The LBC host James O’Brien has become a uniquely loathed figure in British political discourse - and he’s earned every drop of it.
He is the shitlib manifest.
In this moment, he is the vindictive sophist to Keir Starmer’s autonomous android. He is there to twist his heel on your broken limbs, to pour sand in your eyes. No atrocity committed upon the British natives is too grotesque to be blamed on themselves, no victim of his own ideals unworthy of his hate and scorn. There is no logic too complex or convoluted to prevent him from arriving at an argumentative frame that disadvantages you and not the regime.
His resolve to defend the status quo is as absolute and unshakeable as his namesake’s in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Nothing is too paradoxical or hypocritical to defend, no grievance or injustice suffered by the natives awful enough to prompt a smidgen of introspection.
His performative, sweating frustration and endlessly exasperated intonations serve as spells cast to purge heretical thoughts and to ward off, forever, thoughts or utterances not sanctioned by a 2005-era Blairite consensus. The institutions are wise, sacrosanct and beyond reproach - you are the ones who are corrupt.
To the unaligned listener, he has become something repellent; he oozes dishonesty, which chafes at ideals of fair play and common decency. Rare is it in this age of infinite talking heads and content churn that giving a person your attention for a 30-second clip is met with such grim resignation, like scraping dog shit from the sole of a favourite boot. You know he “won’t get it” because his purpose is not to get it. Moreover, he is instructing his own side not to get it. No matter how illogical, deceitful, stupid or bankrupt the argument is. Something is better than nothing.
No matter the casualty rate, no matter the blood on the pavements and the gore on the streets that his worldview is responsible for, his structural role is to say to his own side “not one step back” and to his opponents “not one step forward”.
The enemy incarnate, distilled and concentrated like a greasy jam designed to make good people vomit.
Many people ask, “how can outrages such as the Henry Nowak killing be defended by these people?” The answer is, it can’t. But the reaction to it can be foregrounded and judged, sneered at and lambasted. You have no agency; you are simply manipulated because you’re stupid and easily led. Your ignorance and bias are the story, not the corpses. Your valid concerns are worthy only of contempt and scorn.
O’Brien is the symbolic embodiment of this lunacy and, yes, this hatred.
He will cleave to the centre that cannot hold because there is no outside of it for him. A set of cascading failures and changing incentives would never include him - better to continue swimming in the shrinking pond than to bake alive on the crusted mud.
To seethe and sweat, lie and wallow in the moral filth of what his class did to Britain - all with unbridled hubris.
You made a video years back on Archetypes of the Left called the Abomination. O Brien fits the bill
I honestly can't listen to James O'Brien. It's not even that I disagree with everything he says, it's the way he comes across. He always sounds like he thinks he's the brainiest guy on the planet and anyone who disagrees with him must either be stupid or a bad person. I don't mind people having different opinions, but I can't stand being talked down to. The minute he comes on the radio, I'm reaching for the off button.