Brendan O’Neill – Delingpole World

I Am Done with Oxford University…

I am done with Oxford University. Possibly I have said this before but it can’t be said often enough.

Here is its latest outburst of progressive ridiculousness. It’s a letter, sent out by some pesky Social Justice Warriors at Queen’s College, protesting at a visit by Brendan O’Neill of Spiked.

Read it and weep.

Brendan O’Neill is speaking at Queen’s College, Oxford next week, and the college’s student organisation has sent out this bizarre warning. If you can’t have "contentious" discussion at a university, where can you have it? pic.twitter.com/7VEDDLWG0N

— spiked (@spikedonline) May 3, 2018

Read the rest on Breitbart.

Welcome to Britain 2018, Where Jokes Are Now Illegal

Welcome to Britain 2018, where jokes are now illegal.

I’m referring, of course, to the case of the blogger Markus Meechan – Count Dankula – who has now been convicted by the Scottish courts of the “odious criminal act” of teaching his pug dog to do a Hitler salute. He is facing a possible prison sentence.

This is appalling. What’s almost more appalling, though, are the people I’ve heard – even clever, savvy people on my side of the argument – who don’t seem to get why it’s so appalling.

Since when did we get to the stage where free speech needs defending? Where jokes – in however poor taste – suddenly become justification for a prison sentence?

Let me spell it out.

All that matters is this: in 2018 – the age of Islamic State terror; underage girls groomed and raped by mostly Muslim gangs; Antifa thuggery; epic financial fraud; acid attacks; an epidemic of knife violence; and flagrant assassination attempts by foreign powers – the British justice system (of which Scotland’s is regrettably a part) now considers it a priority to employ valuable police, courts, and jail time punishing cheeky young men for winding up their girlfriends.

That’s how it started, remember. Meechan, a straight speaking, shambolically entertaining, libertarian-leaning social media shit-poster decided to wind up his more PC girlfriend by teaching her pug dog how to give a Hitler salute. Then he posted the video on the Internet, where, of course, it went viral.

Sure it was tasteless. But then, so was Mel Brook’s “Springtime for Hitler” routine in The Producers. (Made in 1967, by the way, when there were many, MANY more Holocaust survivors still alive to be offended.) So was the stunt pulled by The Who’s Keith Moon and the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band’s Viv Stanshall when they went out drinking in London’s Chelsea dressed as Nazis. So was John Cleese doing his Nazi goosestep in the “Don’t Mention the War” episode of Fawlty Towers…

Read the rest on Breitbart.

Why the Alt-Right Isn’t Wrong

The Trump-supporting vigilantes of conservatism dismiss the mainstream as spineless cuckolds.

I got told off this week by a presenter on BBC radio for using a four-letter word live on air. In my defence, I was merely quoting a tweet from a black Hollywood comedy star called Leslie Jones which said: ‘Lord have mercy… white people shit.’ And the only reason I did so was that I thought it important that someone, somewhere, spoke out against the double standards which seem to exist on social media right now: one rule for progressives and accepted victim groups; quite another for everyone else.

A good example is the ban recently imposed by Twitter on my friend and colleague Milo Yiannopoulos. Milo had got into a public spat with Jones when he goaded her over the awfulness of her new movie, an all-female remake of Ghostbusters. Nothing he said matched the borderline racism and incitement to mob bullying in some of Jones’s tweets. Yet guess which party it was that ended up being booted permanently off Twitter…

This is why I took very strong exception to a piece written by Brendan O’Neill on Coffee House condemning Milo and his Twitter followers as ‘alt-right angries, convinced the world is one big lefty, feminist plot to ruin your average white dude’s life’ and ‘as anti-PC, bedroom-bound fans of Trump and strangers to sexual intercourse’. It seems to me that if you’re going to campaign for fairness and free speech — as Brendan frequently and heroically does — then you need correctly to identify the true enemy.

