START HERE: Compulsory "Don't Hurt Me"

This is what I have to say so that they don't cancel me for writing this.

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This is longer than most future additions to this saga will be, but that’s by necessity. It’s the foundation.

I promise I’ll make you read less next time.

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PLEASE DON’T HURT ME!

I don’t care if people are Jewish.

I don’t care if people are Black.

I don’t care if people are gay or trans or any of the other things.

I’m an individualist.

I don’t care what group you’re a part of based on your immutable characteristics.

All I care about is how you show up as a person, and what principles your behaviors tell me you follow (if any at all).

And it seems absurd for me to start this project by saying that, but here we are…a waving of my hands to protect myself and beg PLEASE DON’T HURT ME before this project even really begins.

People don’t even know what I’m going to say in the course of this journey, but they’ll want to burn me for it anyway.

And most of the people who will come for my head will do so before even reading and considering the contents that lay within.

Because I, your humble narrator, am focusing my attention on the most canceled of all protagonists: Nick Fuentes.

That’s how fucked up cancel culture has become: You’re instantly guilty of any crimes that are perceived to have been committed by a person simply by uttering their name.

I don’t know Nick Fuentes.

I’ve never spoken with him apart from a few tweets, bantering back and forth for fun about nothing of any great societal importance.

But, like everyone, I know OF Nick Fuentes.

He’s that neo-nazi white supremacist, he who must not be named, and certainly never supported or cut any slack.

And I haven’t always been kind to him.

I’ve done streams about him to pick apart and denounce his beliefs as completely antithetical to my own and use him as an example of the worst, toxic elements of the political right.

I’ve laughed when people whom he had aligned with turned on him, thinking he was really stupid to align with them in the first place and, therefore, got what he deserved.

I’ve called him gay more times than I can count on my fingers and my toes, declaring that he wants a dick in the ass more than any obviously repressed man I’ve ever seen in my life.

And there’s a part of me that feels badly about some of that…even though I know admitting that regret publicly will make me guilty of the ultimate heretical crime: Sympathy for the person who became the most canceled man in America before he was old enough to buy a beer.

We’re not supposed to have sympathy or empathy for Nick Fuentes.

It’s ok for him to be a punching bag, the person you can call any name, spread any lie about, and people will believe it.

If you’re a barista at a Starbucks he walks into to order a Pumpkin Spice Latte, it’s ok for you to spit in his coffee. If you serve him in a restaurant, it’s ok to piss in his food.

Everyone else gets to come back on Twitter…but no, not him.

Everyone else gets to be comfortable on the platforms that claim to stand for free speech…but no, not him.

He’s 25 years old (as of this writing) and we’re supposed to view him as the ultimate evil, the permanently outcast man.

We’re not supposed to talk about him.

We’re not supposed to talk to him.

We’re not supposed to ask him for his side of things.

We’re not supposed to listen to him.

He is to be permanently and forever excommunicated from society, and if you violate those rules, you get tossed out with him.

Why?

Let’s be honest: Nick brings some of it on himself.

Ok, he brings on a lot of it himself.

He’s intentionally provocative, intentionally inflammatory.

He’s a virgin, he has to get off on something.

So, he gets off on saying the things he knows will make people come for his head, just to make a point about the things that cannot be said.

What’s that quote?

“To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you can’t criticize.”

You know who said that, right?

Nick criticizes a lot of people who can’t be criticized.

But why can’t they be criticized?

And Nick he does have beliefs that many will find offensive.

Cookies, anyone?

But since when do we unperson someone for believing crazy things?

If the things he believes are really unhinged from reality, can’t they be easily disproven?

And if you don’t care to make an effort to disprove them, why can’t you just let it go?

Either way, why aren’t we allowed to talk about them?

Why do conversations about them have to be restricted to backchannels with all the people who secretly agree with you, but would never say so publicly for fear of being canceled?

If the ideas are so bad, then why can’t reason simply disprove them?

Are we really mandating that no one is allowed to exist in polite society if they believe anything that someone else finds offensive?

And why is the line drawn where it is? Who decides? Why can’t we simply choose not to engage with each other if agreement is that important?

Do we really need validation that badly from everyone that we have to unperson anyone who challenges our perception of the world?

Is the cognitive dissonance from finding out you were lied to by everyone you trusted really that bad?

And if we’re going to be honest about how Nick brings some of this on himself, can we please also be honest and say there are way worse people than Nick on the internet, and they don’t get half the backlash he does?

I’m not a Groyper and never will be (I’m far too female and far too Millennial for that).

I disagree with so many of his positions that it hurts.

And I’ll have to say that over, and over, and over again for daring to laugh at his jokes because if I don’t, I may lose my payment processor.

I’ll bend the knee and say “yeah, I think 6 million Jews died and I swear I’ll never talk about all the other groups who died too because I know they’re just not as important,” if it means I get to keep my bank account.

That may not even be enough anymore. If I don’t call for the Palestinians to be genocided, I can’t be allowed to get on an airplane.

I disagree with so many of Nick’s positions…but can we at least be honest and say there are more reasons that Nick is taking the brunt of it other than his crazy opinions?

Nick is the protagonist. I’m the narrator.

There’s a reason I’m calling this site “Nick & I.”

Like I said before, I don’t know him, and he’s not involved in this at all (at least, not yet).

But I’ll bet most of the people who demand we unperson Nick Fuentes have never really listened to him.

And I get that.

Because most of the people who hate me and have tried to destroy my life haven’t listened to me either.

Why would they? Their goal isn’t to understand you…it’s to silence you.

That’s the game the internet plays.

Games of power to see who can outlast the others, with the people who should be on your team being your fiercest enemies.

Last year at this time, I wrote a book about this bitch who led a cancel mob against me for years.

