S Peter Davis
·
Inside every hateful person is a scared person. If you want to know what they're scared of, don't worry, they'll tell you. In the case of the far right, we actually have a single book that explains it all in the most unintentionally ridiculous way possible.
The book is called Forbidden Thoughts. It's a collection of short stories by a bunch of right-wing science fiction writers, complete with a foreword by professional dickhead Milo Yiannopoulos. I wouldn't recommend that anyone read it, ever, even ironically, but it does serve as an easy guide to the grossly implausible things these guys claim to fear. For instance ...
The Story:
The key to being a terrible person is to always assume everyone else is much, much worse. The problem is that if you're part of what polite society considers a hate group, then it takes some serious mental leaps to get there.
So let's kick off by looking at the story "At The Edge Of Detachment" by A.M. Freeman, a cautionary tale about a 12-year-old boy who tragically breaks his arm after falling out of a tree. Luckily for his mother, the legal age for aborting a fetus in the United States has been extended to, uh, 13 years after birth. You know, that thing that liberals are always saying they want?
Anyway, his mother decides that it is cheaper and easier to simply have her son killed than treat him for a minor ailment, so she applies to the government to obtain an extremely late-term abortion. The story consists of the child protagonist's inner monologue on his very short life before he is dragged away by government agents while screaming that he's a living person.
The Fear:
If there's one thing that the folks on the extreme right know, it's that liberals LOVE dead kids. In 2015, right-wing blogs started stirring up a panic storm about the imminent abortionpocalypse when they discovered an article published way back in 2012 for the Journal Of Medical Ethics titled "After-Birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?"
Holy shit, right? The article dared to present the question: if it's generally acceptable to terminate a pregnancy upon learning that the fetus has some kind of severe genetic defect, then why is it not acceptable to terminate a baby for the same reason? The right went apeshit about this being the smoking gun that proves this is what liberals actually want!
According to Mike Adams, the supplement-hucking pundit behind Natural News, this reveals what he knew all along: "But killing babies just before they're born isn't quite enough for these Satan worshippers." Alex Jones colleague Paul Joseph Watson states that after-birth abortion is "the logical conclusion" to the pro-choice position.
An author who goes by "Vox Day" (which is literally botched Latin for "The Voice of God") went further down the rabbit hole and suggests this article is just the first step toward all murder being legal, like the Purge 365 days a year. ("These people are a death cult. They worship death.")
So do any of these guys actually believe this is what the left wants? Or are they just saying the worst possible thing they can come up with in order to force the other side to respond on those terms? Who can say? Here, maybe some more examples will enlighten us ...
The Story:
OK, maybe not. "Safe Space Suit" (seriously, that's what they titled it) by Nick Cole is about a Mars colonization mission that goes horribly wrong because its obsessively PC mission director insists on hiring a black lesbian as the spacecraft's pilot. This is a mistake because said lesbian, Captain Jemison, "was rated at the lowest percentile of pilots applying to the mission."
Thus the ship crashes on Mars, killing almost everyone onboard. As it turns out, everyone who played a vital role in the mission was some form of affirmative action hire, right up to the president, who was elected "on the basis of his skin color." This entire story has all the subtlety of an ethnic slur being yelled out of a truck window.
The Fear:
Affirmative action is one of the biggest boogeymen of the right. To their mind, society is crumbling because organizations insist on hiring people due to quotas on things like race, gender, and sexuality, and clearly that means hiring people who'll just steer our shit right off a cliff. Stefan Molyneux, a right-wing commentator and accused cult leader, warns of nonwhite immigrants being hired in Europe: "You cannot run a high IQ society with low IQ people."
"But wait," you might say, "he's implying that nonwhites have lower IQs, that doesn't sound right." Oh, they do more than imply it. Vox "Latin is hard" Day wrote a book titled Cuckservative, in which he attempts to prove that intelligence is in fact inextricably linked to race. Day posits that suggesting otherwise is akin to believing "mice are just as strong as elephants, amoebas just as intelligent as dolphins, and that only speciesist oppression prevents them all from flying just as well as eagles."
But remember the rule isn't just that the best jobs should be reserved for white people -- it's white men. Self-styled "intellectual rebel" David Garrett Brown has written multiple articles for the male supremacist website Return of Kings about how letting women be firefighters will get people killed, presumably because he thinks estrogen is flammable. And Lauren Southern, current conservative celebrity, recently wrapped up a world tour trying to discourage women from becoming CEOs because they "aren't wired" to be in positions of influence. Unlike, uh, Lauren Southern, I guess.
Stop and ask yourself: How many of the people in their audience are A) super competent at something, B) still lost their job to affirmative action, or C) were harmed due to the incompetence of an affirmative action hire? Are there any who even think that's happened to them? Or, again, is it just something they say because they love to see the outrage it triggers?
The Story:
Oh shit, here we go. In "The Code" by Matthew Ward, the dating scene has become a minefield after America passes laws that forbid men from making physical contact with women unless they are permitted to through a series of very specifically worded verbal contracts. If you poorly phrase or otherwise botch the contract, then you get arrested for rape. This is apparently the world feminists admit they want at their secret meetings.
The story follows the protagonist through a nervous restaurant date, which he begins by reading the official contract in order to shake her hand: "I, Eric David Schrih, Jr., do hereby wish to enter Phase 1 of the verbal agreements as laid forth by Code 3.4.3. Do you consent?" As the night wears on, he becomes comfortable with his date to the point where he eventually leans in for a kiss without stating the requisite verbal contract first. The story ends with him being hauled away to prison.
