Jeff Sparrow - Trigger Warnings: political correctness and the rise of the right

TRIGGER WARNINGS

Jeff Sparrow is a writer, editor, and broadcaster. He writes a fortnightly column for the Guardian , and contributes regularly to many other Australian and international publications. Jeff is a member of the 3RRR Breakfasters team and the immediate past editor of the literary journal Overland . He is also the author of a number of books, including No Way But This: in search of Paul Robeson and Money Shot: a journey into porn and censorship .

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First published by Scribe 2018

Copyright Jeff Sparrow 2018

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9781925713183 (Australian edition)
9781911617075 (UK edition)
9781947534698 (US edition)
9781925693133 (e-book)

CiP records for this title are available from the National Library of Australia and the British Library.

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To Steph, for all the reasons

Contents

Chapter One:

Chapter Two:

Chapter Three:

Chapter Four:

Chapter Five:

Chapter Six:

Chapter Seven:

Chapter Eight:

Chapter Nine:

Chapter Ten:

Chapter Eleven:

Chapter Twelve:

Chapter Thirteen:

Chapter Fourteen:

Introduction

Nothing is more anti-American, anti-freedom, anti-truth, and anti-reality than political correctness. It is a noose around Americas neck, growing tighter each day It is a communal tyranny, not dissimilar to the one America fought a revolution over.

This passage comes from a volume published in 2015 under the title Retaking America: crushing political correctness . There was nothing particularly unusual about it. Rather, it was a boilerplate example of a popular genre in what was often called culture war. On Amazon, readers could find a wide assortment of books making an almost identical pitch: The Intimidation Game: how the left is silencing free speech ; The Silencing: how the left is killing free speech ; Bullies: how the lefts culture of fear and intimidation silences Americans , and many, many others.

If Retaking America was in any way different, it was only because of its author, a man called Nick Adams. For, despite his books title, Adams was not American at all. He was an Australian whod launched his political career in the inner-Sydney suburb of Ashfield.

Back in 2004, Adams had become the youngest councillor in Australia, winning election for the Liberal Party while still at school. His policies included support for portraits of the Queen, opposition to multiculturalism, and the extermination of the suburbs pigeons.

Ashfield should be inhospitable to pigeons, he told a perplexed council meeting as he presented a plan to protect the region from avian flu.

Adams career in local government came to an end when his verbal abuse of a journalist led to a six-month suspension from the Liberal Party. Undaunted, he decamped to the US and reinvented himself as a motivational speaker and conservative commentator. Soon, he would be prosecuting the culture war on Fox News and similar platforms.

By good luck or by good timing, Adams second coming coincided with the rise of a certain Donald J. Trump. In fact, in Retaking America , Adams presented a model inauguration address written for a hypothetical but distinctly Trump-like president.

Of all enemy combatants, political correctness is the most dangerous, announced Adams imaginary statesman. It endangers our homeland and our culture. It emboldens our enemies and critics. It denies reality and encourages mediocrity Thats why my first act as President is to announce from this day forward an end to political correctness.

During the 2015 primaries campaign, Donald Trump was grilled by Fox News personality Megyn Kelly, who quizzed him about his long history of sexism.

Youve called women you dont like fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals, Kelly began. Your Twitter account has several disparaging comments about womens looks. You once told a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president, and how will you answer the charge from Hillary Clinton, who is likely to be the Democratic nominee, that you are part of the war on women?

Trump didnt hesitate.

I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct.

Sections of the crowd in the studio erupted into whoops and cheers.

Kelly had highlighted a record of misogyny sufficient to sink the electoral chances of a traditional politician. But Trump neither apologised nor explained. Rather, he implied that the question itself was out of line, symptomatic of a broader national dysfunction and many in the audience, it seemed, thought so, too.

In Retaking America , Adams explained that hed left Australia to escape oppression by political correctness.

From identity politics and secularism, he argued, to the all-powerful welfare state and the war against national identity, every problem in America today is compounded by this suffocating regime of thought control.

After 9/11, the US government passed the USA PATRIOT act, rolling back traditional freedoms in the name of fighting terror. The CIA established a network of black sites, secret prisons located all over the globe, in which suspects could be detained without charge or trial after being snatched from the street. American agents established elaborate protocols for enhanced interrogations, sometimes involving the practice known as waterboarding a torture technique used by Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot. Successive presidents embraced a program of assassination, in which the commander-in-chief signed off on kill lists handed to drone operators so that the death sentences could be carried out remotely by sophisticated robots. The National Security Agency and other agencies worked to establish a total surveillance of all electronic communications, compelling every major American internet service provider to hand over the content of their users records. According to Edward Snowden, in a single month in early 2013, one National Security Agency unit collected data on more than 3 billion telephone calls and emails that had passed through the US.

Those developments reminiscent of the darkest sci-fi dystopia didnt trouble Adams in the slightest. For him, it was political correctness that constituted an Orwellian tyranny. He wasnt alone. Throughout the Republican primaries, almost all the major candidates denounced PC. Ben Carson explained that PC was destroying our nation, Ted Cruz said that it was killing people, Jeb Bush declared that it needed to be shattered, and Carly Fiorina insisted that it was choking candid conversation.

Like most mainstream pundits, the Democrat strategists assumed that anti-PC obsessives were unelectable. The Clinton campaign actively tried to boost the fortunes of those it called the Pied Piper candidates the culture war populists likely, according to the conventional wisdom, to lead their party into the wilderness. Chief among them, of course, was Donald Trump, a man whom the Democrats privately identified as their preferred opponent.