Last night, Billy Corgan was on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ InfoWars.com radio show to chat about conspiracies and things—you know, like you do. Their conversation spanned a plethora of topics, including President Obama being in bed with tech companies, mind control, clickbait, and (you guessed it) social justice warriors. After a long, drawn-out conversation about how Apple and other tech companies control news and media “thanks to News apps,” they break into the “social justice warrior” conversation.
According to Jones, social justice warriors are “young victims who are brought up” by a certain kind of culture. He cites ambiguous statistics saying that they show “lower IQs, lower brain activity,” who “scream at reporters, ‘You hate me because I’m a [transgender slur].'” He goes on to say that “it’s just a made up thing in their head, and we don’t hate them.” Of course, right after that, he asks Corgan, “How do you transcend this, because sometimes I get mad and want to punch them in the nose.” Y’know. Punching people. Because you don’t hate them.
Corgan calls them Maoists, saying that “you’re not going to get them back. It’s a cult.” He then goes on to talk about how he’s worried “the cult” is going to come and get him because he’s going to say “the wrong thing on the wrong day because I was tired… You know what I mean? It’s like, to live like that, to live where every word is a landmine—you know what I’m saying—it’s not the world I want to live in.” The conversation kind of devolves from there, up until the point at which Jones shares an analogy, comparing social justice warriors to the Ku Klux Klan. He says:
… they just spit in our reporter’s face and spit on somebody else just because they just wanna hate somebody and they are literally like a dumb Klan guy that just pulls over on some black guy walking home from work and kills him ’cause they’re black. They want to just project something onto you.
And, stepping on one of those proverbial conversational landmines he mentioned, he stretches the analogy further, expanding upon it.
If we could transport back to, you know, a much, much more racist–I’m not saying America doesn’t have a racist bent, so let’s put that out there to start with, but let’s go back to a time where racism was accepted, it was institutionalized. OK? If you could go back to Selma 1932, and the Klan member spitting in some person of color’s face, don’t you think that guy thought he was right, too?
Jones agrees, and Corgan tacks on, saying, “OK. So how is this any different?”
Literally what. Where to even start?
Trying to equate the hatred dished out by the KKK over decades of racist history with “social justice warriors” doesn’t compute. Bringing up an example of a supposed “social justice warrior” (I can only ever really write that with quotes) spitting in the face of a reporter does not put them on the level of a member of an organization that carried out literal lynchings. Equating social justice with bigotry is just straight up ridiculous.
You can check out a bit of the interview for yourself right here or you can brave the InfoWars.com website to watch the whole thing in full. Good luck.
(via Pitchfork, image via screenshot from The Alex Jones Channel)
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