To help you understand what’s going on, I’d like you to cast your minds back to the Eighties and the era of ‘political correctness gone mad’. At the time, we thought it was so loopy it would disappear up its own bottom. Instead, it continued to get worse and worse, leading to lunacies like the nursery schools in Oxfordshire teaching kids to sing about ‘Baa Baa Rainbow Sheep’, and thence to nonsense like the ‘safe spaces’ promoted on university campuses for a generation of special snowflakes, as well as to vexatious campaigns like the one conducted at Oxford by anti-white race hustlers known as Rhodes Must Fall.

Yes, to some it might seem a joke but to the kids who have to live in this oppressive environment — as Brendan himself knows, having written about the Stepford Students in The Spectator — it’s horribly real. Young white straight males suffer especially: the moment they arrive on campus they are treated like potential rapists; in lectures they’re harangued by Marxist professors on their ‘white privilege’, as if all ills in the world from the abuse of women to racism are somehow their fault. And the conservatives who should have been fighting their corner just haven’t been up to the job because of the fatal weakness so many on the right have: a secret terror that they’re as nasty as the left claims they are.

Read the rest in the Spectator.

Twitter Has Made Milo into Western Civilization’s Greatest Gay Hero Since Alexander. He’ll Hate That…

Even though Milo is a preening bitch with stupid hair who learned most of his journalistic skills from me but has now disappeared up his own bottom I have to admit that I still love him and that, what’s more, he has taught me a few useful things in return.

The main one is this: concede an inch of territory to the enemy and the enemy will destroy you. They are not reasonable. They are despicable. This is war.

If everyone on our side of the argument understood this we would have won this conflict long ago. Not only are we wittier, cleverer, better informed and more honest, unhypocritical and fundamentally likeable than the opposition – but we also have all the ammunition to win every battle we fight because reality has a conservative bias.

Unfortunately we have long laboured under a fatal weakness which has rendered all our advantages as of naught. Some call it “Cuckservatism”; others “a pathetic urge to be liked”; others “cleaving to the reasonable middle ground,” but however you anatomise it or describe it the result is the same. The enemy feeds on our weakness and gains in strength.

When you’re at Bastogne, surrounded by Nazis, the last thing you need is the guy twenty yards to your left abandoning his foxhole, allowing your entire company position to be outflanked. But this is what our own people do to us all the time.

Today, it’s our gallant comrade Brendan O’Neill’s turn to sell us short.

He has weighed into the Milo/Twitter/Leslie Jones debate and grabbed completely the wrong end of the stick with a piece entitled The Hounding Of Leslie Jones: Anti-PC Gone Mad.

Yep. Instead of recognising the business for what it is – a key battle in the liberal-left’s ongoing war on free speech – O’Neill has quixotically decided that the real villains of the piece are shady figures on the alt-right; and that the victim isn’t the innocent guy who got banned from Twitter, but the race-baiting cry-bully who engineered that ban.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Project Grief: Remain’s Dirty Politicking Has Hit an All-Time Low

Getty

Dear Remainers,

The morning after a senseless tragedy which has appalled the whole of Britain I’d like to ask you a simple question:

Is there any depth to which you will not stoop in order somehow to snatch victory in this EU referendum?

The answer I’m getting from some of you is: “Nope. None.”

Here’s Alex Massie in the Spectator. Having generously acknowledged that “Nigel Farage isn’t responsible for Jo Cox’s murder. And nor is the Leave campaign”, he then suggests that no, actually, they were.

But, still. Look. When you encourage rage you cannot then feign surprise when people become enraged. You cannot turn around and say, ‘Mate, you weren’t supposed to take it so seriously. It’s just a game, just a ploy, a strategy for winning votes.’

Let me precis for you, Alex, what you’re trying to say in your oh-so-subtle way: “Vote Leave. Vote Fascism. Vote Murder in the Streets.”

Here, is the Guardian’s Polly Toynbee playing a similar game.

First the disclaimer:

There are many decent people involved in the campaign to secure Britain’s withdrawal from the EU, many who respect the referendum as the exercise in democracy that it is.

