Brendan O'Neill

I really shouldn't buy books by columnists, they aren't really books, just compilations of "journalism", or whatever passes for it these days. The modern columnist is someone who expresses opinions for money. Inevitably, this means they also hold opinions for money. It is how money works. For the most part, I could sympathise with some or even many of the views displayed within these pages, even if the writing (you could hardly call it prose) is culled entirely from websites and periodicals, in a manner typical to all columnist cash-ins. However, the failure - and it must be a deliberate failure - of O'Neill to acknowledge the ferocity with which accusations of anti-Semitism are made, and by who, and the consequences of those accusations, is inexcusable. Those who stridently patrol for anti-Semitism reflect a foundational element of the "woke" universe which O'Neill here describes and opposes. You really can't make any serious attempt to critique modern identity politics without considering the most powerful expressions of Jewish identity, and Jewish support for identity politics in general. I can understand why O'Neil doesn't want to do it. It feels very unwise to write such a thing even in an utterly trivial review like this. However, it is a frustrating, damning, and enduring omission on O'Neill's part. He has done all the intellectual groundwork (especially as regards censoriousness, cancel culture, hatred of majorities and the importance of victim status in the age of late capitalism) and he must know where it points. His supposed fearlessness in standing up to "woke" culture is a only a pose if he cannot bring himself to publicly admit that accusations of anti-Semitism are sometimes made in bad faith. He is happy to attribute bad faith to everybody else, after all.… (meer)