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.
I’m starting to feel sorry for progressives who are schtum about the revolution in Iran. My contempt for them is giving way to pity. Imagine watching women fling off their hijabs in glorious defiance of the cruel mullahs who rule over them and feeling nothing. Imagine seeing brave youths swarm the streets to confront the
Finally, the left has found a “kidnap victim” it cares about. Having spent more than two years making excuses for Hamas’s savage seizing of 251 Israelis, having violently torn down posters of those stolen Jews, now the activist class has suddenly decided that abduction is bad after all. Why? Because a dictator they admire, Nicolás
And just like that, the left loses interest in the Middle East. In 2025, they spoke of little else. They culturally appropriated Arab headwear, poncing about in China-made keffiyehs. They wrapped themselves in the Palestine colors. They frothed day and night about a “murderous regime” – you know who. And yet now, as a Middle
The unhinged hatred for the world’s only Jewish state has reanimated a medieval-like loathing for the Jewish people
So there you have it: the feelings of white men matter more than the rights of black lesbians. That’s the takeaway from the mad fracas at a Gold’s Gym in Los Angeles this week, where a female gym-goer by the name of Tish Hyman says her membership was unceremoniously revoked. Her offense? She dared to
If you are obsessing over someone’s skin colour, you are probably a little bit racist
Americans often ask me ‘what is happening?’ in British politics at the moment. Well, here is my answer…
There is so much euphemistic reporting about Scarlett Johansson’s decision to drop out of a film in which she would have portrayed a trans man. Ms Johansson ‘quits role’, headlines tell us. She has ‘stepped away’ from ‘trans role’, we are informed. It all makes it sound like she had a simple change of heart, or
Oh America, what have you done to your kids? Consider David Hogg, the 17-year-old survivor of last month’s massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida and now omnipresent media agitator for tighter gun-control laws in the US. That young Mr Hogg’s instant reaction to being criticised by a news anchor was to
At last, some students in the West are campaigning for freedom and democracy. Following years of supposedly rad students banning pop songs about sex, and force-fielding their campuses against offensive speakers, and even expelling certain newspapers from their common rooms as if they were heretical abominations, a group of students has emerged to demand more
