Fighting Fire with Free Speech: Aborting Antiwoke Fascism with Principled Political Incorrectness

I’ve been called a social justice warrior for as long as that left-handed compliment has existed, and I’ll own that shit till the cows come home. I am a loud and proud genderfuck sex-positive feminist who is all for open borders, reparations, smashing the patriarchy, abolishing whiteness and defunding pretty much anything that knocks on my front door with a badge (I guess Girl Scouts are cool.) Call me an SJW and my gut response is to yell “Metal!”, stick out my tongue and flash the double devil horns like Randy Rhoads on one last plane ride to hell because I will proudly ride and die by those values any day of the fucking week.

The people on the bottom of this dying empire’s boot have every right to revenge against the multiple systems of power that have trampled on us for generations but if there is just one tactic for righteous retribution that I just can’t fucking stomach it’s that grimy little kink known as political correctness. I may be “woke” as fuck but whenever I hear some white cis-het liberal drone on about free speech being equivalent to physical violence all can do is cringe and hiss. My Queer uncle Billy Burrough raised this SJW better than that and I get a never-ending supply of shit from my fellow SJWs because of it.

I don’t have to prove that cancel culture is a thing because I’ve fucking lived it. I live it every goddamn day. SJW or not. I also happen to be a post-left market anarchist who supports bottom unity and swears like a drag queen on shore leave. I have been denounced as a fascist for defending right-wing libertarians who have been better allies to me than every gladhanding Bernie bro glued together. I have been tarred as a sexist and a racist for trashing Kamala Harris for throwing transwomen of color to the wolves in men’s prisons. I have had entire organizations threaten to pull their support from websites that I sponsor simply because I’m published on other websites that they consider right-wing. And I have been banned and deboosted from every social media outlet known to man or beast simply because I choose to identify myself with repossessed slurs like tranny and dyke that certain sensitive breeders have decided to universally label as hate speech.

All of this shit may be legal and constitutional and most of it may even be done with the loftiest of intentions but that doesn’t make it any less immoral. My biggest problem with the PC movement however is that it just makes for a shitty strategy even when it’s hurled at cunts who deserve it. When a crowd of irate antifa kids get together to shut down some sick creep like Milo Yiannopoulos from giving another tirade on campus they really only achieve two things. They squander precious manpower better used to throw down with the police state on a cage-rattling fabulist and they help that putrid puke artist sell another hundred books without even having to leave the comfort of his police-escorted limousine. The most heinous blowback from this campaign to de-platform dangerous douchebags is that now those very same douchebags are using the free speech card to back a movement that is mowing liberty down like an unkept bush on a post-1985 porn set.

They call it antiwoke and it has become a thriving industrial complex of think tanks, parental action groups and political organizations that are using the banner of free speech to erase Black people from the history books and Queer people from the streets. Tennessee has even passed an anti-drag law that promises to charge anyone who their fascist police state declares to be a male or female impersonator “performing” in public with a misdemeanor followed by a felony for a second offense. 16 GOP-led states are pushing for similar assaults on free speech. Meanwhile, schools across the country are gagging their students from engaging in discussions on anything that offends certain white Christian parents and books are being yanked from public libraries by the thousands. They call it antiwoke, but it reeks to high hell like political correctness in my nostrils.

None of this should be particularly shocking to those of us with a memory that extends past last Tuesday considering that the very same PC culture adopted by many misguided hipsters today was largely the invention of the wilting church ladies of the Christian right who claimed that three minutes of protected speech from Judas Priest could turn any Cub Scout into a Satan-worshiping faggot (I’m a Shaktiist dyke, thank you very much!) The right has always been at the forefront of cancel culture and unlike the left, they’ve never been afraid to use the state to enforce it with draconian laws and judicial witch trials. Just ask Lenny Bruce, Allen Ginsberg, Mike Dianna and the West Memphis 3 if you don’t believe me. The only difference now is that the left has largely forfeited the fight for free speech to a bunch of fucking fascists who wear it like drag while they bring back the Inquisition.

Twisted twats like Ron DeSantis and Tucker Carlson embody all the worst aspects of both fascism and the same damn cancel culture that they claim to be using it to wage war against and why not? Both of these censorious perversions thrive on equating speech with violence and silence with safety. While left-wing brats struggle to silence these creeps with boycotts and corporate retribution, their voices just get louder and louder, and those voices are now openly calling for the annihilation of my people as they grope the courts for the legal machinery to make it happen. Political correctness hasn’t made our nation woker. It has just turned a generation of leftists into compliant snowflakes begging the Fortune 500 for salvation while the right prepares for a literal genocide.

Enough! I have seen the best mouths of my generation castrated by censorship, whispering hysterical mute. Those who truly deeply care about the plight of the marginalized must break free from their safe spaces and fight fire with freedom. We must take back the mantle of free speech from the reactionary right and weaponize it as an awesome tool for social justice the same way that the Yippies, Jello Biafra, the Beats and Mario Savio once did. We the faggots, perverts, trannies, whores, wetbacks, darkies, sluts and dykes must all come together and throw our screaming bodies against the gears of totalitarianism.

We must make political incorrectness in and of itself a virtue worth signaling over. We must tell our stories uncensored in voices too shrill to be ignored. We must declare Babylon to be a white supremacist conspiracy and recognize race as a sickness. We must slaughter our sacred cows and call out our nation’s heroes out for being a stampede of colonialist rapists. We must declare the Pope a groomer, Hillary a bastard, Obama an Uncle Tom, Mayor Peter an Uncle Twink, and Ron DeSantis a fucking Nazi in no uncertain terms. We must bring politics and religion back screaming to the dinner table and we must use the seven deadly words in every conversation because the fight for conversation is the fight for freedom and that fight begins with dirty words and social justice warriors who are unafraid to use them to offend the powerful.

If we are to die tomorrow, let us at least die screaming obscenities with our finger held high.

Nicky Reid is an agoraphobic anarcho-genderqueer gonzo blogger from Central Pennsylvania and assistant editor for Attack the System. You can find her online at Exile in Happy Valley.