by CJ Hopkins, Off Guardian:
OK, this one is for all the professional “sensitivity editors” out there, and for the US Department of Homeland Security, and President Donald Trump, and the European Union censors, and all the other self-appointed Speech Police that have been goose-stepping around dictating what everyone can and can’t say and publish and think all the time like a bunch of sanctimonious little fascists.
If you’re easily offended, you’ll probably want to skip this one.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
This isn’t the column I was planning to write. I was going to write an insufferably pompous and crushingly boring column about “the state of the publishing industry” and “contemporary literature,” and all that crap, but then a number of recent events intervened and forced me to change my plan.
I was planning to publish that insufferably pompous and crushingly boring column about the publishing industry and literature, and so on, because I’ve got a couple of new books coming out soon.
The first one, Fear and Loathing in the New Normal Reich, will be published by Skyhorse Publishing in April. The other one is a new edition of my dystopian novel, Zone 23, which will be published by Arcade Publishing in July.
Skyhorse Publishing, launched in 2006 by Tony Lyons, is one of the fastest-growing independent book publishers in the United States. The company has published 112 New York Times bestsellers. Arcade Publishing is an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing. Their official motto is “Something to Offend Everyone.”
As you can probably guess from the fact that they are publishing two of my books, Skyhorse Publishing and Arcade Publishing do not employ “sensitivity editors” or otherwise attempt to sanitize the writing of the authors they publish. “Sensitivity editing” is just another example of the censorship, “visibility filtering,” and other forms of speech policing that has become normalized in recent years. If you’re not familiar with “sensitivity editing,” I published a column about it in 2023 after Puffin Books—an imprint of Penguin Random House—unleashed their “sensitivity editors” on Roald Dahl’s books.
Anyway, I decided not to write that crushingly boring column about the publishing industry, the “big five” publishers that mostly decide what everyone reads, and the state of contemporary literature, and so on, because I have really had it with all the censorship, and sensitivity editing, and speech policing, and the crackdown on political dissent, and the abrogation of what remains of our democratic rights.
The Department of Homeland Security’s recent arrest and planned deportation of Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian activist and Columbia University grad-student, who the Trump administration has accused, not of any actual crime, but, rather, of “terrorist-aligned” speech, and Trump’s fascistic tweets that followed, and people’s rationalizations of this latest example of the new, nascent form of totalitarianism I have been writing and warning about, was just … well, I felt that something a little more relevant than an insufferably pompous and mind-numbingly boring column about the publishing industry and literature was in order.
So here goes.
* * *
An Open Letter to the United States Department of Homeland Security, the European Union Thought Police, the Sensitivity Editing Community, the Anti-Defamation League, the Anti-Zionist Inquisition, the Visibility-Filtering Department of Free-Speech X, the German Anti-Meme Police, the UK’s Ministry of Defense Against Potentially Harmful Silent Prayer, the Terminally Woke, the Covidian Cult, the Musk Cult, the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, the Federal Bureau of Mandatory Pronoun Usage, the International Society of Anus-Clenching Control Freaks, the National Association for the Advancement of Humorless People, et al.
Dear Sir or Madam (or whatever the fuck you’re calling yourself these days),
I am writing to bring to your attention some rather disturbing thoughts I have been having recently, which I assume you will want to log in whatever paranoid database you maintain to keep track of convicted thoughtcriminals like me.
These thoughts have to do with my views, which I’m afraid have become misaligned.
Dangerously misaligned.