The Fear:
The right has been really vocal about the idea that the cultural push for "consent" is an authoritarian nightmare spiraling the world into an inevitable sexless dystopia. As Return of Kings contributor Vincent Vinturi puts it: "when it's all said and done, the woman is invariably happy that I didn't listen to a single word of protest she uttered; that I barreled through her resistance nonchalantly and drove the ball to the basket." I'm no detective, but phrases like "ball to the basket" seem to strongly indicate that Vinturi is still desperately trying to figure out what exactly sex is.
Self-styled pick-up guru and general sex pest Roosh Valizadeh has argued that trying to make a woman interested in sex requires about as much effort nowadays as landing a high-paying job. Not that I'm suggesting Valizadeh knows what it's like to get a job, but for an apparent seduction expert, he seems to have a really difficult time convincing women to touch his bits.
In 2017, Valizadeh posted a video (in front of the framed Trump portrait he apparently hangs in his living room) lamenting the fact that the left has made the world such a barren and sexless wasteland that he had to invest "literally thousands of hours of work and energy" studying how to get laid before it finally happened. That's ... that's not normal, Roosh. Maybe get a new hobby. Literally any new hobby.
Why do so many men on the right have such an enormous amount of trouble getting women near their penises? Mike Cernovich, the far-right agitator who recently got director James Gunn fired from Disney by resurfacing some old shitty tweets he made, once posted about an incident in which a girl he was dating wouldn't let him stick it in her in the back of her car. So he showed her up by jerking off in front of her and cumming on himself. (That's admitting sexual assault, for those keeping track.) And it wouldn't have to be this way if it wasn't for all all of the SJWs and their impossibly confusing "rules."
The Story:
"The Social Construct" by David Hallquist is set in a world in which procreative sex is illegal and all babies are genetically designed in a lab, where their characteristics are controlled down to the finest detail. Even after birth, they can be sent back to the lab to have their design tweaked if the parents change their mind, including their sex.
In the story, William and Georgia design a male baby, but after a while decide that they prefer a daughter. So they send the child away to be surgically transformed into a girl. But after their new daughter refuses to stop playing with trucks, William and Georgia have an argument about whether to send her away again to be reverted into a male. The argument ends with Georgia weeping and saying, in a way that sounds totally natural, "They said human personhood is a social construct," and finally deciding "I want an abortion."
The Fear:
In my depressingly extensive research into the modern right, I've concluded that the mainstream acceptance of transgender people is at least among the top three things they're terrified about, possibly even above Mexican immigration (they sure do seem to like the food, though). As with all issues, they insist that allowing a thing is the same as forcing everyone to convert to said thing at gunpoint.
Gavin McInnes, the definitely-not-a-cult-leader behind the definitely-not-a-cult Proud Boys, thinks that parents are going to start forcing their kids to change genders or be gay in order to signal how progressive they are: "Make your kids trans! Say they have no gender! And then you can stand there and go 'I'm on the right side of history.' ... They're using their children as fodder."
Meanwhile, YouTuber Steven Crowder flies into a panic at the thought of misguided parents screwing up their children's gender identity, living in a parallel universe in which not only are trans people universally accepted, but they are such an overwhelming force in society that no child is safe from their influence. Once again, the national conversation went:
"Hey, maybe we should acknowledge the existence of _____ and stop abusing/killing them."
"Oh, so you're saying all of us should live in utter subjugation of _____? Over my dead body!"
Which brings us to possibly the dumbest iteration of that ...
The Story:
"A Place For Everyone" by Ray Blank tells the story of a world in which a super politically correct AI randomly allocates everyone their own job, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and name, in a misguided attempt to make everyone equal. Using gender-specific pronouns is illegal, as one of the protagonists learns after going before a tribunal and, after accidentally saying the word "she," is reprimanded by a judge named Gloria ("a bulky fellow who might have played linebacker when sports still involved contact") and reminded that the correct pronoun for all humans is now "ey."
The Fear:
Fans complain that it's inaccurate to label Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson "alt-right," but he definitely became "number one with the alt-right" when he declared that he would refuse to refer to students by their preferred pronouns even under threat of imprisonment, claiming that the legal protection of transgender people as a sign of a totalitarian state. Legal scholar Eugene Volokh is sure the government will soon be imposing massive fines for refusing to use "made up" pronouns. And according to Paul Joseph Watson, "some on the left are pushing to eliminate language."
If you've spent approximately any time whatsoever on Reddit, then you might be familiar with a popular meme called "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter" which ridicules the concept by suggesting it's one short step away from deciding you're the most absurd thing anyone can think of. And because the right has beaten the self-awareness out of itself, greatest philosopher of all time Stefan Molyneux thinks it's genius.
But it isn't just trans people who are apparently dragging us into a vortex of insanity. Steven Crowder thinks "a serious trend right now" is "trans-speciesism." To prove that this is a "serious trend," he dug up a single interview from some European TV show where some lady insists that she's actually a cat.
That's a perfect example of the process at work. At every turn, they mine frantically for some remote example, some random person or incident to prove that they're right about this, that straight white men are about to be rounded up and sent to extermination camps by people who want to destroy all of society just for the hell of it. On some level they know it's not true -- they have to -- but have to pretend it is in order to protect their identity, to justify their behavior.
On top of everything else, it just seems like an awful way to live.
S. Peter Davis is the creator of the Three Minute Philosophy YouTube series, and is the author of the book Occam's Nightmare.
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