I have suspected for some time now that my chud brother has been radicalized by the alt-right. Naturally I assumed InfoWars and 4chan were to blame, but my suspicions were aroused even further when he made a comment about some old Roald Dahl books being updated for a modern audience. About time, too! When I told my big (read: bigot) brother to stop crying over progress, he yelled back that this was all part of the “on-going culture war” and that I supported censorship (no arguments there!).
His baseless claim (read: conspiracy theory) that we are currently engaged in a “culture war” is utterly preposterous and should be dismissed as transphobic trash. What we have are marginalized LGBTQIAP+, BIPOC and Latinx folx just fighting to be seen and heard, while a tiny but extremely dangerous fringe-minority of white supremacists and bigoted chuds relentlessly attack us for no reason other than racism, transphobia and sexism.
With all that said, comrades, if we are to gain any ground in this imaginary but totally one-sided conflict we must use all the tools at our disposal to defeat and expose the enemy. We must gain an intimate knowledge of our oppressors. With this noble mission in mind, I decided to perform some reconnaissance of my own by infiltrating my chud brother Kyle’s bedroom the next time he was out spreading Covid with his friends.
foreign body research
After a week of waiting around, Kyle finally emerged from his bedroom, his right bicep visibly throbbing from what must have been a monster marathon masturbation session. I waited for the front door to slam downstairs before approaching his lair of hate. I was stylishly dressed in an official AntifaTM balaclava (thanks Amazon.com!), medical gloves and several N-95’s to avoid contracting any of his filthy germs or testosterone. (Check my insta for pics.) With much trepidation, I creaked open his door and flicked on the light.
I let out a muffled gasp of disgust. A teetering mountain of cummy tissues and crumpled Monster Energy drink cans were piled precariously next to his computer. Like some sort of monument to White Supremacy. His monitor was still on. Sixty nine search tabs were open; all porn related, apart from a 4chan /pol/ thread about Jewish people faking the pandemic, a Hogwarts Legacy stream and a Rumble video about Mars being both hallow and flat.
Clearly this was all a not so clever smokescreen designed to stymy my investigation and hide his nefarious novels. I shook my head and carefully made my way towards his book shelf, extremely conscious of the Covid particles floating around the room that were almost visible to the naked eye.
Squinting through my trade mark balaclava and fogged-up face shield from the Dollar Store, I scanned his book shelf for the kind of disgusting alt-right material bigots like him would no doubt use to brainwash children with. Hoisting my organic fair trade burlap sack, I confiscated as evidence his Harry Potter omnibus, my flesh sizzling at the mere touch of it, and began the odious task of collecting the other far-right titles I vaguely knew of (“1984”, “Brave New World”, “Fahrenheit 451”, “The Canterbury Tales”, etc.). I bundled them all into my sack and turned on my heel, only to come face to face with my brother standing there, stroking a hard cover copy of Macbeth with a sly grin on his maskless face.
BOOKCASE, HEADCASE
“I fucking knew it,” he literally screamed at the top of his lungs as I attempted to humbly explain myself and my noble deeds.
As he approached me with the book that reeked of moldy toxic masculinity I ducked and squealed, scurrying my way past him to the hall, down the stairs and back into the safety of my basement saferoom. I wasn’t going to wait around and explain to his porn-addled bio terrorist what my intentions were. This was his step-sis intruder fantasy come true; there was a 50/50 chance he’d either try to impregnate or kill me. And besides, I had a lot of reading to do.
I spent the entire night skimming through his books, my faithful vomit bucket beside me and my heckin’ allies from the Trans Army Facebook group providing moral support through affirming messages and dick pics. Some of the braver souls even read along with me. When I finished, my stomach was empty, the bucket was full, and over half of our impromptu book club had posted disturbing, worrying sign-off messages or had just gone completely silent. Some of them even started posting stuff on Facebook shortly after about something called ‘Red Pilling’ and how we were living in a dystopian surveillance state. The books had brainwashed xem!!
The backwards, right-wing messages and themes prevalent in literally every book I had swiped from Kyle are extremely distressing, and the thought that Republicunts might force this kind of material on impressionable young kids fills me with horror. The complete lack of BIPOC and LGBTQIAP+ representation also sends a message to children belonging to those groups that they don’t exist, and if they believe that hard enough they will simply cease to and disappear from reality in a puff of existential dread.
THE GOOD WORD, (READ: THE ALT-RIGHT WORD)
I mean, have you ever wondered what kind of literature the far-right fascists in Florida (who want to control what your possibly gender queer child consumes) enjoy in their spare time? Assuming of course they’re even able to read in the first place. If not, well, you should be deeply concerned. Soon, these bigots will be ransacking school libraries and replacing LGBTQIAP+ child friendly books like “The Horny Caterpillar” and “Gender Curious George” with right-wing propaganda like “Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal” and “The Bible”.
The so-called works of classical literature may be used to further anti-lockdown, anti-vax and anti-mask agendas. Conspiracy theorists may invoke these outdated and problematic tomes to make baseless comparisons between real world events and the fictional stories told in these racist relics. The whole thing is super Orwellian. Reading 1984 is literally 1984, and that’s why I applaud the efforts made by the UK counter-terrorism program that is monitoring folx who buy up this kind of literary extremism.
Efforts to rewrite and update these books to make them more palatable and suitable for a modern audience may be an insurmountable task, given the widespread backlash Puffin books received for their valiant and virtuous reimaginings of Roald Dahl’s deeply problematic works. I propose that these products from a bygone era simply be gathered up and tossed on a bonfire. Let’s rid the world of their evil. To quote the subversive literary masterpiece that is ‘The Last Jedi’ script and sticker book: “Let the past burn, kill it if you have to.”
