The New York Times often reverentially referred to as “The Newspaper of Record,” recently published a front-page story titled “When Students Change Gender Identity and Parents Don’t Know.” The story began by reporting the experience of a mother who learned that her biologically female teenager was, with the approval of her child’s school, using a male name and pronouns, a fact of which the mother had not been informed. Consistent with its use throughout the story of the words “he” and ‘his” in referring to the teenager, the article at one point noted that the student had requested “surgery to remove his breasts.”
Eye-catching, certainly, but not quite at the level of this classic in an earlier report about the issues faced by a biological girl when, in accordance with her gender identification, she used the boys’ bathroom: "There were practical issues. When he had his period, he wondered if he should revert to the girls’ bathroom, because there was no place to throw away his used tampons.”
At a time when a newspaper like the New York Times and many other mainstream institutions take a knee to this kind of insanity, we are in dire need of truth tellers to call them out. As shown in his new collection of essays, "A Heretic’s Manifesto," commonsense will find no more brilliant and cutting a champion in the face of such nonsense than Brendan O’Neil.
He begins by telling us that “[w]e need to talk about her penis.” Nothing, he says, better captures today’s irrationalism and its attendant authoritarianism than the commonplace use of this nonsensical phrase, not only in the fever swamps of the Internet but also in the respectable press. O’Neill cites multiple examples from the British press – and even from police reports and judicial proceedings -- that fully equal in their absurdity those that I have cited above. In several instances, they caused this reader to dissolve into laughter.
Although he is a very funny writer, O’Neill doesn’t think amusement is the right reaction to what he tells us. He recognizes, as did George Orwell, that language can be manipulated to limit and control thought. “Using people’s preferred pronouns, dutifully making a reference like her penis,” he writes, “are not mere acts of niceness but rather are signifiers of subservience to the disrupting ideology of transgenderism.” They sanctify “people’s subjective delusions over and above objective truth,” reflecting “the legion untruths we are all forced to labour under in this era of linguistic and moral tyranny.”
To those who might find this an overstatement of a peril imagined largely by conservatives, Mr. O’Neill counters that the ubiquity of a falsehood of such magnitude “confirms just how insidious the overhaul of speech and thought has become in our era.” He is correct. This is about more than “gender fluidity.”
It is the same post-modern malarkey that has caused the University of Arizona to issue a handbook titled “Diversity and Inclusiveness in the Classroom” asserting that classroom debate “must be an 'accessible space,'” and that “sharing should be based on one’s own feelings, experiences and perceptions.” The handbook discourages students from rebutting feelings that don’t jibe with verifiable reality. Should someone inadvertently challenge a student's feelings by citing factual evidence, the student whose emotions have thus been disrespected is encouraged to say “ouch.”
The same Wall Street Journal column reports that college debate competitions must now be preceded by a pre-debate "on the terms of engagement: whether students are required to cite proof or are free to argue wholly from their feelings and so-called “lived experience.”
Put aside that unless certain physical and mathematical truths are accepted, there will be no further progress in science and technology. How are we ever going to talk to each other about any public issue if we can't argue from evidence-based truth?
And beyond that, O’Neill says, requiring people to genuflect to such rubbish as the price of social acceptability is nothing less than totalitarian.
Early in "Nineteen Eighty-Four," Orwell’s protagonist, Winston Smith, writes this heretical thought in his secret journal: “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
And if that is denied – or if social pressure make us hesitant to say “he is he” and “she is she” – we are on the road to unfreedom.
O’Neill’s opening essay on ”Her Penis” is the best in "A Heretic’s Manifesto" and well reflects his view that such outlandish claptrap must be resisted, resolutely and unflinchingly, even if anodyne acceptance would be more socially convenient. But his eviscerations of climate catastrophizing, the Covid lockdown, white self-abnegation, unwarranted claims of “Islamophobia” and the hysterical reaction of transgender ideologues to feminists who stand up for women’s rights, are also bracing, and will delight at least those who share his outlook on these subjects.
