A black guy, a Jew, and a Chinese dude walk into an Irish bar. The black guy says, “I’ll have a Guinness.” The Jew says, “I’ll have a Stella,” and the Asian dude says, “I’ll have a Maker’s Mark on the rocks.” The bartender looks up from cleaning a glass and says, “What the fuck are you guys doing in here? Get out of here.”

These days it’s hard to tell if you’re allowed to like jokes like these. All over the so-called free world, common sense and basic human rights are being smothered under a stultifying wave of censorship that used to be called “political correctness” and is now called “tolerance.”

Even VICE—where we are committed to saying what you want, and where new employees are sometimes shocked that terms like slut, paki, and faggot are part of casual office banter—is not immune to this insidious form of repression. In spite of the fact that I am one of the owners of this company, our lawyers suggested I undergo sensitivity training after saying “I love fags” in the middle of an important meeting. During the training we were told that it is illegal to discuss anything personal about your co-workers under any circumstances. In other words, I could be sued if I went to the bathroom with my co-worker, locked the door and whispered “The managing editor is Italian.”

This magazine was once banned at Ottawa’s Carleton University (my alma mater, I’m ashamed to admit) after we featured an ad that displayed a female model’s pubic hair. The censors’ rationale was that the ad had used “sex rather than sexuality” to sell the product in question. When a student at the school tried to organize a debate over the university’s actions, the student council revoked the room that he had booked for the occasion. The school paper proceeded to print an article about the controversy and, as a result, was also temporarily banned from the campus.

Sadly, this sort of blatantly irrational hypocrisy has become the rule, rather than the exception, at most North American universities. At Wake Forest, one of the few orientation events that freshmen are obliged to attend, is an experience called Blue Eyed, in which whites are abused, ridiculed, made to fail, and taught helpless passivity so that they “can identify with a person of color for a day.” At Michigan State University, where certain elevators and cafeteria tables are reserved for blacks and gays as a way to “counteract oppression,” columnist Jason Van Dyke was dismissed from the school paper after he wrote a piece suggesting that the gay community may be intolerant.

And sanctions aren’t restricted to those whose ideas are deemed hurtful or offensive. When Dr. Richard Zeller, a sociology professor at Ohio’s Bowling Green State University, proposed a course on political correctness that would offer students a chance to look at this integral part of university life from a conservative perspective, he was forced to resign. When asked to comment, Dr. Kathleen Dixon, BGSU’s director of women’s studies said, in an admission that was as frank as it was disturbing, “We forbid any course that says we restrict free speech.”

The irony wouldn’t have been lost on tyrants like the late Chairman Mao Zedong. The Chinese communist leader and mass murderer once proposed a campaign of “thought reform and re-education” for university students that would not be complete until, as Mao put it, “children had denounced the lives and political morals of their parents and emerged as progressive in a manner satisfactory to their trainers.”

This neo-fascist desire to control people’s attitudes and language also makes its way into the legislature. If you are arrested after being involved in a street fight, for example, you can be charged with some form of assault. But in many states, if you use the word “nigger” or “faggot” during the fight, the incident can be labeled a hate crime and you will be subject to an additional or more severe sentence.

Now, obviously a gang of racist skinheads deserves a harsher punishment than some drunken brawler, but problems arise when tribunals try to identify and quantify an entity like “hate” as defined under a statute. Arguably, there is a degree of animosity present any time one human being assaults another, but prosecutors have to determine whether or not this hate is the kind of “hate” they’re looking for. And so, an accused can be grilled about how many black friends he has or if he’s ever made any off-color jokes. Often the “proof” comes down to an offensive epithet uttered during the incident. But, as anyone who’s ever called their partner “a dirty fucking slut” in the heat of an intense sexual encounter can tell you, context is everything.

Ultimately, censoring discourse only serves to send bigotry underground, making the task of exposing its inherent stupidity that much harder. After several officers on a military base in Texas were reprimanded for using the word “nigger” in casual conversation, soldiers simply substituted the word “Canadian.” The euphemism spread to the general populace and led to some very confused Canuck tourists wondering why Texans were always going on about “lazy fucking Canadians” and the dangers of living in a “Canadian” neighborhood.

