Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsA manifesto for the sane in a world gone mad
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 20 May 2022
Talk to the woke and they'll deny it is even happening. Talk to anyone else, and it's quite clear that important elements of society in the west have lost touch with reality. Facts and truth no longer matter, meanwhile navigating relationships - even with strangers - is now fraught with hidden career-ending terrors. If that's how you quietly feel, then this book is for you. It explains how we got to the point a tiny group of woke activists have managed to hold the rest of us to ransom.
I devoured my copy in one sitting, such was my "at last" excitement reading about the craziness that so many of us are witnessing, as well as the discomfort rational, tolerant and reasonable people are feeling while being unable to say a word. They fear being denounced by a quasi-religious thought police.
The woke agenda is pushed by a tiny minority of extremist activists that, starting with the universities, have hijacked pretty-much all of our institutions, as well as the language and our everyday interactions. Via terror tactics not out of place in 17th century witch trials, they are forcing an extremist ideology upon every walk of life - at the same time rekindling divisions that had been dying naturally.
For the vast majority of normal people - who are not prejudiced, who simply want to get on with their lives - fear is forcing them, not even into silence, but into a North Korean level of acquiescence. They fear being denounced by the race/gender commissars, often with appalling career-threatening consequences. Any deviation or free-thinking (or even questioning of the new orthodoxy) renders you suspect and worthy of isolation and attack. Remember, these are not celebrities being "cancelled": they are normal people trying to make ends meet, being forced into "right-think" by Orwellian employers or educational establishments that have drunk the woke cool-aid (and lost their heads in the process).
But there is another tiny group of people - those that refuse to be silenced. They are determined to state the facts, to shout "the emperor has no clothes" - to call out the charlatans bullying ordinary people into compliance with their intolerant and irrational ideology. Joanna Williams is one of those brave few.
This book is not a rant. It is a thoughtful, factual, history of how we allowed free, successful, tolerant societies to be held to ransom by a tiny group of self-interested pied-pipers.
The book ends with a call to arms - to the rational, the reasonable, the sane, the moderate, the democratic. They must find their voice and resist. Only then can we restore common sense in a world lost to slogans, accusations, dogma, flat-earth theories and medieval style witch hunts.
I hope as many people as possible read this book - it is the manifesto for the sane in a world gone mad.
