Irish Eurovision band sack team member for saying a male rapist is not a woman

[Xoxoxoxoxoxox]

Ian Banham - the creative director for the Irish Eurovision Song has been sacked by the other band members because he wrote a tweet calling out the press for referring to a male rapist as a ‘she’.

The band have issued this statement:

Wild Youth is a band that stands for unity and kindness. Our song represents our beliefs as a band. We have cut all ties with lan Banham and will not have him on or near our team or Eurovison journey. We are so sorry for anyone offended by his comments.

They are in effect sacking their band mate and they defending a rapist’s right to be called she’ and they say they stand for ‘kindness’.
There is a backlash, I wonder how much support they will get for this.

https://twitter.com/bandwildyouth/status/1650833255266934784?s=46&t=KoykWa-IFitZMrteWP2pKA

It sounds like the Macarena sung by a dying, drooling drunk as he rolls about in the gutter at kicking out time of a particularly seedy Bingo Night. Perhaps that's the point, IDK.

That Croatia entry is bringing back memories of the trippy scene from The Big Lebowski!

They're certainly making a clear, bold statement of their intentions, though: for the Croatian broadcaster not to be landed with a very large bill in 2024!

There really is nothing new under the sun.

"Irish Eurovision band sack team member for saying a male rapist is not a woman"

There's more to it, of course. He made a series of transphobic tweets as well as anti-vaccine tweets. Many of their fans wanted the band to break ties with him.

https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/04/25/wild-youth-eurovision-ian-banham-transphobic-tweets/

Gonna watch the Fast Show again now and remind myself that there is humour outside of Twitter/social media and the Po-faced fuckers that inhabit it!

It's one for about 10.20pm in slot 23 when you are at a Eurovision party and hammered.

Classic it is not. I won't disagree with the point about being flat and dreadful. But yes for me the entire point is that is truly bad in a bad way.

It's one of those Eurovision songs you wait for for twelve months to come along give you three minutes of wtf and then never give a second thought to.

It also reminds me of a (loosely!) musical version of this!

Cf Malta, as I understand it. Abortion illegal, gender self-ID legal way ahead of the pack. I saw a suggestion that this might be connected with Malta's dubious track record on tackling organised crime and people finding it convenient to be able to change name and ID with minimal questions asked.

I think in this case it was another MTF person. That doesn’t make the act any the less despicable,though.

he also tortured them.

Where is the anti-vaccine tweet? There seems to be one tweet from a year ago, after nearly all restrictions were lifted and life was back to normal, where he criticises GB news for a story about fears of rising Covid deaths. He commented that now the initial Ukraine panic was over the news agencies were back to Covid. Which wasn't an anti-vax tweet, it doesn't mention vaccines at all, but a criticism of media sensationalism. So if you've got anti-vax tweets, show them.

It's terribly ... avant-garde, but yet simultaneously dated in its 'try too hard' way. Just another load of nearly-middle-aged blokes pretending to be outrageous.

Singers like Andy Bell cornered that market decades ago.

Yeah, I keep hearing that he said a whole load of utterly despicable things, but so far the one I'm seeing is the rapist misgendering and the misgendering of that frightful fraud, Mulvaney. Also, Having Views about who won Eurovision. And saying someone was fat or something? Nothing excessively unusual.

It looks like the band's cutting ties with Ian Banham was prompted by a thread from ESCDiscord, a "16,000+ member Discord server" not affiliated with Eurovision and with no formal standing. The criticism wasn't directed at the band but at RTE: 'Eurovision celebrates diversity through music. However, his remarks related to transphobia and Ukraine (and their victory last year) seem to run contrary to this. We therefore strongly condemn @rte for using Mr. Banham as the staging director for this year's Irish entry.'

Apparently recent tweets set someone off at ESC Discord and they went on a hunt to find "incriminating" prior tweets. No mention of the Tate tweets (I haven't read them), but I'd imagine they included everything potentially incriminating that they could find.

The tweets included in the complaint (first link), in order:

1. 29/03/2023: IB agreeing that convicted rapist (and this is apparently the THIRD conviction) Zara Jade is a man.
2. 26/03/2023: IB replying to a retweet questioning Dylan Mulvaney's claim to be "acting like a woman" with the comment that DM is not a woman.
3. 02/04/2023: IB commenting on a tweet about a trans-species person, saying "it's for sure a cult"
4. 15/05/2022: IB tweeting in response to JHB approving of Ukraine's Eurovision win, saying it's supposed to be a contest of music not of political support
5. 15/05/2022: IB tweet congratulating the UK on "winning" Eurovision
6. 16/03/2022: IB commenting on a GB News article reporting WHO warnings about COVID resurgence, saying that it's ramping up fear
7. 15/05/2022: IB replying to a tweet re the "perfect" Ukraine > UK Eurovision result, commenting again on the political basis of the win and wondering if Ukraine can/will host.

I have to say 2023 is turning out to be quite a good year in respect of the be kind brigade and the TRAs doing all the heavy lifting when it comes to showing how insane the whole TWAW TMAM thing is.

Yeah, I keep hearing that he said a whole load of utterly despicable things, but so far the one I'm seeing is the rapist misgendering and the misgendering of that frightful fraud, Mulvaney. Also, Having Views about who won Eurovision. And saying someone was fat or something? Nothing excessively unusual.

Isn't it astonishing how often these nasty bigots have said things that are so very bad that the world has apparently banished them from its boundaries - along with all traces of evidence that they ever existed.

But don't worry about anything silly like 'proof', will you; just trust us that this is a really terrible person whom you need to cancel....

But what about that ridiculously fake looking tweet of support for Andrew Tate? Funny how they didn't find that when it was only a few weeks old.

I'm getting flavours of Mouldy Old Dough.

First they came for those who criticised the result of Eurovision, but I did not speak up because I do not watch Eurovision.

Then they came for those who criticised GB News for sensationalism, but I did not speak up for I had not seen that episode and knew not of what they talked.

Then they came for those who said that a male rapist is not and can not become a woman, and I agreed with them and said, fair enough, mate.

This. Ffs

This whole thing is frightening, isn't it? And I suppose that's kind of the point. There are organised groups of people who will trawl your social media for wrong think and get you fired.

I kind of wish JKR hadn't weighed in on this today. Would have liked to leave Irish twitter and BeKind twitter to have to look each other in the eye without the welcome distraction they now have of "Oh well if JKR is feuding (yes someone called it a feud!) with them, they'll definitely win, poor little plucky Irish underdog band!"

But JKR has suffered from the exact same bullshit of people saying she was transphobic for having pretty standard average rational and sane views but have been grossly misrepresented in order to cancel.

So it's hardly a surprise she would step in when lots of people didn't support her

I'm Irish and they will be getting Nul points from me.

Oh I know, she hasn't done anything wrong at all.

I'm just pointlessly speculating about whether the pressure would have built on the band to respond in any other way to the backlash, had they not gained this renewed victim status when someone as big as JKR shows up. But I'm as grateful as anyone else for everything she has done, all along.

I honestly think the only thing that will stop this scourge in the end is adults deciding not to give in to it any more. The amount of power that has been handed over to this cabal made up of the cynical, the stupid, the self obsessed and the personality disordered is just shocking.