Now the inevitable “but…”

But there are others whose recklessness has been open and shocking. I believe they bear responsibility, not for the attack itself, but for the current mood: for the inflammatory language, for the finger-jabbing, the dogwhistling and the overt racism.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

These Cambridge Buttocks Have Restored My Faith in the Future of Western Civilisation

Check out these arses. Not just any old arses, either, but proper, educated Cambridge University arses. On a miserable, cold day in which I have been laid low with man flu, these pert buttocks have restored my faith in the future of Britain. (Especially – though I do not wish to prejudice your voting – the splendid pair belonging to Katie from Sidney Sussex.)

Can naked bottoms really be that socio-politically significant? Oh very much so, I’d say. Especially to anyone who has just read the quite monumentally depressing cover story from this week’s Spectator by Brendan O’Neill. His argument is that political correctness has become so heavily entrenched in academe that our seats of learning are in serious danger of abandoning perhaps their most important function: opening up developing minds to new ideas and experiences.

If your go-to image of a student is someone who’s free-spirited and open-minded, who loves having a pop at orthodoxies, then you urgently need to update your mind’s picture bank. Students are now pretty much the opposite of that. It’s hard to think of any other section of society that has undergone as epic a transformation as students have. From freewheelin’ to ban-happy, from askers of awkward questions to suppressors of offensive speech, in the space of a generation.

This was certainly the impression I got the other day from the mostly university-age audience on that car-crash BBC debate programme Free Speech. What struck me forcibly was that these young people had given up on the ability to “think” in any useful or meaningful way. Not only did they lack the core knowledge base (history, current affairs) which might have informed their identikit, off-the-shelf opinions.

But they all appeared reluctant to offer any view that wasn’t “safe” – ie one that hadn’t been extensively pre-validated by the groupthink herd. No one, for example, was prepared to question the premise that Muslims were blameless victims of “Islamophobia” nor that Britain, nay the world, is currently in the grip of something called “rape culture.”

Brendan O’Neill, who speaks on university campuses more often than I do, has noticed similar problems.

I’ve been jeered at by students at the University of Cork for criticising gay marriage; cornered and branded a ‘denier’ by students at University College London for suggesting industrial development in Africa should take precedence over combating climate change; lambasted by students at Cambridge (again) for saying it’s bad to boycott Israeli goods. In each case, it wasn’t the fact the students disagreed with me that I found alarming — disagreement is great! — it was that they were so plainly shocked that I could have uttered such things, that I had failed to conform to what they assume to be right, that I had sought to contaminate their campuses and their fragile grey matter with offensive ideas.

Where once students might have allowed their eyes and ears to be bombarded by everything from risqué political propaganda to raunchy rock, now they insulate themselves from anything that might dent their self-esteem and, crime of crimes, make them feel ‘uncomfortable’. Student groups insist that online articles should have ‘trigger warnings’ in case their subject matter might cause offence. The ‘no platform’ policy of various student unions is forever being expanded to keep off campus pretty much anyone whose views don’t chime perfectly with the prevailing groupthink.

Where once it was only far-right rabble-rousers who were no-platformed, now everyone from Zionists to feminists who hold the wrong opinions on transgender issues to ‘rape deniers’ (anyone who questions the idea that modern Britain is in the grip of a ‘rape culture’) has found themselves shunned from the uni-sphere. My Oxford experience suggests pro-life societies could be next. In September the students’ union at Dundee banned the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children from the freshers’ fair on the basis that its campaign material is ‘highly offensive’.

This is what is so great about those Cambridge arse photos. Yes, it’s quite true: one of the reasons I chose to write about them is because I wanted to run a photograph of Katie from Sidney Sussex’s bottom and this seemed like a half-way decent excuse.

But it’s also true that I believe that news features like this, run in Britain’s most popular online student newspaper The Tab, may be all that stands between today’s student generation and the eradication of the Western intellectual tradition by the kill-joy forces of cultural Marxism.