And often, hate laws end up hurting the people they were designed to help. When a coalition of Vancouver women’s groups was asked to help set the Canadian government’s guidelines for acceptable pornography, so many lesbian-made books and movies ended up being banned that two women’s bookstores were forced out of business. Similarly, America’s anti-hate-speech laws have often ended up enhancing the societal imbalances they were designed to redress. In Michigan, more than twenty blacks have been charged with racist speech but not a single white person has. In Florida, the hate-speech law was used to throw a black man in jail after he called a cop a “white cracker.” In fact, the only hate-crime case to make it to the Supreme Court involved a man who had been called a “white piece of shit” by a black man.

WE FORBID ANY COURSE
THAT SAYS WE RESTRICT
FREE SPEECH
But just when it looked like things had come full circle, and our attempts to wipe out hatred and intolerance had created an intolerant dystopia of thought-control and censorship, terrorism reared its ugly head and good old-fashioned hate has come back with a vengeance. All over North America, people are rethinking the live-and-let-live policies that may have contributed to the September 11th tragedies.

More than half of the 19 terrorists involved in the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon were here on expired visas. This situation is only now being addressed because prior to 9/11 anyone who discussed America’s lax immigration controls was immediately labeled a Nazi. Under the protective cover of multiculturalist policies, enemy nations and terrorist organizations have been allowed — and in some cases, encouraged — to openly install fifth columns in the heart of western democracies.

After the September 11th attack, a group of Muslim demonstrators held an anti-American rally in Luton, England. When asked if they considered themselves traitors, they declared that they were not British Muslims, but Muslims living in Britain, and that their allegiance was to Islam, not “Britain’s infidel government.”

Idiots like this may only represent a tiny portion of the Muslim population, but the fact is that nobody actually knows because anyone who raises the question risks being labeled “intolerant.” And don’t even suggest that the protestors were assholes who should’ve been deported or thrown in jail. The same people who tell us that it is imperative to scour the intimate details of college professors’ personal lives for signs of sexism, racism, or homophobia insist that any attempt to investigate Muslim extremists or enforce existing immigration laws is a violation of human rights and proof that we are living in a police state.

This so-called tolerance has brought us to the point where a man who tells a woman she has pretty legs can lose his job and be dragged in front of a kangaroo court, but a terrorist sympathizer who declares that America got what it deserved on 9/11 must have his right to free speech defended. It’s time that we bid adieu to this ludicrous state of affairs and embraced the angry, purifying power of hate.

The fact is that throughout history, hate has been the impetus by which people have overcome the inertia of fear. From the Boston Tea Party, to the suffrage movement, to the fight for civil rights, progressive change has only come when people hated the status quo enough to actually do something about it.

Hate is even a factor in the supposedly super-rational world of science. Journalist Charles Cross once estimated that 90 percent of scientific discoveries are made by stubborn and prejudiced researchers whose primary motivation is the desire to humiliate their competitors. In a 1983 article, he wrote: “The entire scientific community seems based on hate, on a bitter and stubborn desire to win the argument.” He also noted that scientists regularly refer to each other as “sons of bitches” and talk about “nailing those bastards (their competitors) to the wall.”

It seems that wherever hate is allowed to flourish, truth and justice will eventually prevail. Take the case of Mr. Death, a.k.a. Fred A. Leutcher Jr., one of the world’s most influential holocaust deniers. Rather than being censored, Mr. Leutcher was encouraged to expound on his theories and debate them in an open forum. Motivated by hatred of Mr. Leutcher and his hateful ideas, researchers embarked on an intensive re-examination of the facts. This closer study led to the discovery of important new evidence that established once and for all the horrible realities of the holocaust, and in the process, actually increased people’s awareness of the atrocities.

Clearly, hate does a lot more good than its supposed counterpart. The warm and fuzzy stupidity of “tolerance” is a refuge for dull-witted bullies too lazy to think for themselves, or too cowardly to call a spade a spade. Rather than trying to twist the speech of all the unbelievers, it’s time we embraced our inherent hatred. The Clash said, “Let fury have the hour. Anger can be power. You know that you can use it.” All we know is we hate people that hate hate and we have no tolerance for the intolerance of intolerance.

By: GAVIN MCINNES
The above article was published by Vice Magazine.
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