Episode
Civilization, Moral Masochism, and Wonders of the Visible World (w/ Brendan O'Neill)
- Podcast
- History Impossible
- Published
- Jul 8, 2025
- Duration seconds
- 9206
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Summary
Hello everybody. We have another amazing conversation for you fine people to enjoy, this time a little spicier as far as controversial subjects go. To further expand upon my thoughts on the imperialistic character of Islamism as well as discuss the development of the new (neo?) antisemitism we are currently seeing develop in the West, I realized there was likely no one better suited in my orbit than the great UK-based polemicist and writer Brendan O’Neill. Brendan has been featured, well, all over—the British television, the Oxford debates, and many more, all while writing for multiple publications including spiked! (where he is chief political writer), The Spectator , and the Daily Mail , as well as hosting his excellent interview show, The Brendan O’Neill Show . I’ve followed his work for a very long time, and have always admired him for his sharp commentary that, while certainly very much his own, calls to mind the kind of sharp commentary we saw from the great Christopher Hitchens (and not just because of the accent). With Brendan’s work, as soon as you think you’re hearing a typical broadside against the Western left, you realize that there is a deeper, more socially liberal critique informing all of that, sharpened all the more when he turns his guns on the radical right. This came up a lot during our conversation. However, his most recent accomplishment, his excellent 2024 polemic After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel, and the Crisis of Civilization , is what made this conversation more of an imperative. It was not just the power of this book—the rage behind it, which I often shared—that made me want to speak to Brendan about it, but also—selfishly, I admit—my own words were quoted within it, specifically from the piece I wrote jointly for Queer Majority and Quill…