Read the rest at Breitbart London

3 thoughts on “These Cambridge buttocks have restored my faith in the future of Western Civilisation”

Rich Vail says:26th November 2014 at 3:49 pmI have to agree with your assessment sir. For sometime I have worried about that the state of English society, but if these people can do this it may not be beyond redemption after all.
Doubting Rich says:26th November 2014 at 4:36 pmMy only disappointment is that the young lady from my own college chose to be photographed with her underwear on. However it has sadly gone somewhat downhill since I left, the bar getting quieter as it steadily rose from near the bottom of the academic leagues of the University.
jb001 says:1st December 2014 at 10:09 amDidn’t members of the Frankfurt School talk about eros as a means to achieve their ends James?Cultural Marxism is “liberating”, remember.

Comments are closed.

Why the Liberal-left Isn’t Wishing Spiked a Happy 10th Birthday

I once wrote a contentious piece for the Spectator with the tongue-in-cheek title I Am Facing Up to the Fact That I May Be Marxist. This wasn’t because I was seriously thinking of moving leftwards after a lifetime’s natural and unrepentant conservatism. Rather it was an affectionate tribute to the fact that the best political commentary in Britain at the time was – and still, pretty much is – coming from an eccentric bunch of self-proclaimed revolutionary Marxists. (Though I personally did – and still do – prefer to think of them as libertarian conservatives in denial).

One of them – Brendan O’Neill – is now an adornment to Telegraph blogs. Others include the feisty but oddly cuddly Claire Fox who runs one of Britain’s most entertaining intellectual talking shops the Institute of Ideas; Austin Williams of the Future Cities Project; the Times commentator Mick Hume; academic Frank Furedi; and destroyer of PC in the museums world Tiffany Jenkins. Their spiritual home is the website founded by Hume a decade ago: Spiked.

Spiked is often accused of its critics on the left of being gratuitously contrarian. I encounter this a lot myself: it’s how left-liberals often dismiss political views they lack the mental wiring to comprehend. They don’t understand the logic, therefore it can only mean that the journalist adopting these unhealthy, politically incorrect views must be voicing them as a cynical attempt to get more readers or because they’ve been ordered to do so by their evil right-wing bosses. Because, obviously, any point of view which contradicts the left-liberal Weltanschauung cannot possibly be sincerely held.

Here’s how Spiked’s editor Brendan O’Neill sees it, in a characteristically thoughtful, intelligent essay:

spiked does not adopt political postures in order to annoy. But we understand why some people think that we do. Because spiked subscribes to principles and ideals that were once taken for granted amongst certain sections of left-wing or radical-humanist thought, but which no longer are. And it is our attachment to those ideals, our commitment to freedom of speech, open-mindedness and a human-centred morality, which means that we often rub up against a political culture which not only now lacks faith in such values, but which sees them as undesirable. The accusation that spiked is contrarian is really testament to the shrinking of what is sayable and thinkable these days.

spiked has firm principles based on a commitment to the ideals of human liberation. Unfortunately, upholding those principles today often means dissenting from and being sceptical of both mainstream political thought and also the ‘radical’ outlook. So spiked is for free speech, moral autonomy, tolerance and the democratic spirit. These sound like easy principles to endorse, but in modern political debate they frequently come with a ‘but’ attached. ‘I am for free speech, but not for racists…’; ‘I am for tolerance, but I won’t tolerate climate change scepticism…’ spiked prefers no ‘buts’ with its principles. And it is our war of words against the contemporary ‘butting’ of what were once seen as key Enlightened ideals that makes us appear to some as contrarians.

This is why left-liberals loathe Spiked possibly even more than they loathe people on the right like me. No leftist likes being told he has betrayed both his principles and also all those oppressed people – moderate Muslims, say; scientists who still believe in openness, empiricism and keeping politics out science; Third World families who want working electricity not ‘renewables’ – that he is supposed, in theory, to be defending. Also, of course, there’s nothing the left enjoys more than an internal spat. It’s like the Judaean People’s Front versus the People’s Front of Judaea: splitters!

Tag: Brendan O’Neill