| Andrew Doyle | |
|---|---|
 Doyle in 2024 | |
| Born | 1978or1979(age 45–46) [1] Derry, Northern Ireland |
| Medium | Print, theatre, social media |
| Education | Aberystwyth University (BA), University of York (MA), Wadham College, Oxford (DPhil) |
| Genres | Political satire |
| Notable works and roles | Spiked magazine , Jonathan Pie |
Andrew Doyle is a playwright, journalist, and political satirist from Northern Ireland, who has written for the fictional character Jonathan Pie [2] and created the character Titania McGrath. [3] [4]
Doyle is from an Irish Catholic background, and was born in Derry, Northern Ireland. [5] [6] He completed his undergraduate studies at Aberystwyth University before obtaining a master's degree at the University of York. [7] He holds a doctorate in early Renaissance poetry from the University of Oxford, having studied at Wadham College, Oxford. [8]
Doyle regularly writes for Spiked , and runs a comedy night in London called "Comedy Unleashed". He has performed his stand-up shows at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, four of which have also been performed at the Soho Theatre, London. He has appeared on Sky News as a commentator, and as a panel-member on The Moral Maze on BBC Radio 4. He has been a speaker at the Battle of Ideas Festival in London, an annual event hosted by the Institute of Ideas. [9] [ non-primary source needed ]
He was previously a visiting research fellow at Queen's University, Belfast, [10] where he worked on the writings of Forrest Reid. [11] Doyle originally worked as a teacher, including alongside Simon Warr at Royal Hospital School. [12]
In April 2018 Doyle created the fictional character of Titania McGrath, initially via a parody twitter account. According to Doyle, the character was designed to mock "woke culture". [13] The McGrath twitter account has been suspended for hate speech four times. [1] [14] Doyle has written two books under the guise of the character. The first was Woke: A Guide to Social Justice published 7 March 2019 [15] and a parody of children's books, My First Little Book of Intersectional Activism published September 2020. [16] In March 2019, Doyle was contacted by Rosamund Urwin, a journalist at The Sunday Times , who asked whether he was the person behind McGrath's Twitter account, due to the inclusion of several sources in McGrath's book that he had quoted previously. Though he denied it, he later revealed himself as the man behind the account. [13]
In February 2019, Doyle wrote a text in The Independent under the pseudonym Liam Evans. [17] The piece expressed dismay at comedy material performed on stage. After admitting he wrote it as a hoax, Doyle claimed the newspaper had published it without sufficiently checking the writer. The Independent's executive editor said that "The suggestion [...] that it is so outlandish that it must be false, is bizarre." Doyle also pointed out that if reading the fourth letter of every sentence in the text, it spells out "Titania McGrath wrote this you gullible hacks". [18]
Since 2021, Doyle has hosted a weekly show titled Free Speech Nation on GB News. [19] [ better source needed ]
Doyle is the co-author with Tom Walker of Jonathan Pie: Off the Record (2017). [20] He is also the author of Titania McGrath's Woke: A Guide to Social Justice (2019). It was positively received by a large number of celebrities including Ricky Gervais, as well as numerous right-leaning commentators. It was negatively reviewed by Alex Clark in The Guardian , writing that Doyle was making a cheap shot by poking fun at identity politics. [21] Doyle used the Titania McGrath pseudonym for My First Little Book of Intersectional Activism (2020), published by Little, Brown in September 2020. [16] [22] [23] [24] He is the author of Free Speech and Why It Matters (2021) [25] and The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World (2022). [26]
Doyle describes himself as left-wing and criticises political correctness and identity politics. He is a Brexit supporter. [27] [28] Doyle supported Jeremy Corbyn during the 2017 United Kingdom general election. [29]
Doyle is gay. [30] His uncle is political activist Eamonn Melaugh. [31]
Isaac Bickerstaff Esq was a pseudonym used by Jonathan Swift as part of a hoax to predict the death of then-famous Almanac-maker and astrologer John Partridge.
Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg, better known as PewDiePie, is a Swedish YouTuber known for his comedic videos. Kjellberg's popularity on YouTube and extensive media coverage has made him one of the most noted online personalities and content creators. He has been portrayed in media as a figurehead for YouTube, especially in the genre of gaming.
Fourth-wave feminism is a feminist movement that began around the early 2010s and is characterized by a focus on the empowerment of women, the use of internet tools, and intersectionality. The fourth wave seeks greater gender equality by focusing on gendered norms and the marginalization of women in society.
The Babylon Bee is a conservative Christian news satire website that publishes satirical articles on topics including religion, politics, current events, and public figures. It has been referred to as a Christian or conservative version of The Onion.
Jonathan Pie is a fictional character portrayed by British comedian Tom Walker. Pie is a liberal political correspondent who rants angrily about British, American, and Australian politics, giving his true personal opinions before or after filming a scripted news segment.
Woke, the African-American English synonym for the General American English word awake, has since the 1930s or earlier been used to refer to awareness of social and political issues affecting African Americans, often in the construction stay woke. Beginning in the 2010s, it came to be used to refer to a broader awareness of social inequalities such as racial injustice, sexism, and denial of LGBT rights. Woke has also been used as shorthand for some ideas of the American Left involving identity politics and social justice, such as white privilege and reparations for slavery in the United States.
Bari Weiss is an American journalist, writer, and editor. She was an op-ed and book review editor at The Wall Street Journal (2013–2017) and an op-ed staff editor and writer on culture and politics at The New York Times (2017–2020). Since March 1, 2021, she has worked as a regular columnist for German daily newspaper Die Welt. Weiss founded the media company The Free Press and hosts the podcast Honestly.
My Little Pony: Best Gift Ever is a double-length Christmas-themed special based on the animated television series My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, taking place in-between seasons eight and nine. It premiered on October 27, 2018 on Discovery Family.
Cancel culture is a cultural phenomenon in which an individual thought to have acted or spoken in an unacceptable manner is ostracized, boycotted, shunned, fired or assaulted, often aided by social media. This shunning may extend to social or professional circles—whether on social media or in person—with most high-profile incidents involving celebrities. Those subject to this ostracism are said to have been "canceled".
Titania McGrath (@TitaniaMcGrath) is a parody Twitter account created and run by Andrew Doyle, an Irish comedian and Spiked columnist. Doyle describes her as "a militant vegan who thinks she is a better poet than William Shakespeare". As of March 2021, the character has more than 600,000 followers. Using this pseudonym, Doyle wrote a book, Woke: A Guide to Social Justice, which was published on 7 March 2019. His second book under the name, My First Little Book of Intersectional Activism, was published in September 2020. He also created a live comedy show featuring Titania, which debuted at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August 2019.
James Stephen Lindsay, known professionally as James A. Lindsay, is an American author. He is known for the grievance studies affair, in which he, Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose submitted hoax articles to academic journals in 2017 and 2018 to test scholarship and rigor in several academic fields. Lindsay has written several books including Cynical Theories (2020), which he co-authored with Pluckrose. He has promoted right-wing conspiracy theories such as Cultural Marxism and LGBT grooming conspiracy theories.
My Little Pony: Pony Life is a Canadian animated television series that aired on Discovery Family from November 7, 2020, to May 22, 2021. It is based on Hasbro's My Little Pony franchise and is the fourth animated series in the franchise overall. Pony Life acts as a standalone spin-off to My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (2010–2019), sporting a new caricatured artstyle, slice-of-life narrative, and some of the writers and voice cast returning.
Rest in power is an expression used to mourn, remember or celebrate a deceased person, especially someone who is thought to have struggled against systemic prejudice such as homophobia, transphobia, racism or suffered because of it, particularly in black and LGBTQ communities in the United States. It has been used to eulogize victims of hate crimes while protesting the social inequality and institutionalised discrimination that may have led to their deaths. It is a common phrase to use to honor someone's legacy, though as an activist.
"Successor ideology" is a term coined by essayist Wesley Yang to describe what he sees as an emergent ideology within liberal or left-wing political movements in the United States, Canada, and to a lesser extent other Western countries, centered around intersectionality, social justice, identity politics, and anti-racism, the rise of which, Yang argues, is degrading conventional liberal values of pluralism, freedom of speech, color blindness, and free inquiry. Proponents of the concept link it to an alleged growth in the intolerance of differing opinions, to cancel culture, wokeness, social justice warriors, and to the far left; Yang himself describes it as "authoritarian Utopianism that masquerades as liberal humanism while usurping it from within."
Woke is an adjective meaning 'aware of issues concerning social and racial justice'.
Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody is a nonfiction book by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, published in August 2020. The book was listed on the bestsellers lists of Publishers Weekly, USA Today, and the Calgary Herald.
The Free Speech Union (FSU) is a British organisation which advocates freedom of speech. The group was established on 24 February 2020 by British columnist Toby Young. The organisation views itself as countering cancel culture by opposing hostility on Twitter and the withdrawal of some individuals' invitations to speak at some university events.
Jude Ellison Sady Doyle is an American feminist author.
Robert Emil Soave Jr. is a libertarian American journalist. Soave is a senior editor for Reason and co-host of The Hill's web news commentary series program Rising.
Leo Kearse is a comedian and broadcaster from Scotland. His stand-up comedy routines have earned him the Scottish Comedian of the Year award and UK Pun Champion. A self-professed right-wing comedian, Kearse regularly appears on GB News.
