Anti Woke | Selected Essays by Brendan O'Neill

ANTI WOKE
SELECTED ESSAYS BY BRENDAN O’NEILL

ISBN: 9781925826265

Paperback, 110 pages

In this selection of essays, celebrated columnist and editor Brendan O’Neill takes a cudgel to identity politics. From woke white people to the tyranny of transgenderism, from Islamo-censorship to the fashionability of mental illness, O’Neill takes aim at it all. He puts the case for free thinking, free living, and free speech.

From the book:

"When even someone as pop as Perry, who has more Twitter followers than most countries have citizens, is playing the awful game of bowing and scraping before cultural dividing lines, you know PC madness has gone mainstream."

"This is what happens when you think hyper-racially, as the left now does, in alarming contrast to earlier leftists who said ‘Let’s be colourblind, guys’: you resuscitate racial stereotypes."

"In 2007 [Osama bin Laden]he lectured the foul, greedy West again, claiming that ‘all of mankind is in danger because of the global warming resulting to a large degree from the emissions of the factories of the major corporations’. He beat Occupy Wall Street to the punch by four years, slamming the ‘greed and avarice of the major corporations and their representatives’."

"The response of our supposed betters to terror outrages — where they say, ‘Don’t blame Islam, don’t criticise Islam’ — is the worst response imaginable. It inflames the very religious narcissism and violent self-pity that motors many of these attacks."

"Far from taboo, having a mental illness, and talking about your mental illness, is all the rage. It’s the latest must-have. You’re no one unless you’ve had a mental episode."

"Bill [Leak] was subjected to an Inquisitorial persecution. No, there were no pointy-hatted Bible-bashers or stakes being lit. But through the menaces of Islamists and the Stalinist cries for The Australian to dump him and the HRC’s vile hauling of him to account for himself, a man was afflicted for his thoughts, hectored for his ideas, made ‘knackered’ and ‘drained’ for daring to express what he believed to be true. Censorship is cruel. Witch-hunts are implicitly violent. They take a toll on their victims. And they took a toll on Bill."