Has Political Correctness Gone Mad?: The Anatomy of a Right-Wing Conspiracy Theory

Woke social justice warriors lurk around every corner, ready to cancel free speakers and police common sense. Muslims love nothing better than abolishing Christmas. FemiNazi’s throw false accusations at the pillars of our society. Decried by right-wing pundits and politicians alike, the idea of ’political correctness’ is often painted as a form of left-wing totalitarianism but in this pithy, clear-headed account, Tony McKenna explains how the concept itself is in fact one of the great conspiracy theories of our times.

From the fear of ’cancel culture’ to the demonization of grassroots social movements, this is a searing dissection of how the exclusionary agendas for so long played out in our media and party politics have been successfully dressed up as campaigns for freedom and common sense. Tackling some of the favourite bogeymen of tabloids and scaremongers, McKenna dissects the language, rhetoric and ideology that turns refugees into insects, social justice into ’wokery’, and makes predators out of anyone from dark skinned men to trans women. He provides a full analysis of historically important social liberation movements like BLM and #MeToo, giving the historical and cultural contexts for their emergence. As the tried-and-tested politics of stigmatization and exclusion shift from old targets to new, this an explanation of one of society’s most insidious narratives, and how it allows dominant orthodox culture to cast the subjects of its oppressive tactics as the dreaded ’global liberal elite’.

Tony McKenna is a journalist and cultural commentator who writes regularly for Al Jazeera, The Huffington Post, ABC Australia, TRT World, New Statesman, The United Nations, New Internationalist, The Progressive, and Adbusters. He is author of Toward Forever: Radical Reflections on History and Art (2020), Angels and Demons: A Radical Anthology of Political Lives (2019), Art, Literature and Culture from a Marxist Perspective (2015) and The War Against Marxism (Bloomsbury, 2021).