She and her friends really fucked up my life, and my work, and the lives of people I love very much. And she did it because she’s part personality disorder, part jealous influencer wannabe who is still shilling the same pathetic story today that she was four years ago.

No growth, that tells you a lot.

The reason I wrote the book is because there wasn’t a single day that went by for years that I wasn’t confronted with bullshit rumors she spread about me with the help of her mob, and I had to have something I could give people to show them she was psychotic.

Things got a lot better after I wrote the book. She finally started to leave me alone, because she knew I was documenting everything.

I got things back on track and, though I still get called a pedophile all the time (not true, BTW, I hate kids, please keep them away from me) and though my husband also gets accused of being a pedophile all the time (also not true, and really hurtful), and though I will never live down staying loyal to my college boyfriend (that’s the price you pay when a friend gets railroaded by the government for something they didn’t do)….even with all these things I’m in a better place now than I ever had been.

(Read the book if you have questions about the above.)

I’ve finally been able to come up for air. And when you get through the storm, you see the world in a new way.

Kind of like you’re far above it, because you’ve lived through an experience that most people will never understand.

It’s something that would make most people curl up into the fetal position in the corner of their room and wimper if they went through a small slice of what you did.

You look at things as though you are above it, because you are above it.

You earned that.

Enter Nick.

I just wanted to listen to someone who would say something that would surprise me.

I didn’t want to listen to bitches saying cruel things because they think cruelty is edgy, or listen to real edgelords pretending to be intellectuals. Or listen to Tim Pool say whatever talking points the conservatives who think they’re libertarian (but aren’t) would superchat him to hear.

The “smart” people are equally dull because the “smart” people on the internet are the ones smart enough to know that saying anything outside of the Overton window is bad for branding. They stick to the script and pick up their paycheck. They have too much to lose to risk saying anything that might offend someone.

But there is one person on the internet who can say whatever he wants to, without reservation, and that’s the guy who ended up getting canceled so badly that he had to build his own streaming platform to have his voice.

The fact that he ended up having a crush on me was a surprise.

Regardless, over the last month and a half, as I started to really listen to Nick Fuentes for the first time in my life - not to dunk on him or use him as a scapegoat, but really listen to him.

I listened to him in the same way that I listen to hardcore Socialists for hours every single week - to understand who they are, what they believe, and what they’re doing and to be able to explain it back to them in a way they would agree with it.

As I started listening…really listening…I started to understand what’s happened to him.

And I saw too many parallels with what happened to me.

I recognized the things people were doing to get him, because they had done the same thing to me (but on a much smaller scale).

Once you see the pattern and you understand how the mob works, you can’t unsee it, and the mob is predictable. They only know so many tricks, and they repeat those tricks in different variations, over and over again.

I don’t think you really understand what cancel culture is until you get your life fucked up by it.

And the longer your life gets fucked up by it, the more you understand the depths that human beings will go to in their obsession to silence you.

Or just to feed their obsession with you, because the people who live to hate you really can’t live without you.

You also understand how little you can do to stop it, and get put into a position of helplessness that will only be balanced by you becoming a control freak in ways you never knew you could be.

You stop trusting people.

Because you don’t trust anyone and don’t let anyone in to help (not really), you start surrounding yourself with untrustworthy people who only confirm your perception of the world. They keep proving you right - they are untrustworthy.

The difference between Nick and I is that it happened to Nick before he was old enough to rent a car, and it happened to him on a much more massive scale than it happened to me.

The pattern is the same, no matter who is getting canceled.

It repeats itself over and over and over again.

And it does constantly with Nick…because he’s the one that keeps getting knocked down, and then gets up and comes back to get hit again.

That’s why our protagonist has to be Nick Fuentes: He is the lightning rod.

He’s the epicenter of what cancel culture is, the standard by which all other cancelations are measured.

The man who, no matter how many pounds of bricks they drop on his head, just won’t shut up and go away.

But even though Nick is the protagonist, I’m the narrator…and this is still my story.

I want to give my take on what’s happened to Nick, and what we can see happen in front of us every day, and wave my own observations throughout it to have an honest discussion about what cancel culture really is.

The real stuff.

If I’m going to tackle a long-form project about the reality of cancel culture, I don’t want to talk about the same old, played-out, Douglas Murray, Dave Rubin, Eric and Bret Weinstein, intellectual dark web bullshit.

All of them turned out to be fucking frauds anyway.

Today, the same people who made millions of dollars railing against cancel culture just a few weeks ago are the biggest proponents of it.

I want to show how the people who pretend to be against it are the biggest hypocrites of them all.

They never cared about ending cancel culture…they just didn’t want to be the ones who were canceled.

If we’re doomed anyway, we might as well say what we want in the slow decline.

Free speech does not exist in a world where you will be unpersoned for using it.

I think the time is right to have this discussion in a serious way.

October 7, 2023 changed everything.

Alliances were upended, “free speech advocates” showed their true colors, and suddenly, everyone saw the world differently.

We saw what people really cared about, what their values really were.

And people started publicly questioning why there were things we couldn’t talk about.

I’ve always been a contrarian.

Tell me I’m not allowed to talk to someone, and they’ll be the person I want to talk to.

Tell me I’m not allowed to have empathy for someone, and they’re the person I’ll have empathy for.

And because we’re not supposed to see Nick Fuentes as human, I suppose that’s one of the reasons I do.

This is not a project about Nick Fuentes. This is about cancel culture.

It really pisses me off that I feel compelled to start this entire project off with a post specifically saying “I don’t agree with everything the guy says and does” for daring to use him as the protagonist in a work that isn’t even about him.

But that’s the way it goes.

So, with that out of the way, we’re going to do some subversive shit here.

And if people want to cry about it, we’ll use them as examples.

Follow along.

I promise I’ll make you read less next time.