How To Be Right… in a World Gone Wrong

How do you convince someone to think differently in an age when everyone already feels right? In How to Be Right, journalist and radio host James O’Brien argues that what the modern world suffers from is not a lack of opinions—but an absence of reasoning. O’Brien contends that our public debates—on immigration, Brexit, feminism, political correctness, and more—are fueled by emotions, slogans, and fear rather than by critical thinking or empathy. Through years of conversations with callers on his LBC radio show, he has learned that you can’t shout people into changing their minds—but you can ask them questions that help them discover their own contradictions.

This book is both an anatomy of modern public discourse and a field guide to reclaiming reason. O’Brien uses his radio interviews as case studies, not to humiliate but to illuminate. His central insight: most people are not bad or stupid; they have simply been sold comforting lies by powerful interests. Whether the topic is Islam, immigration, or Brexit, his method is the same—patient listening, gentle probing, and relentless logic.

The Struggle Between Facts and Feelings

O’Brien begins by describing how reasoned conversation has been replaced by confirmation and outrage. Politicians, pundits, and social media algorithms reward anger, creating an environment where people no longer ask why they believe what they do. His mission is to restore that lost art of questioning. “What makes you say that?” “How do you know?” “When did you choose to believe that?” These questions, O’Brien says, turn opinion into thought and reveal where logic collapses—like a caller railing against immigrants who “steal jobs and live on benefits.” By pursuing the contradiction, O’Brien exposes how prejudice and misinformation thrive unchecked.

Switching from Combat to Curiosity

Instead of debating to win, O’Brien debates to understand. He dismantles falsehoods live on air by allowing his callers to hear the sound of their own reasoning unravel. One man insists that homosexuality is a lifestyle choice until O’Brien asks, “When did you choose to be straight?” Another claims all Muslims must apologize for terrorism until O’Brien compares it to asking all Richards to apologize for a criminal named Richard. These moments capture the book’s heartbeat: how a calm question can be deadlier than a shouted argument.

Why It Matters Now

In a polarized age of ‘fake news,’ O’Brien sees conversation itself as a moral act. Each chapter tackles an explosive issue—Islam, Brexit, feminism, LGBT rights, political correctness, nanny states, the age gap, and Trump—and uses real calls to reveal the reasoning behind modern grievances. His goal is not to mock ignorance but to show how manipulation operates: how tabloids, populists, and ideologues sell anger by fabricating endless enemies. (He compares editors like Paul Dacre and Rupert Murdoch to salesmen of ghost-train tickets, profiting from fear.)

In the end, How to Be Right isn’t about winning arguments. It’s about saving reason—and empathy—from extinction. O’Brien invites you to replace certainty with curiosity, contempt with compassion, and shouting matches with honest conversation. The real art of being right, he suggests, is first to be willing to be wrong.

O’Brien opens with the roots of modern prejudice: fear and misinformation. He examines how moral panics about Muslims, immigrants, or minorities are kept alive by media narratives and political opportunists. His chapter on Islam shows this clearly. He recalls callers who demanded that all Muslims apologize for terrorism. Rather than denounce them, O’Brien walks them into reflection: why should Abbas from Reading apologize for killers in Paris any more than a listener named Richard should apologize for the crimes of the ‘shoe bomber’ Richard Reid? The silence that follows is his weapon—forcing honesty through logic rather than outrage.

The Machinery of Fear

He traces this fear to media manipulation. Tabloids like the Sun and the Daily Mail frame Muslims as threats, immigrants as invaders, and liberals as elitists. This constant drip of distortion gives ordinary people a sense of being under siege. When callers like Martin from Chester tell O’Brien they “just don’t feel comfortable with Muslims,” he exposes how that unease comes not from personal experience but from headlines designed to manufacture fear. By guiding Martin to admit he has never met a Muslim who threatened him, O’Brien restores thought where propaganda had been.

