The moon landing? Pfft. There is no more exciting time to be alive than now. We are living in an age of heroes, villains and revolution, and no one quite knows where the next uprising will come from.
The attempt to stifle cultural expression has gotten so bad that even leftists are getting sick of it. Lionel Shriver, author of We Need To Talk About Kevin, is one of the most accomplished leftist authors in the world. In 2010, she authored So Much For That, a book about a man who has to sell his business and give up his dreams to pay for his sick wife’s healthcare costs. It is essentially a critique of the pre-Obamacare American model of private healthcare.
Yet even Shriver has figured out that something has gone terribly, disastrously wrong with identity politics. Her keynote speech at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival in September 2016, which she delivered wearing a sombrero, was an evisceration of the Left’s new obsessions: identity, cultural appropriation, and feelings. She went as far as to call the identitarian Left the “culture police” and announced a sincere desire for them to go away soon.
I am hopeful that the concept of “cultural appropriation” is a passing fad: people with different backgrounds rubbing up against each other and exchanging ideas and practices is self-evidently one of the most productive, fascinating aspects of modern urban life.
Shriver also committed what is, for a leftist, an unforgivable sin: she explained the actual reason for the rise of Donald Trump.
The Left’s embrace of gotcha hypersensitivity inevitably invites backlash. Donald Trump appeals to people who have had it up to their eyeballs with being told what they can and cannot say. Pushing back against a mainstream culture of speak-no-evil suppression, they lash out in defiance, and then what they say is pretty appalling.246
Shriver’s speech was an important moment, due to her stature in the world of left-wing literature. But she was just one of many liberal-leaning creators who have begun to speak out against the regressive Left. Other renowned authors, like my literary hero Bret Easton Ellis, have also spoken up.
The imagination cannot help but rebel against the shackles that the regressive Left would seek to put on it. The cultural libertarian revolution is only just beginning.
Like you, I’m sick of the odious blue-haired fucks on college campuses. I’d rather be at home watching Netflix, sucking off my boyfriend, or spending thousands of dollars in Louis Vuitton. I do what I do because I have to, because no one else can or will right now. Until, perhaps, this book gets out there and inspires the next generation of culture warriors.
I have to go through the motions, day after day, absorbing the vitriol from the media and idiotic protesters, because every other conservative and libertarian figurehead has utterly failed you. I’m like Cincinnatus, the Roman general who dropped his plough to lead an army to victory and secure the safety of his homeland, before immediately returning to the farm and his slave girls. In my case it would be a harem of Nubian catamites, but otherwise the picture is the same. In my heart of hearts I want to declare victory, or at least to pass the baton on, so I can go back to the chaise longue and indulge myself in silk and champagne.
But I know that will never happen in my lifetime, so I am resigned to the fight. I will wage war as long as there are dykes in gender studies departments telling lies about innocent young boys, as long as Black Lives Matter activists are attacking people for their skin color and as long as Britney has to withhold music videos because her managers are worried they aren’t feminist enough. I will fight so long as free expression and creativity are at risk from thick-as-pigshit New York bloggers and social-justice activists.
I’ve always felt an acute sense of personal ordainment—as though my life was meant for something greater. It’s why I always related to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I’m the chosen one. I was chosen to fight the dark forces that pervade our world. As long as America needs me, I am yours.
At least for now, I am rejoicing. Because together, we have struck a savage blow in what will be a decades-long fight to reclaim creative freedom and freedom of speech from the political Left. I’m talking, of course, about Daddy.
It was 1:40 AM on November 9, 2016, and I was in New York, giggling uncontrollably. I was giggling because The Associated Press had just called Pennsylvania for Donald Trump. I could imagine the looks of bewilderment, despair and outrage on the faces of mainstream reporters covering the results just a few hallways away from me and it made me laugh uncontrollably. The West was not doomed to die an ignominious death at the hands of open border-obsessed globalists. I was giggling because we had won.
The earthquake heralded by the election of Donald J. Trump had been a long time coming. It was the culmination of nearly thirty years of hectoring from both the mainstream Left and the mainstream Right; about how we should shut up if we knew what’s good for us, about how we need to make up for a history of racism, sexism, and every “phobia” under the sun, about how entertaining this dangerous thought or making that dangerous joke would be the end of our careers.
Well, it turns out that the real danger lies in not daring to be dangerous. I dare to be dangerous every day, and I can’t stop winning.
My ascendancy has marked the overturning of an old order. GamerGate bloodied the leftist vigilante squads on social media and their friends in the press. Brexit put a stake through the heart of the bureaucratic, globalist European Union. And then Donald Trump came, to annihilate thirty years of politically correct consensus in the United States.
Leftists think 2016 was The Worst Year Ever, and not just because so many of their favorite celebrities died. Given the scale of their political defeats, they have some justification, but they are also pessimistic by nature. These are the people who believe racism is worse than it’s ever been, that rates of sexual assault on college campuses approximate the Congo, and that Brexit will herald World War III.
Steven Pinker, a sensible liberal, reminds us that this is not the case. The world is getting better, and has been for some time. As he ceaselessly reminds a pessimistic public, “Extreme poverty, child mortality, illiteracy, and global inequality are at historic lows; vaccinations, basic education, including girls, and democracy are at all-time highs.” Rates of murder, violence, sexual assault and other crimes in the West also continue, by and large, to fall.247 Socially, the millennial generation is the most tolerant ever and the incoming president is also likely to be the most gay-friendly man ever elected to the presidency.
Now that leftists are out of power, America is on track to be less divided, safer, and more stable than ever before. By the time the next election rolls around, I predict Democrats will struggle to downplay the nation’s success.