In 2016, battle lines will be drawn. On one side, people of all colours, genders and orientations are rallying around the flag of freedom of speech. On the other, a nasty set of authoritarians are rallying around a flag that identifies as a flag only on Mondays, uses they/them pronouns and will try to get you fired or expelled from school if you forget it.
Let me explain. In 2015, I saw the seeds of a movement begin to sprout. Across the internet, and even in fear-gripped halls on campuses, young people began to stand up and challenge the humourless, divisive, identity-obsessed elites that have taken over our cultural discourse. People of seemingly disparate interests and politics — gamers, pundits, metalheads, comic book and science fiction fans, atheists, Catholics, conservatives, libertarians and even many disaffected liberals — came together to agree on only one thing: art and culture should be left alone.
That movement is called cultural libertarianism. It stands against any authoritarian, from the Right or the Left, who sucks fun and freedom from the world like some kind of vampire without the cool factor, and who uses faux grievances and exaggerated victimhood to get what they want. Cultural libertarianism rejects the fainting-couch feminism and race-baiting of the Left in favour of deliberately provocative joyfulness and exuberance. It also predicates facts over hurt feelings, versus the social justice crowd who want to turn harrowing anecdotes into “lived experience” — which we are then expected to treat like scientific data.
While college campuses retreat into safe spaces, emotional coddling and treating the leaders of tomorrow like primary school children, cultural libertarians think of new ways to provoke and offend people. In a culture of control, conformity, and coddling, cultural libertarians are the true counterculture. 2015 was the year victimhood and hurt feelings became social currency — but cultural libertarians are putting an end to the madness.
Using scary words like “abuse,” “threats” and “harassment,” wacky far-Left fantasists have tried to bully libertarians and conservatives into silence, threatening their reputations and publicly shaming them. They have failed: the resistance to speech codes, trigger warnings, safe spaces and other progressive and feminist stupidity is stronger than ever, and it comes from women and minorities as much as anyone else.
Cultural libertarians expose the hypocrisy in these codes and rules, using social media theatre, satire, and the dankest of memes to point out that these chefs do not eat their own cooking, and that these rules only exist to protect the aristocracy of socially-acceptable thought and speech, not regular people. It’s a grinning revolution of clowns, jokers, humorists and the good natured, laughing in the emperor’s face until he realises how naked he is.
We’re tired of the progressive left pretending to stick up for us while making the world less safe, leaving our media and workplaces fraught with anxiety and trying to censor and destroy our hobbies — even pushing creators of fantasy franchises to lie — or inexplicably forget key details — about their own creations in order to satisfy the PC brigade.
In a world where looking righteous is more important than doing good, making pure, socially-just art is preferred to, say, discussing the sex slaves of ISIS. Policing Twitter is more urgent than policing a neighbourhood. Superficially kind words and intentions replace genuinely kind acts. According to social justice, a savage world is fine, as long as our art, media, news and humour remain milquetoast.
It’s now clear that progressives, lecturing the rest of us on how we ought to live from their bully pulpits in the media, academia and the entertainment industry, are terrified of the internet and don’t want to know what we have to say. Well, tough. In 2016, it’s time for the counterculture to go to war. Over the past year, I’ve seen people from all over the world stand up and fight back against the authoritarian, censorious world being built around us.
From video games to reddit to college campuses, we’re beginning to realise that there are more of us than there are of them. Our YouTube videos get more views, our fundraisers smash their targets, our numbers on social media eclipse theirs. And by the way: we see your hypocrisy. Social justice is always a cover for something, as the endless queue of progressives who get busted for being sex pests or worse continues to grow.
The public is getting sick of nasty, spiteful rants from people who pretend that their objectives are nice-sounding things like “diversity” and “equality” but who are really just bullies. “Why does no one like me?” cries the SJW. Maybe because without regard to your race, creed, colour, gender, sexual orientation, et. al., the content of your character just sucks. Here’s a tip for social justice goons: sometimes when you think the rest of the world is mad and evil… it’s not them, it’s you.
Ordinary people are also getting sick of seeing stupid people hectoring them, lecturing them and admonishing them while denying obvious facts and scientific research for the sake of feelings. Social justice warriors have made themselves experts at ignorance. I mean, for instance, is there a class of people dumber and less well qualified to talk about gender relations than Gender Studies graduates?
It’s like getting wildlife advice from a guide who’s terrified of animals. “So tell us about the animals in this zoo.” “THEY ALL TERRIFY ME, I NEVER LEAVE THE RANGER STATION!” I’m sorry, but nobody needs sex advice from a silly little girl who’s not only never had any, but is actively terrified of men and penises. Get your sex advice from where all sensible people get it: your depraved uncle Milo.
And what’s with all the bigging up of disorders, diseases, disabilities and assorted other weirdnesses as though they were somehow the mark of moral virtue? Let me tell you, I know plenty of cripples and most of them are total assholes. I note that just about the only disability SJWs don’t revere is being mute. But I guess that would defeat the point, wouldn’t it. As for the endless pandering and mollycoddling of gays, it’s almost enough to turn me heterosexual.
When we fight, we win, because social justice warriors refuse to defend their loopy and idiotic pronouncements and because we don’t mind questioning authority and re-examining received wisdom. Crazy feminists are being exposed as horribly out of touch with ordinary people; race-baiters are being exposed as frauds and wackos. We are trampling all over the nannying speech codes of political correctness. So it’s time to fight properly.