Highly recommended.
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"A Heretic's Manifesto" establishes Brendan O'Neill as Britain's Greatest Living Heir To Orwell
Just a few weeks ago, I was lamenting the absence of any new nonfiction book that I really wanted to read. Many new books of late should have been long articles and were joyless to read.Then I read, in a single sitting, British author Brendan O’Neill’s new collection of essays, A Heretic’s Manifesto: Essays On The Unsayable. It offers one of the most important defenses of liberal democratic civilization and truth ever written.A Heretic’s Manifesto establishes O’Neill as the greatest living British heir to Orwell. I beseech you: stop whatever you’re doing right now and buy his book. As with Orwell, the topic O'Neill is addressing, incipient totalitarianism, is urgent.His writing is flinty and fearless. It is also potent and dangerous, which is exactly what’s needed if we are to stop censorship, the invasion of privacy, and totalitarianism from gaining any more strength.At a minimum, A Heretic’s Manifesto should put to an end your fear, as it did to mine, that English is dead. O’Neill shows that English, the English, and the liberal democratic form of civilization they created are not only alive but vitally necessary to humankind’s future.
Top reviews from the United States
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Reviewed in the United States on June 30, 2023
Reviewed in the United States on July 14, 2023
Reviewed in the United States on July 9, 2023
Then I read, in a single sitting, British author Brendan O’Neill’s new collection of essays, A Heretic’s Manifesto: Essays On The Unsayable. It offers one of the most important defenses of liberal democratic civilization and truth ever written.
A Heretic’s Manifesto establishes O’Neill as the greatest living British heir to Orwell. I beseech you: stop whatever you’re doing right now and buy his book. As with Orwell, the topic O'Neill is addressing, incipient totalitarianism, is urgent.
His writing is flinty and fearless. It is also potent and dangerous, which is exactly what’s needed if we are to stop censorship, the invasion of privacy, and totalitarianism from gaining any more strength.
At a minimum, A Heretic’s Manifesto should put to an end your fear, as it did to mine, that English is dead. O’Neill shows that English, the English, and the liberal democratic form of civilization they created are not only alive but vitally necessary to humankind’s future.
"A Heretic's Manifesto" establishes Brendan O'Neill as Britain's Greatest Living Heir To Orwell
Reviewed in the United States on July 9, 2023
Just a few weeks ago, I was lamenting the absence of any new nonfiction book that I really wanted to read. Many new books of late should have been long articles and were joyless to read.Reviewed in the United States on July 9, 2023
Then I read, in a single sitting, British author Brendan O’Neill’s new collection of essays, A Heretic’s Manifesto: Essays On The Unsayable. It offers one of the most important defenses of liberal democratic civilization and truth ever written.
A Heretic’s Manifesto establishes O’Neill as the greatest living British heir to Orwell. I beseech you: stop whatever you’re doing right now and buy his book. As with Orwell, the topic O'Neill is addressing, incipient totalitarianism, is urgent.
His writing is flinty and fearless. It is also potent and dangerous, which is exactly what’s needed if we are to stop censorship, the invasion of privacy, and totalitarianism from gaining any more strength.
At a minimum, A Heretic’s Manifesto should put to an end your fear, as it did to mine, that English is dead. O’Neill shows that English, the English, and the liberal democratic form of civilization they created are not only alive but vitally necessary to humankind’s future.
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Reviewed in the United States on January 25, 2024
Top reviews from other countries
Wagner Leal Arienti
Leitura para quem está incorformado com a nova forma de censura.
Reviewed in Brazil on September 2, 2023
Lottie
Essential reading in these Orwellian times
Reviewed in Germany on September 15, 2023
SHIELDFAN
A BLUEPRINT FOR THE RETURN OF SANITY AND COMMONSENSE
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 8, 2023
Tsiporah
full of insights we wish we had thought of
Reviewed in Canada on November 27, 2023