The Logic of Compassion

O’Brien believes that most bigotry collapses under empathy and simple reasoning. When a caller insists that Muslims should ‘weed out their bad apples,’ O’Brien replies that by that logic, every Catholic should answer for the IRA or every white man for a paedophile. When a man named Frank calls for banning mosques and deporting all Muslims, O’Brien calmly draws out his underlying conclusion: that coexistence is impossible. “Neither you nor ISIS believe we can live together,” he tells him. “You’re doing their work.” It’s a chilling moment that shows the paradox—how hatred helps the extremist cause it claims to fight.

(Comparable idea: Hannah Arendt’s analysis of how ordinary people become agents of evil through thoughtlessness in Eichmann in Jerusalem—O’Brien draws a similar conclusion about modern fear.)

Ultimately, he wants you to see how being right isn’t about being righteous; it’s about grounding your beliefs in compassion and evidence, not fear. The moral task is to stop being an unpaid propagandist for hate.

Few topics reveal modern irrationality more clearly than Brexit. O’Brien revisits callers who cannot name a single EU law they disliked but still believe that leaving was about ‘freedom.’ Andy from Nottingham admits he voted for independence despite expecting financial loss, yet when pressed to name one law he’d escape, he can’t. Another, Dean, insists Brexit is about immigration but cannot explain how leaving will change the ‘mobs in the city centre.’ For O’Brien, these cases expose how people have replaced knowledge with feelings—a victory of slogans like “Take Back Control” over substance.

The Manufactured Myth of Enemies

O’Brien dissects the ecosystem that produced these beliefs. Tabloids and politicians, from Paul Dacre’s Daily Mail to Boris Johnson’s false ‘bendy banana’ stories, have long peddled a narrative of European oppression. They created villains—‘unelected bureaucrats in Brussels,’ immigrant mobs, or human rights lawyers—so readers could channel frustration at imaginary threats rather than real causes like austerity or low wages. Brexit, O’Brien argues, is not a victory of the people against elites but of elites manipulating the people against themselves.

How Conversation Reveals Contradictions

In his on-air dialogues, O’Brien uses questions to hold up a mirror to cognitive dissonance. “You voted for fewer EU laws,” he reminds a caller, “Can you name one?” or, when someone complains about immigrants filling hospitals, he asks, “Which EU country has a non-white majority?” The silence that follows isn’t entertainment—it’s education. You can see how persuasion happens not by facts alone but by confronting the absurdity of a belief in real time. (This mirrors Socratic dialogue: letting contradictions reveal ignorance.)

Through Brexit, O’Brien shows what happens when emotion replaces inquiry: entire nations can be misled. His remedy is accountability and humility—daring to ask not just what others believe, but what you yourself might have accepted without question.

In one of the book’s most humane chapters, O’Brien revisits his encounters on LGBT rights. When callers insist being gay is a ‘lifestyle choice,’ he doesn’t lecture; he asks, “When did you choose to be straight?” This simple reversal unmasks prejudice not with outrage but with reason. The man invariably admits he never chose to be straight—and is forced to realize the absurdity of his claim. The power lies in empathy disguised as logic.

Dialogue as Gentle Dismantling

O’Brien’s method is disarming humor. He recounts using lines like, “You sound like you need a boyfriend,” delivered not cruelly but playfully, to lighten tension while revealing how prejudice masks fear. An electrician later wrote to thank him after using that same reasoning to help a relative accept a gay family member. For O’Brien, that email meant more than any viral clip. It proved that reason mixed with care can actually change hearts.

Religious Hypocrisy and Compassion

When religious callers defend homophobia through scripture, he turns their argument inside out. “What did Jesus say about homosexuality?” he asks one. After 27 failed attempts, the man can’t answer—because Jesus said nothing at all. O’Brien then contrasts that silence with Christian obsession over minor Levitican laws about shellfish or blended fabrics, highlighting selective morality. By exposing inconsistency, he turns bigotry into an intellectual puzzle. The effect recalls Bertrand Russell’s rational dismantling of religion—calm, factual, and mercilessly polite.

For O’Brien, defending LGBT rights is not culture war—it’s sanity. When logic and compassion meet, prejudice loses the oxygen it needs to survive.

O’Brien confronts a modern crisis of masculinity: men convinced they are society’s new victims. Through discussions on sexual harassment and #MeToo, he discovers how ignorance—not malice—sustains sexism. A caller named Fiona tells him about a senior partner who complimented her jeans; she explains that the remark implied he had imagined her half-naked. O’Brien, stunned, realizes he had said similar things in his own life—and only then understands how compliments can humiliate. Feminism, for him, becomes less an ideology than an education in empathy.

From Denial to Realization

His exchanges reveal common male blind spots. A woman named Sheila says she misses being wolf-whistled, and O’Brien risks ‘mansplaining’ to explore whether admiration can coexist with objectification. By comparing past norms—when marital rape wasn’t a crime until 1984—he underscores how what once seemed normal was really oppression rebranded as tradition. (He notes parallels to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, where the ordinary becomes monstrous when accepted uncritically.)

Cultural Battles and Objectification

From the Presidents Club’s predatory charity dinner to debates over ‘grid girls’ in Formula One, O’Brien forces defenders of sexist customs to answer one question: “Why are they there?” When a caller finally admits the purpose is “adding glamour,” O’Brien translates: exploitation dressed as entertainment. By linking overt misogyny to everyday permissiveness, he demonstrates how changing culture requires questioning what we call normal.

What he learns mirrors the philosophy of bell hooks and Simone de Beauvoir: equality begins when men stop seeing women as context for their own stories. He ends the chapter admitting his feminism is still “a work in progress”—a humility that models how men can learn without defensiveness.

O’Brien tackles one of the most misused phrases in modern speech: “political correctness gone mad.” He argues that what critics call political correctness is simply politeness—efforts to treat people with respect. Yet media figures have weaponized the term to justify cruelty. He dissects viral myths like councils banning Christmas or removing St. George’s flags—stories later proven false but still repeated as proof of “liberal censorship.” When a caller named Marian swears Muslims are offended by Union Jacks, O’Brien calmly fact-checks her live: the story was about one councillor in a tiny Somerset town, and no Muslims complained. He turns outrage into embarrassment—with nothing but Google.

How Outrage Is Manufactured

For O’Brien, modern culture wars survive on emotional bait. Tabloids serve stories engineered to trigger anger: a “banned” hymn, a “renamed” Christmas, a student protest. Readers never check details because outrage feels better than nuance. The result is what he calls “a ghost train industry”—we pay to be frightened of phantoms. (Compare to Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death on how entertainment replaces information.)

Defending Decency

O’Brien argues that genuine freedom of speech includes the freedom to be challenged. When critics like Geoff complain about “gender-neutral clothing” at John Lewis, he asks them to define political correctness. Geoff finally realizes it just means “trying not to offend people”—which he agrees is good. The trap collapses. O’Brien’s method shows how today’s anti-PC warriors mistake rudeness for honesty and cruelty for courage.

Ultimately, he asks you to choose: would you rather be free to insult or free to think? The latter, he insists, is the truer liberty.

O’Brien explores the idea that government care is tyranny—a myth pushed by libertarians who see compassion as control. Through the example of fixed-odds betting terminals and sugary drinks, he dismantles the claim that regulation kills freedom. These machines, he reveals, are engineered to ensure loss; Coke contains seven teaspoons of sugar per can. Freedom without protection, he argues, isn’t liberty—it’s exploitation.

The Illusion of Free Will

He confronts callers who oppose a sugar tax. “Why should I pay more because others are stupid?” one demands. O’Brien points out that marketing budgets for junk food dwarf health education campaigns, so the ‘choice’ is rigged. Like tobacco ads of the past, corporations spend billions making harm desirable. The so-called nanny state, he concludes, is just society recognizing manipulation and choosing self-defense.

Adoption and the Veil of Empathy

This chapter turns personal: O’Brien, adopted as a baby, imagines the life he might have had without privilege. This reflection forms his political philosophy—seeing fairness from both sides. He adapts philosopher John Rawls’s “veil of ignorance” to his own story: justice means designing society as if you could wake up anywhere in it. Compassion becomes rational self-interest.

Ultimately, O’Brien reframes the “nanny state” as a “grown-up society”—one where caring for others is not meddling but maturity.

In his look at the widening age gap, O’Brien shows how older generations mistake luck for virtue while younger ones inherit precarity. Comparing his parents’ 1960s mortgage—three times annual income—to today’s eightfold ratios, he challenges callers who think millennials are lazy. When “Doris” claims young people waste money on iPhones, O’Brien calculates her first home would now cost under £8,000 by equivalent standards. The math leaves her speechless but unmoved—a snapshot of denial across society.

Shifting Notions of Security

O’Brien admits his own anxiety. For his father, homeownership guaranteed safety; for millennials, rent is a lifelong treadmill. He coins “genteel hand-to-mouth living” to describe a generation that can work hard, earn well, and still never build equity. This financial helplessness, he argues, breeds political volatility—and sympathy for populists who promise to restore a lost normal that never really existed.

The New Division

The real coming conflict, he predicts, isn’t race or religion but age. Pensioners hold wealth and vote powerfully; their children pay more tax for fewer rights. Unless society rethinks inheritance, housing, and wages, resentment will harden. (He compares it to Thomas Piketty’s warning in Capital in the Twenty-First Century about wealth concentrating at the top.)

O’Brien ultimately sees hope in humility—acknowledging that comfort is not character, and that fairness means sharing what luck once gave.

O’Brien’s chapter on Donald Trump serves as the book’s finale and warning. He calls Trump a symptom, not the disease—a product of a culture that prefers slogans to facts. Through surreal calls, he shows how “fake news” became a shield for cognitive dissonance. One caller, Jack from Croydon, insists Trump mocking a disabled journalist was fabricated—despite footage proving otherwise. The phrase “fake news” replaces thought with faith. “If you call evidence lies,” O’Brien says, “truth can’t reach you.”

The Cult of Emotion

He identifies the psychology behind Trump’s supporters: insecurity weaponized. People who feel powerless find comfort in blaming others—Muslims, feminists, foreigners—while chanting slogans like “Lock her up.” Like Brexiters shouting “Take Back Control,” this emotional theater fills the void left by deliberate deception. When O’Brien asks a caller why he’s furious about a protest balloon, the man doesn’t know the event’s date; he only knows he’s angry. Rage becomes identity.

The Fight for Objective Reality

Comparing Trump’s America to Orwell’s prophecy, O’Brien warns of truth dying by laughter and laziness. He cites Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts” as the moment reality fractured. In Trump, right-wing media found a mirror: a man who turned lies into loyalty. Against this, O’Brien insists the only resistance is relentless questioning—of politicians, journalists, and ourselves. He ends with a call to journalists: never normalize deceit, never surrender objectivity for access.

The antidote to Trumpism, he implies, isn’t anger—it’s attention. Truth, once lost, can only be rebuilt through the fragile art of listening.

In the epilogue, O’Brien turns his critique inward—to journalism itself. He argues that the media failed democracy by treating lies and facts as equal for the sake of ‘balance.’ Climate change deniers debated scientists; Brexit dreamers debated trade experts. This obsession with neutrality, he says, accidentally legitimized nonsense. Real balance isn’t giving each side a microphone—it’s weighing them by truth.

A Manifesto for Honest Media

O’Brien calls journalists to tougher standards: interrupt liars, replay contradictions, publish funding sources of think tanks. If politicians refuse interviews, admit it publicly rather than filling airtime with substitute pundits. His proposal echoes George Orwell’s belief that journalism’s duty is “printing what someone doesn’t want printed.” The press, he argues, must stop socializing with power and start holding it accountable.

Hope Through Honesty

Despite bleak politics, O’Brien remains optimistic. He believes listening—true listening—can restore sanity. When people are confronted kindly but firmly with evidence, minds can change. His entire career proves it, one phone call at a time. He ends by reminding readers that democracy depends on conversation. “When liars have the loudest voices,” he writes, “truth-tellers must find new ways to be heard.”

That is the final paradox of How to Be Right: to fix the noise, you must first learn to listen—patiently, fearlessly, and with faith that truth still matters.