FREE SPEECH TOPPLES CREEPS

IMAY love this witch hunt against workplace sex predators like Harvey Weinstein more than I should.

I love, for instance, that some media stars right here must namecheck themselves on Google every day, freaking they’ll be outed next.

I loved reading just last weekend the oops-you-got-me confession of author and MSNBC political commentator Mark Halperin, accused of groping and propositioning women much his junior when he was political director at America’s ABC.

It’s such fun to see bullies get paid back, especially by the very people they once thought too weak to resist.

So many women who were expected to accept the hand on the backside from a boss now find themselves with power to make the bastard pay.

Weinstein is now sacked from his own film production company, and Halperin lost his job, a book deal and an HBO project.

Women are suddenly believed and gropers are running scared. Hollywood star Ben Affleck and even George Bush Sr, the former US president, have had to apologise now for gropes they’d probably long forgotten.

Excellent, although I worry about quite how much I’m liking this. For a start, witch-hunts can get wild, confusing allegations with proof, and trivial with serious.

I also wonder whether some of the outrage from men, particularly, is tainted with envy and frustration that their own virtue was not its own reward.

How many are thinking: At last! Weinstein won’t be around to make virtue seem for losers by bullying yet more women into his bed. He won’t get extra for breaking the rules.

But there is a more moral comfort to take from this great reckoning. See how Weinstein fell? How Halperin lost his living?

It wasn’t from being sued or denounced to some commission. In fact, the legal suits against Weinstein always ended in confidential settlements that left him free to molest again.

No, two things brought down these men. First, free speech: laws that allowed women to denounce them without running the same risk of being sued that women face here.

Second, people power: people don’t want to buy things from a known sex creep — not books or even opinions. The market works, especially now women do so much of the earning and buying.

Trust free speech and people over nanny laws and commissars.

The victims brought down their own monster, and the people cheered.