Throughout 2016, I’ll be on my Dangerous Faggot tour, visiting college campuses throughout the US and Europe. No doubt, the crybullies on campus will try to ban me. But the fact that I’ve been invited to so many universities tells me that even on campuses, where the influence of authoritarian activists is so strong that professors are hounded from their positions for minor disagreements and preposterous manufactured grievances, the resistance is growing. Quickly — and regardless of the machinations of achingly PC social networks, who are policing speech with alarming regularity these days.
I constantly hear from people who ask me what they can do to help. Inviting controversial speakers like me is a good start, not only because we’re charming and fascinating and have great hair, but also because it’s a symbol of resistance against the campus censors. Even if they succeed in banning me (or Julie Bindel or Christina Hoff Sommers or any of the other personae non gratae of the campus crazies), all they do is alienate more reasonably-minded members of the public. So invite us, even if it seems hopeless.
Build connections with your fellow students, too. The advantage of the radicals is that they’re more motivated, often utterly dedicated to their ideology at the expense of all else. (Most of the feminists are childless, for instance, and almost all of them are single.) Although libertarians are often animated by a desire to simply be left alone with their own lives, we must resist the temptation to be casual. Take action. Build connections with people who think like you. Launch campaigns to overturn campus speech codes. Above all, form cultural libertarian societies on campus, so that freedom continues to grow after you leave.
And don’t forget to do what they really hate: examine controversial ideas. Go beyond your outdated, 1960s college reading lists. Dive into evolutionary psychology, the science of race and gender. Read Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate. Dive into the work of Robert Plomin and Simon Baron-Cohen, and other researchers whose work is terrifying the progressive orthodoxy. Read some Charles Murray!
Unlike radical progressives, cultural libertarians will never give you a banned book list. We want you to expand your mind, not your obedience to a rigidly-defined cult of conformity. Read your enemies, too. Listen to their media, browse their books, read their columns. Scout, probe, learn the ways of people you can’t stand so you know their arguments before they make them. Over-read, over-prepare, then win so decisively nobody forgets it. Forge unlikely alliances.
Fighting doesn’t have to be boring, of course. Because we’re repulsed by the joyless, dour humourlessness of political correctness, we’re also funnier and more exciting than our opponents — and that attracts even more supporters. Particularly when they come from 4chan and 8chan, cultural libertarians are among the most talented and creative forces on the internet, constantly producing memes, videos, and even songs to inspire supporters and enrage opponents. Like all countercultures in history, we have our own symbols and language.
https://twitter.com/vLadruG/status/682262596423122944
But we’re also much, much funnier than the handwringing peaceniks of the 1960s. That, again, is due to the uniquely earnest and soppy forces that are ranged against us. They’d like to police the fun and the laughter off the face of the Earth. We’re reacting to that with clever and unpredictable new appraisals of the world around us, even as so-called “comedians” in the progressive establishment become little more than professional whiners.
Be funny. Nothing terrifies an authoritarian more than the sound of laughter. Ridicule and mirth in the face of anger and vitriol are our secret and deadly weapon. No one can resist the truth wrapped up in a good joke. And remember to push the boundaries in your humour, too. If they’re easily outraged, then be even more outrageous. The runaway success of my #FeminismIsCancer hashtag over Christmas has proven that you can say whatever you want, provided it’s twice as funny as it is offensive. And, of course, provided that it’s true.
The millennial generation stands at a crossroads. Just as every other generation has had to fight a battle to protect liberty, whether from the Moral Majority, the USSR, or the fascists, so too do you. Your opponents are less frightening than the ones your ancestors fought, but they’re still formidable. We must ridicule the social justice warriors and the campus crazies, but we must also not let their ridiculousness lull us into complacency. There’s work to be done.
You have a powerful ally in the fight, of course: me. My New Year’s resolution is to fuck shit up. Yiannopoulism (I’ll come up with a better name soon, I promise, but in the meantime this will trigger any SJW whose primary disability is hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia) is becoming a runaway internet phenomenon that shows no sign of slowing down any time soon. Every day, people are getting braver about making unconventional choices and learning to embrace fun and common sense again.
So come with me, over the next year. Let’s rustle jimmies and tweak noses. Let’s un-coddle the coddled American mind. Let’s respond to outrage culture with unapologetic, unrestrained, uncontrollable mischief. Who’s with me? Because here’s the dirty secret about social justice warriors: nothing bad happens when you tell them to go fuck themselves.
Had progressives wanted to stem the tide of cultural libertarianism, the time to do it was a year ago. They could have edged back, been reasonable and won us all over. But instead they doubled down. Fine: now they get to lose. Let’s defend culture and free expression and push these odious halfwits back into their dreary studio apartments filled with cat-piss and alt rock-records and let them know that we’ve decided to opt out of the soft bigotry of San Francisco-style hand-wringing nonsense. We possess a working sense of humour and we’re going to use it — whether they like it or not.
If you take their crybully pronouncements at face value, social justice warriors believe, with all the fervor of a paranoiac, that they are helpless, fragile things, buffeted by sinister structural forces they are powerless to resist. They believe that their opponents possess power that, if used ruthlessly enough, could eradicate them. What do you say we prove them right?
Follow Milo Yiannopoulos (@Nero) on Twitter and Facebook, or write to him at milo@breitbart.com. Android users can download Milo Alert! to be notified about new articles when they are published.
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