Brendan O’Neill, "Anti-Woke: Selected Essays" (Connor Court, 2018)

Not all those on the Left are "woke." The ever-controversial columnist Brendan O'Neill is a case in point. In Anti-Woke: Selected Essays (Connor Court, 2018), O'Neill takes a Marxist cudgel to identity politics. From woke white people to 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’."

Brendan O'Neill is editor of Spiked, the online magazine based in London but speaking to the world. He is one of Britain’s most thoughtful and polarising polemicists. He has been described by the Daily Mail as 'one of Britain's leading left-wing thinkers' and by The Guardian as an 'obnoxious intellectual wind-up merchant'.

He has written for The Spectator, The New Statesman, BBC News Online, The Christian Science Monitor, The American Conservative, Salon, Rising East, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Big Issue, The Australian in Sydney, and The Sun. He is host of The Brendan O'Neill Show podcast and he makes frequent appearances on Sky News and the BBC.

Kirk Meighoo is a TV and podcast host, former university lecturer, author and former Senator in Trinidad and Tobago. He hosts his own podcast, Independent Thought & Freedom, where he interviews some of the most interesting people from around the world who are shaking up politics, economics, society and ideas. You can find it in the iTunes Store or any of your favorite podcast providers. You can also subscribe to his YouTube channel. If you are an academic who wants to get heard nationally

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics