FOOT SOLDIER IN THE CULTURE WARS

Tony Thomas's new essays pulverise "woke" causes including climate doomism; the Aboriginal industry; and the ABC's bias.
While society goes mad with political correctness, Tony gives sanity and laughter a chance. He probes the outer reaches of woke-ism for absurdities beyond satire.
Who else but Tony would record that Melbourne University's green brigade imported a guest expert on "tree humping"?
Tony also focuses on great Aboriginal questions of the day, like "Who gets to be an Elder?" Can you be a younger Elder and why are 80% of Elders worried about other Elders' bona fides? As for who gets to be an Aborigine, one of 85,000 recent "new identifiers" discovered her Aboriginality by talking to her chooks.
Tony is not just a political tragic. In wide-ranging essays he writes about Australia's greatest spy - a persuasive middle-aged housewife in Adelaide with baby-blue eyes. He writes how at 20 he was taught German by a literary scholar who then was sentenced to hang for murder. And he describes how 5000 Perth citizens armed with pistols, rifles and shotguns went on a man-hunt in a pine plantation in 1963 -- with police approval.
Tony gives you a feast of far-fetched facts, and as always, it's with a sly smile.


I have known Tony for over 40 years. These essays reflect his meticulous research, attention to detail and, above all, his passionate condemnation of all the lies, hypocrisy, smugness and groupthink that demean our public policy debate.
-- John Stone, Federal Treasury Secretary 1979-84, National Party Senator 1987-90:


Some authors proffer mindfulness, a calming and sombre page or two from which to fall quietly into slumber. If you're looking for such inert writing, drop this volume like a hot cake. For here the indefatigable Tony Thomas again introduces his readers to a wild, colourful, convulsive world of eccentrics, of argumentation, of strange and sometimes strikingly uncongenial places and cultures, as he persists in his restless everyman quest for answers to his endless questions.
-- Rowan Callick OBE, China expert and an Australian Journalist of the Year


There is only one Tony Thomas, a fact for which peddlers of cant, snout-troughing catastropharians and the ABC - but I repeat myself - must daily rejoice.
-- Roger Franklin, editor of Quadrant Online.