American Psycho author Bret Easton Ellis attacked “PC victim culture,” microaggressions, and campus crybabies in a long monologue of his own during the latest episode of the Bret Easton Ellis podcast, having previously delivered a monologue by Alex Kazemi that attacked the VMA’s pandering to social justice warriors and Black Lives Matter in his last episode.
“If you are a smart person, so traumatized that you are still referring to yourself as a survivor/victim or something, then you need help, and you should probably contact the national center for victims,” opened Ellis during his latest episode. “Especially if you are, say, a writer, still unable to cope to the point that you will not, cannot go see Nate Parker’s slave epic The Birth of a Nation, with its depiction of slave violence and rapes, because Nate Parker was acquitted of a rape charge from 1999 while he was a college student.”
“But victimizing oneself is like a drug. It feels so delicious,” he mocked. “I get so much attention from people. It is what defines me, what makes me alive. I’m showing off my wounds so you can lick them. Don’t they taste so good? Don’t they make me so important? If you define yourself through a trauma that happened to you, and that is still a part of you, you are probably sick and in need of help.”
“If you cannot read Shakespeare, or Melville, or Toni Morrison because it will trigger something traumatic in you, and you’ll be harmed by the reading of the text because you are still defining yourself through your self-victimization, then you need to see a doctor,” Ellis continued. “If you feel you are experiencing microaggressions because someone asks you where you are from, or ‘can you help me with my math,’ or offers a ‘god bless you’ after you sneeze, and you feel like all of this is some kind of mass societal dis, then you need to seek help. Professional help.”
Ellis continued to brand the “widespread epidemic of self-victimization” and “defining yourself” by “a traumatic thing that happened to you in the past” as an illness.
“It is something you need to resolve before you re-enter society,” he stated. “What you are doing to yourself is harming yourself, and seriously annoying others around you. The fact that you can’t listen to a joke, view imagery, and that you categorize everything as either sexist, or racist, or homophobic, whether it is or not, and therefore harmful to you and you just can’t take it, is a kind of mania, a delusion, a psychosis that we have been coddling, encouraging people to think that life should be a smooth utopia built only for them and their fragile sensibility. In essence, staying a child forever. Living in a fairy-tale.”
Criticizing the dozens of professional victims who appear to make a living out of being oppressed, Ellis added that “yes, it’s difficult for someone at seventeen to move past a childhood trauma and pain, but not really at 27, or 34, or 49, or 56,” before claiming that not only can pain be useful, but that it is also often the “building block for great novels, and music, and art.”
“When I first started hearing professional victims demanding that things shouldn’t be posted or shown, or posts should be blocked, or people should be punished and shamed and blamed or fired because they offended the victim on some level, I’d laugh at how ridiculous it all was. But then get queasy when a certain faction would try and appease the victims, elevating them to hero status,” confessed Ellis. “But now a backlash is beginning against PC victim culture perpetrating itself onto the rest of us, instead of letting victims wallow in their own self-victimization, proudly asserting it, demanding everyone pays respect to their pain. A pain that, honestly, no one really cares about, except other victims. Because a victim is not active. A victim is passive. A victim is someone who can’t move on, and so it’s doubly frustrating to listen to their complaints.”
“It’s about acceptance and moving the fuck on,” he declared. “The University of Chicago sent a letter to its incoming freshman classes this summer, the class of 2020, stating in essence that there will be no trigger warnings or safe spaces allowed. That there will be no crackdown on microaggressions, and that visiting speakers will be allowed to speak without being boycotted because a fraction of the student body doesn’t agree with what the speaker represents, or the ideas that the speaker may want to talk about.”
“This announcement was greeted by almost everyone with a huge sigh of relief,” stated Ellis. “Moving forward, a progression in not coddling students and keeping them victims and babies, and instead making them adults dealing with the world that is mostly hostile to your dreams, your ideals, and restoring the university as a place where young adults can stop shutting things down [and start] building themselves up by empowering them with ideas that are different from their own.”
Citing recent controversies surrounding Nate Parker and Lena Dunham, Ellis claimed them to be “reminders of the infantilization victim culture that was and is still to a degree everywhere.”
“Maybe it’s all amusing. Maybe it’s not a problem at all, maybe it’s all just entertainment. Everyone’s a racist, maybe every man is ultimately a rapist, whatever,” he continued. “But there’s a child-like attitude toward the world in this kind of over-emotional lashing out, and the culture of blame.”
“It almost seems at times as if kids are running the world,” concluded Ellis. “Feelings are not fact.”
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