"Free speech means the right to shout 'theatre' in a crowded fire."
-Abbie Hoffman
"I know too much and not enough."
-Allen Ginsberg
Revolution makes for some strange bedfellows and as a kinky agitator for free speech, I have pretty much fucked with them all, from head-chopping Salafi whack-jobs and intellectually braindead Holocaust deniers to flag devouring Maoist lunatics and gun-toting millenarian Jesus freaks. I have defended the rights of anti-vaxxers to openly deny the basic tenets of medical science, I have defended the rights of fag-bashing imbeciles to refuse to bake wedding cakes for weirdos like me, and I have even defended the rights of washed-up comedians to snatch another fifteen minutes at the expense of my own hard earned gender identity.
Truth be told, I have probably broken a lot of hearts on the left with this kind of advocacy and I have probably lost a lot of legitimate allies defending people that would likely sooner see a genderqueer feminist like me dragged behind their pick-up trucks than share a bathroom with their daughters.
As usual, the left has a point and I feel their pain. There is a very powerful part of me that would enjoy nothing better than to cave in the face of every last transphobic troglodyte with a D-cell Maglite. Even on eight milligrams of Estradiol, I have very moist dreams that end with that specific tableau tastefully set to the soundtrack of Blue is the Warmest Color.
But what my former comrades in the black bloc often fail to comprehend is that my at-times downright sadomasochistic stance on the unfettered right to be an absolute cunt is specifically inspired by my upbringing as a student of the countercultural fringe on the New Left.
Free speech is the disorganized religion of my elders. The dogma of outlaw priests like Allen Ginsberg, Mario Savio, Lenny Bruce and Abbie Hoffman. Proud commie pinko freaks who got locked up and beat to a bloody fucking pulp so you and I can wipe our ass with the flag and tell our local sheriff to go fuck himself with his service revolver. These people, my heroes, left a trail of broken teeth from Berkley to the Supreme Court defending the inalienable right for the individual to be a cunt and I would be spitting on their graves if I made exceptions just for the people who personally sicken me.
It isn't that I support hate speech any more than the next antifascist does. It's that I recognize the inconvenient fact that affording any major institution, be they private or public, with the ability to silence any individual is far more dangerous than any individual could ever be. But while this position has led me to defend the far-right more times than I care to count, that doesn't mean that I have ever been foolish enough to believe that those libertarian-come-lately assholes would ever return the favor.
The right loves to fan their sweaty taint with the First Amendment but it never takes them very long to rediscover their censorious roots. The first inkling of this hypocrisy amongst the latest generation of right-wing free speech frauds in the so-called Antiwoke Movement came with their open armed embrace of using the state to police Queer kids in both public and private schools, but the MAGA movement's love for cancel culture has reached truly dizzying new highs of orgasmic ecstasy and dismal new lows of gutter despotism in the wake of Israel's genocidal war on the children of Gaza.
Practically overnight, every GOP presidential hopeful and Fox News edgelord who has ever beat off on camera with the Constitution began screaming like flaming snowflakes to have any college student in a Keffiyeh dragged off to the guillotines and they have happily hopped into bed with the Ivy League Karens of the academic elite to make it happen. The same people who marched for Milo clapped their hands until they bled as Colombia suspended the Students for Justice in Palestine and Harvard blacklisted the Palestine Solidarity Committee for simply verbally holding Israel responsible for provoking terrorism with apartheid.
Florida governor and presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, a garish neocon Reagan stunt double who built a pitiful career pushing trans girls off their bicycles and flexing for the cameras before barking "Free speech!" showed off his own antiwoke muscles for GOP primary voters by demanding that his state universities cancel campus speech and banish organizations like the SJP entirely.
Not to be outdone by his former primary competitor, Senator Tim Scott, who backed a bill on the Hill called the Stop Antisemitism on College Campuses Act that would essentially strip funding from universities for simply hiring certain professors that certain Zionists deem antisemitic. In fact, every single GOP presidential candidate except Vivek Ramaswamy has called for literally deporting students just for showing up at pro-Palestine rallies.
Now, I may despise what has become of the left in the era of kneejerk political correctness, but I also have a very hard time imagining Bernie or the Squad backing this kind of legislation directed at the "Putin Puppets" who oppose their bullshit funding of the NATO catastrophe in Ukraine. As much as these swishy champagne socialists may sicken me with their own hypocrisy, the right always takes this shit one step further and that's because this is who they are.
Censorship is the religion of their elders. Pompous Christian nationalist church ladies like William Buckley, Edwin Meese, Jerry Fallwell and Phyllis Schlafly. The same people who canceled William Burroughs, 2 Live Crew, Ward Churchill, Judas Priest and Norman Finkelstein. In spite of their posturing, the Antiwoke Movement has nothing to do with free speech. Those self-serving creeps are merely the rotten fruit of the Christian Right's prolapsed anus, and those sheep will always come home to trample on those of us who dare to engage in truly dangerous speech which is all the more reason why commie pinko freaks like me need to be devoted to zealously protecting it at all costs.
The campus speech codes and convoluted notions of "student safety" against scary language empowered by political correctness are currently being weaponized by the Antiwoke Movement to silence the most important student antiwar movement since the Bush era and this is precisely why I have risked alienating myself from my own tribe to defend shock jocks and hate mongers against these puritan vestiges of social cleanliness.
Because I knew that as long as this architecture of intellectual surveillance existed, it would inevitably be used by the institutions of patriarchy and white supremacy still nestled in those ivory towers to flog the marginalized. Faggots like me are always the first to get fucked by institutional power which is precisely why faggots like me need to be on the front lines in the fight to castrate these very institutions of those powers and keep them from silencing anybody ever again, and that includes the neanderthals who will inevitably exploit my efforts just to bash me.
This is the price of true liberty, and this is the big difference between right-wing "libertarians" and sex-positive genderfuck mutants like me who used to pass for left-wing before the left-wing got lost. I will be fighting for the inalienable right for those phonies to be a cunt long before their knife wounds heal on my back because there but before the grace of the state go I.
So, fuck the state or die fucking. Free speech is for everyone or it's for no one at all.
Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post
* You've Got Another Thing Comin' by Judas Priest
* Awful by Hole
* Banned in the USA by 2 Live Crew
* U-Mass by the Pixies
* Mother by Danzig
* Freedom to Fuck Off by Petey
* Express Yourself by NWA
* Hard to Love by Bully
* Anarchy in the UK by Megadeth
* Say it Like You Mean It by Sleater-Kinney
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