Analysing the forehead: What does Brendan O'Neill actually say he believes...
A reader in Brendanology.
If the Black Goat with a Thousand Young, Shub-Niggurath, a Lovecraftian horror with no empathy, no hope, and a thirst for the blood of humanity, was, through a corrupt tendering process, given responsibility for Britain’s abortion services, Brendan O’Neill would almost immediately welcome the development as a refreshing break from political correctness.
Critics, who, rightly, objected to placing an eldritch terror in control of a vital aspect of women’s healthcare, would be framed by him as typical moaning elite liberals, who are fundamentally disconnected from the concerns of the modern working class:
Of course, the woke Stasi has been in uproar since The Black Goat with a Thousand Young secured the position. But if the Black Goat was a black woman, with one leg and a CV filled with jobs linked to trendy left wing causes, they wouldn’t complain one bit. This is all about the intolerance of the left. Just because the Black Goat feasts on the blood of the innocent, they assume it must have voted Tory. How bigoted!
It’s easy to assume that Brendan O’Neill is just a controversialist who will always takes the opposite view to whatever the general leftwing position is, while also ludicrously claiming to be left-wing. But it is more complicated than that. Behind his skyscraper forehead — the subject of a Twitter Photoshop meme — there’s a lot going on; mostly it’s about Brendan’s insecurity/ anger. “I am not pwned,” he insists, over and over again, seemingly unaware the Dril already did his whole career in a single tweet:
But what does Brendan say himself? It’s rare to encounter him in any context other than a reactive one — i.e. he goes on a broadcaster to have contrarian opinions for money. In the video above, however, he gives a speech and answers questions for over an hour, providing a blueprint for what he believes and why he agitates as he does. Here’s O’Neill’s central thesis from the early sections of the talk:
The problem with political correctness, as I understand it… one of the most frequent criticisms of people who oppose political correctness is that we just want to turn the clock back, we want to go back in time to an era in which middle class, middle-aged white men ran everything, and minorities groups and women, knew their place. That’s always the criticism if you say, I’m anti-PC, I hate PC.
I can’t speak for all opponents of political correctness. But I can speak for myself, and in my case, the precise opposite is the case… my opposition to political correctness is not driven by some warped nostalgia for an older, whiter era, but the precise opposite… I am committed to the idea of minority groups and women having a serious role to play in society, and engaging in society on an equal footing with white men. Because I think the most insidious achievement of political correctness has actually been to undermine some of the great social games of the past 50 years ago… particularly racial and gender equality… PC doesn’t expand the inclusion of all groups in public life… it actually limits that engagement, it stymies it, it makes it more difficult.
O’Neill goes on to present PC — which Stewart Lee called, “an often clumsy negotiation towards a kind of formally inclusive language…” — as “rehabilitation of racial thinking.” In his student debating addled mind, Brendan O’Neill actively believes that anti-racists are the real racists. War is peace.
Brendan O’Neill’s default position is that being ‘colour-blind’ is the solution. He is the Patron Saint Of People Who Don’t See Colour. But to be ‘blind’ to colour is often to be ‘blind’ to the nature of systemic racism, to the underlying injustices of many of the systems that rule our lives. But for Brendan O’Neill, it’s always possible to blame the Left for the Right’s political motivations and actions.
If police kill black people, that’s ultimately the Left’s fault for creating ‘grievance culture’ and ‘cancel culture’, and Brendan and his fellow contrarian monsters will probably throw in the term ‘cultural Marxism too’ — which is an antisemitic dog whistle so loud that if you blow if you will end up covered in more dalmatians than Cruella De Vil in her most disgusting wank fantasies. If you don’t like that last joke, you are the REAL intolerant Left.
Brendan O’Neill does believe things. But the heart of those beliefs is always that he is more rational than the dumb wokeists who are ruining the culture of pubs and shouting, where he is always listened to, and where he will always be the first to speak. He believes he is the one man who is not racist, sexist, homophobic etc etc because he can point to friends who are all those things, but he doesn’t accept that his arguments are ever discriminatory to those groups of people as a class of individual or that that the effects of intersectionality — the interaction of things like class, sexuality and race — can result in you having a harder life.
To Brendan O’Neill, most other people are engaged in arguing in bad faith, while he speaks the truth. Look at what Stewart Lee says of Jeremy Clarkson:
“… with his outrageous politically correct opinions, which he has every week, to a deadline, in The Sunday Times… almost as if they weren’t real… Clarkson is either an idiot or a genius… he either actually believes all the badly-researched, lying, offensive shit he’s said, or he’s a genius who has worked out the most accurate way to annoy me. In which case, fair play to him, you’re god.”
Brendan knows he’s not god. He knows that god was a bit weak on people. He knows that Jesus should have told the prostitutes — not women who sometimes do sex work, you PC goons! — to get a proper job, and that the Good Samaritan was just encouraging the laziness of people lying in a hole waiting to die. If Brendan O’Neill heard the story that the character Leo tells in the clip below, he’d tell him to stop being such a woke, liberal, snowflake, Remoaner cuck. And look, it’s Leftist fools like me who are truly to blame for that. Couldn’t we just be about 12% more bigoted?