Brendan O’Neill is Spiked's chief politics writer. His new book, After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation, is out now.
Tyranny is a sneaky thing. It often scurries in on the back of controversy. It is often when people are angry about something that authoritarians spy an opportunity to take a potshot at liberty. And, boom, before you know it politicians are on TV calling for entire media channels to be shut down. This is
Justin Trudeau’s government sees fascists everywhere, except when one is standing right under their nose. That’s the brilliant if bleak irony of the Canadian parliament’s standing ovation for Yaroslav Hunka, a 98-year-old veteran of the Ukrainian military who, it turns out, fought under the Nazis in the Second World War. It was an extraordinary sight,
It is often on the back of public fury that dangerous new precedents are set. Authoritarianism can sneak in when we’re all hopping mad about something or someone. So mad that we don’t even notice that society’s rules are being rewritten in an illiberal way. I fear it’s happening again, with YouTube’s demonetisation of Russell
Has cancel culture finally met its match? Have the new blacklisters who hasten to erase anyone who gives voice to a view that displeases them finally had their comeuppance? The roaring success of Róisín Murphy’s new album, Hit Parade, suggests it’s possible. The digital inquisitors tried to silence the queen of new disco over her
Of all the smug, bitter things the Guardian has published over the years, its review of Róisín Murphy’s new album has got to be one of the worst. Ms Murphy is a musical genius but a wicked woman, the review essentially says. Why? Because she committed the blasphemy of criticising puberty blockers. Switch off her
In the past they would put a witches’ bridle on women who yapped too much. Any woman judged to be a gossip or a hysteric or just too darn opinionated risked having this iron muzzle attached to her head to keep her babbling tongue in place. That’d shut her up. Today, more subtle methods of
Just when you thought things couldn’t get any madder, you find out the following: at the Co-operative bank, if you’re a murderer of women you can keep your account, but if you accurately describe women as adult human females, you can’t. According to news reports, the Co-op bank, which prides itself on being super-ethical, allowed
Imagine if the Mayor of London was a Tory and his website featured an image of a black family alongside the words: ‘Doesn’t represent real Londoners.’ Imagine if this right-leaning mayor had weird rules on ‘branding’, one of which was that images of young black families should not be used in mayor-related publicity because these
So, let me get this right: at the Edinburgh Fringe, comedians who make jokes about killing and raping women are welcome, but comedians who defend women’s rights are not? How else are we to explain the surreal situation where Frankie Boyle, notorious cracker of misogynistic gags, is having the red carpet rolled out for him at the
‘My breasts were taken away from me (and) the tissue was incinerated.’ Every word of destransitioner Chloe Cole’s testimony to the US Congress was harrowing. But it was her calm, frank description of a doctor’s destruction of her breasts when she was just 15 years old that haunts the mind. Such a sinister violation of
Hold on: I thought it was the wimpish new left that loses its rag over ‘offensive’ culture. Aren’t snowflakes usually self-styled radicals, with multicoloured hair and pronouns in their bios, who rage like overgrown children against movies or books or jokes that rattle their fragile sensibilities? Yet now it’s men on the right, blokes who
Every time I cross paths – or swords – with a cranky student activist, I have the same thought: ‘Oh God, these people are going to be running the country one day.’ I have tormenting visions of these blue-haired censors, these giddy blacklisters of the un-PC, in parliament, drawing up laws, wagging a collective finger
On Saturday, in Trafalgar Square, a man called for violence against women. Specifically, it seems, intellectually curious women, those unruly harridans who refuse to bow down to certain beliefs. Punch them ‘in the fucking face’, he bellowed into a mic. The heaving mob around him cheered. An electric current of hate seemed to flow through
So Jolyon Maugham loses again. The crusading barrister is now almost as famous for losing cases as he is for battering to death a defenceless fox. And he hasn’t disappointed with his latest legal shenanigans. The appeal against the LGB Alliance’s charitable status, which was spearheaded by troubled trans charity Mermaids and backed by Maugham’s
Joe Biden cannot be trusted to protect the American people’s freedom of speech. He needs to be restrained, by law, from interfering with people’s First Amendment right to express themselves as they see fit. That is the implication of an extraordinary preliminary injunction slapped on the Biden administration this week by a federal judge. The injunction was
Imagine if, in 1868, when the TUC was founded, someone had told those warriors for workers’ rights that one day they would be referring to biological males as ‘mothers’. And what’s more that they would be publicly scolding anyone who dared to dissent; anyone who said: ‘Hold on – surely only women can be mums?’
The five departed souls of the Titan submersible suffered two tragedies. First, the tragedy of dying in a catastrophic implosion deep in the North Atlantic. Then the tragedy of posthumous ridicule. There seems to be a stark and bleak lack of sympathy for the men who perished. Instead a moralistic mob has found them guilty
The mob has claimed another scalp. This time it’s Howard Donald’s. The Take That star has been found guilty of likecrimes. That is, he liked some ‘problematic’ tweets, including a tweet that said – brace yourselves – ‘Only women have periods’. For this, for giving his approval to a statement of biological fact, he’s been
There is something faintly ridiculous about the Privileges Committee’s report on partygate. Sixteen pages in, you encounter the following sentence: ‘We have evidence that trestle tables were set up for drinks to be laid out.’ You have barely caught your breath from this nightmarish vision of a trestle table being erected in the Downing Street
For a month that’s supposed to be all about love and acceptance, Pride has a pretty nasty streak. Maybe that’s what one of the mysterious colours on its indecipherable flag represents: the cruelty community. Consider Oxfam’s Pride animation, which it tweeted out earlier this week. Alongside all the usual Pride platitudes – we must love
