:

‘For those of us in media there’s a real challenge to confront: a wave of censorship that seeks to silence conversation, to stifle debate, to ultimately stop individuals and societies from realizing their potential,’ he said.

‘This rigidly enforced conformity, aided and abetted by so-called social media, is a straitjacket on sensibility.

‘Too many people have fought too hard in too many places for freedom of speech to be suppressed by this awful woke orthodoxy.’

Whatever you might think of Rupert Murdoch, on the subject of wokery and left wing censorship he is 100% correct. The Left brooks no challenge to their ideas, behaves like a raging mob and enforces ideological conformity. Mr Murdoch is also correct when he said that left wing orthodoxy poses a threat to freedom of speech and that this threat is aimed at cultures that over centuries created systems where freedom of speech was both accepted and cherished. The woke orthodoxy is indeed ‘awful’ and in my view dangerous and needs to be stood up to and countered.