“Free speech should not trump safety,” she said. These students truly believe that open discourse is a form of violence.
The tour as a whole was anything but a disappointment. Videos of my talks, filmed on a shoestring, attracted millions of views on YouTube. Stories on Breitbart about the chaos and hysterics at my events received tens of thousands of comments and shares. I was exposing the angry, poorly dressed underbelly of American campus politics, and the world was rapt.
By the time I reached Pittsburgh, it was only February 2016. I was not a month into my tour, and had performed at fewer than six colleges—yet it was already clear that I’d tapped into something massive. And so, after a brief series of meetings at Breitbart’s Los Angeles offices and in Cannes during the film festival, I was told to go out, double down, and be more outrageous than ever.
By then, word had spread to other colleges that there was a dangerous faggot on the loose. This caused protesters to up the ante. At DePaul University in Chicago, I stood transfixed as Edward Ward, a Black Lives Matter activist, local minister and alumnus, stormed the stage with an angry look in his eyes. Once I calmed my raging boner, I realized he had grabbed the microphone from my student host and had essentially taken over the event. Meanwhile, a shrieking female accomplice had jumped on stage too and began to swing her fists an inch from my face.
The police did nothing, something I later found out was a result of administrators ordering them to stand down.214 I ended up cancelling my talk and leading my supporters outside for a protest march in defense of free speech. Despite groveling to the left-wing protesters who wreaked havoc at the event, the University President, Dennis H. Holtschneider tendered his resignation just two weeks later after pressure from left-wing students and faculty members who were angry that he hadn’t banned me from campus altogether.215 Although the response of the university was pathetic, no one had been seriously hurt, and I was glad to see that my words were so vexing to the campus left. Rage was building.
I find it difficult to understand how anyone could hate me. But such was the anger I confronted at every event that I came up with some theories. And those theories all boil down to one simple fact: I’m tremendous.
I have single-handedly flummoxed the campus censors. In the years before my arrival, they had been on a roll, stopping even mild-mannered conservative columnists like George Will from speaking on their campuses.216 Yet here I was, a magnificent blond bastard who told edgy jokes and—horror of horrors—occasionally said celebrities were ugly. I was freely romping into their cherished safe spaces and there was nothing they could do to stop me. I had resources, I had the backing of Breitbart, the most fearless news organization in America, and I was riding a wave I had helped to create: a new movement of young, politically dissident troublemakers.
Just as I was attracting fanatical hatred, I was also attracting a devoted fan base. The shouts and shrieks of my protesters were loud, yes, but not as loud as the chants of “MILO! MILO!” and “USA! USA!” from eager audiences. At UC Santa Barbara, my fans even started the tradition of carrying me into lecture halls on a golden throne. It felt…right.
As my college tour progressed, it was clear that conservatives, libertarians, non-totalitarian liberals, and other political dissidents on campus were becoming bolder and more mischievous. The old order of political correctness was crumbling around us—we could all sense it. This was, after all, the glorious summer of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. At the University of Michigan, college crybabies went so far as to call the police after spotting pro-Trump chalk drawings on campus.217 Other students went further with their triggering pranks, even constructing mock “Trump walls” on campus.218 If George Will were to arrive on a campus that summer, leftists would have been too busy protesting a dozen other outrages to notice.
Sometimes people don’t understand just how loopy college campuses are. So let me tell you about one of the things campus crybabies get most upset about.
“Cultural appropriation” is the buzzword the Left currently uses to torment people it accuses of disrespecting other cultures. White girls wearing dreadlocks or hoop earrings are a particularly popular target, as are Halloween parties, where ponchos mean peril and you can be scalped for wearing a headdress. Wearing the garb, or dancing the dances, or even writing from the perspective of another culture is a grave act of neo-colonial oppression, we are told.
But compare that fantasy complaint with the reality of art. The Final Fantasy series borrows from George Lucas, who borrowed from Akira Kurosawa, who borrowed from Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare. Without appropriation, culture as we know it would not exist. Civilization would resemble a Nickelback album.
Cultural appropriation only applies to white people using/wearing/enjoying things created by non-white people. Black people can wear jeans, drink Guinness, eat spaghetti, and use electricity with no concern for the cultural ramifications of their actions. Why, if I didn’t know better, I might conclude that cultural appropriation was just an excuse to paint white men as history’s eternal villains.
One particularly amusing example of cultural appropriation panic occurred in July 2015, when Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts announced “Kimono Wednesdays,” in which visitors were encouraged to pose in kimonos next to Claude Monet’s painting La Japonaise, which depicts the artist’s wife in a similar outfit. Local leftists found the prospect of whiteys dressing up in oriental outfits outrageous, and promptly conducted a sit-in at the museum.
But, hilariously, the (mostly white, college-age) protesters soon found themselves joined by counter-protesters who, by contrast, were actually Japanese. According to The Boston Globe, the counter-protesters carried signs welcoming others to share in Japanese culture. Among the counter-protesters was Etsuko Yashiro, a 53-year old Japanese immigrant who helps organize Boston’s Japan Festival. Yashiro told The Globe that she was “disappointed by the other side,” and reportedly blamed the incident on the protester’s youth. Other local Japanese residents were similarly befuddled. The Deputy Consul General of Japan in Boston, Jiro Usui, told The Globe, “We actually do not quite understand what their point of protest is. ”219 You and me both, Jiro.
Few things betray the short-sighted, joyless, anti-human stupidity of the Left as much as cutural appropriation. Virtually every book, film, play, video game, and work of art is the result of a long history of cultural appropriation.