I could post a one-second video of me sneezing on Facebook and get 5,000 comments. Azealia Banks cleaned out her closet and it was covered by almost every magazine in America. But forcing people who hate you and everything you stand for to point cameras at you for over a year? That’s a level of trolling I can only hope to achieve. Trolling is the perfect weapon of a political dissident intent on spreading forbidden or inconvenient truths.
One of the purposes of trolling is to generate as much noise and public outcry as possible, which has the added effect of drawing attention to the very facts society is so eager to suppress. The mere act of unashamedly revealing such truths is frequently all that is needed to generate the outcry in the first place. Trolling and truth telling are made for each other; two bold acts of modern rebellion existing in perfect, intricate symbiosis. If you tell lies to and about men, if you spread conspiracy theories about the “wage gap” and “campus rape culture,” if you tweet “Kill All White Men” and “I Bathe In Male Tears,” if you close comment sections because you hate being ridiculed by readers who are smarter than you, if you prefer ideology and activism to facts, if you create a hateful atmosphere in which it’s okay to laugh at white people but no one else, if you are mean and vindictive and cruel and sociopathic yet try to cloak yourself in the language of tolerance and diversity, if you get people fired for bringing up studies or asking you to justify your claims, if you whip up outrage mobs over innocent jokes on social media, if you see racism and sexism and homophobia and transphobia and every other imaginable kind of bigotry everywhere, and if you insist on warping reality to conform to your delusions, don’t be surprised if there’s a backlash. Don’t be surprised if that looks like President Trump. And me. And a whole lot of other bad asses.
We don’t care how egregiously you lie about us. As long as facts remain offensive, the age of the troll will never end.
“In times of universal deceit,” wrote George Orwell, “telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” We live in a world where politicians lie to you, the media lies to you, your schoolteachers and your professors lie to you. It’s little wonder young people on campus retreat into safe spaces when they hear I’m coming—the juddering foundation of lies that props up the progressive worldview has become so fragile, even the slightest bit of contrary speech is enough to shatter it. I bring a neutron bomb when a penknife would do just as well, and the results are always spectacular.
I feel no animosity or hatred toward the kids who hide behind safe spaces and social media blocking programs to protect their worldview. Their fragility is the result of an older generation’s cowardice, and its inability to sort feel-good fiction from hard realities. They wanted so desperately to believe that everyone is equal and that we could all get along, and now their kids have swallowed the lies they barely believed themselves. Trigger warnings and therapy sessions are the result. Do not presume that just because I take sympathy on the cry-bullies I intend to go easy on them. I don’t and you shouldn’t either.
Freethinkers and cultural libertarians, take heart. Throughout history, there have always been myths and irrationalities to defeat, and there have always been those who defend them to the bitter, tearful end. Truth, like freedom, must be fought for in every generation. If you’re reading this book, you’ll likely be one of the people fighting for it this time round. Good on you.
It’s cool to be counterculture, and we’re it. Twenty years ago, it was conservatives banning video games because they found them offensive. Now progressives are doing the same thing.
Even the rebellious heroes of my youth have gone soft. In 1997, Marilyn Manson was outraging Christians and social conservatives. The Antichrist Superstar should have been a Trump fan. He was practically built for it. It was a real let down when he came out with a music video in which he decapitated a Trump look-a-like.
Today, the best way to rebel is to be conservative—or even just libertarian. Conservatives are no longer the cultural elites, censoring dissident leftist media. Leftists are the cultural elites, censoring dissident conservatives. As a result, a marvelously rebellious young force has arisen on the web. It’s bold and it’s subversive. And I’m its most dangerous faggot.
Three introductions is enough, yes? Let’s begin.
1
WHY THE PROGRESSIVE
LEFT HATES ME
“At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child—miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic, and useless.”
—P.J. O’Rourke, Give War A Chance
93% of workplace deaths are male.
Rates of rape and domestic abuse are far higher in Muslim communities than non-Muslim ones.
The black community has a huge problem with crime and drugs.
These statements are all facts. Yet in today’s America, introducing them to the conversation causes instant outrage, like when I tell cab drivers curry is not a deodorant.
If you discuss these inconvenient truths, you are expected to begin with certain caveats. “I’m a feminist, but…” “The majority of African-Americans are law-abiding citizens, but…” “I’ll try breathing through my mouth, but…”
Caveats are irrelevant. I refuse to preface any discussion of Islam, for instance, with the usual fake niceties about radical extremists. I prefer to discuss facts directly, and I use exaggeration and bombast, often outrageously.
Challenging the myths of the Left causes them to lose their minds. I puncture their fantasies with attention-grabbing wit and style. I’m also hot, which I’ll cover in excruciating detail throughout this book.
What really drives left-wingers up the wall is that I should be one of them. People like me are supposed to be good little metropolitan fags and vote Democrat. Go to antiwar protests and experiment with quinoa and hummus. We’re supposed to pretend it’s totally believable Rey could pilot the Millennium Falcon with greater skill than Han Solo. Never mind the fact that she learns the Force in like, half a day.
Even before the Left descended into identity-politics lunacy, I wanted nothing to do with them. I wasn’t quite the conservative icon I am today either, though. I was doing something different.
I spent my youth in drug-saturated nightclubs in London, losing my virginity in interracial fivesomes with drag queens, experimenting with every depraved form of escapism I could find. And I listened to a lot of Mariah Carey, Marilyn Manson and Rage Against the Machine.
I also studied music theory, Schopenhauer, and Wittgenstein, and I read Margaret Thatcher biographies, shot my dad’s guns, and dreamt of meeting George W. Bush. (I did later in life, but by then he wasn’t right-wing enough for me.)
Little did I know that I was breaking all the Left’s rules by reading Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and daydreaming that I was the heroically entrepreneurial protagonist, Dagny Taggart.
I came to represent the Left’s greatest fear: an opponent who is cooler, smarter, better dressed, edgier and more popular than them.
To understand precisely why the Left hates people like me so much, it’s necessary to understand how and why their politics have changed over the past few decades.