The Speech Police

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.

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.

Now, I want to stress that I am not in any way a danger to myself or others. But I am concerned that some of my views might be.

Specifically, I’m afraid that my views might be “adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States of America,” and might also threaten to “delegitimize the democratic state” in which I reside, i.e., the Federal Republic of Germany, and other member states of the European Union, and … well, the whole of humanity itself.

For example, terrorism. I’m a big fan of terrorism. My views are definitely “aligned” with terrorism. The wanton mass murder of innocent civilians. Hijackings. Suicide bombings. Beheadings. Assassinations. That kind of thing.

Also, racism, and anti-Semitism, and assorted other forms of bigotry. My views are “aligned” with that stuff as well. Hatred, generally. The more hatred the better, and not just hatred of marginalized groups like fags, trannies, jungle bunnies, wetbacks, hymies, ragheads, gooks, retards, fatsos, midgets, and other protected persons, also hatred of normal heterosexual white people, most of whom are inbred crackers like that banjo kid in the movie Deliverance.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not a bigot, or a racist, or a virulent anti-Semite myself. If you don’t believe me, just ask my good friend, Shaniqua. Shaniqua is a Black Jewish transgender woman who has been actively campaigning to wipe Israel off the face of the earth for years, and a personal friend of mine. Just the other day, as Shaniqua was fucking me in the ass wearing nothing but a gigantic Hamas flag—i.e., wearing it tied around her neck like a superhero cape—as I blasphemed the Prophet Muhammad and Jesus Christ in my best imitation of the voice of William S. Burroughs, who shot his wife in the head, while a video loop of Elon Musk doing a Hitler salute played on the massive plasma TV that a Ukrainian Nazi friend of mine stole from a stock broker he sells snuff films to, she says to me (i.e., Shaniqua does, not my Ukrainian Nazi friend), she says, “C. J., you’re probably the least bigoted piece of white-trash I have ever been personal friends with.”

So don’t even think of trying that “C. J. is a racist and an anti-Semite” crap in my BTL comments, or I’ll sic Shaniqua and my Jew lawyers on you.

Oh, and, speaking of wiping people and nation-states off the face of the earth. There’s another one of my views that I am afraid is probably “adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States of America” and might threaten to “delegitimize the democratic state” of Germany, or whatever.

Yes, that’s right, genocide. I am pro-genocide. Terrorist genocide is best, but any kind of genocide is OK with me. Like how the Europeans genocided the Native Americans, or how the Nazis genocided the Jews, or how Israel is genociding the Palestinians, or, gosh, there are just so many examples throughout our history, the British empire, the Ottoman empire, the Soviet Union, the Khmer Rouge, Darfur, the Rwandan genocide, Bangladesh, the Albigensian Crusade, the Tesla auto dealership genocide, and so on.

Of course I would never myself engage in any acts of terrorism, or genocide, or racist behavior, or financially or otherwise materially support any such acts, or any persons, groups, nation-states, global corporations, or other entities, that engage in such acts.

That said, my views are my views (unless I’m lying), and they are bad, and wrong, and offensive, and potentially harmful, and I’ve just published them on a public platform. Clearly, something needs to be done about that. Something ridiculously over-the-top authoritarian, like arresting and renditioning me to some hellhole in the deep South, and then deporting me to … well, somewhere (we’ll address that shortly). Because we can’t have terrorist-aligned political satirists who are already convicted hate criminals running around being adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States of America, and threatening to delegitimize the democratic state of Germany, and stochastically terrorizing anti-Zionist African-American transgender persons, and calling the Gulf of America the “Gulf of Mexico” (which, I confess, I have also been doing), can we?

OK, the deportation thing could get a bit tricky in my case. The Trump administration can’t deport me because I don’t live in the USA. I live here in Germany. I suppose they could get Germany to deport me back to the USA, rendition me down to that hellhole in the deep South where they sent Khalil, and then try to deport me back to Germany, where I have already been convicted of Thought Crimes and am awaiting sentencing, and then Germany could re-deport me to, I don’t know, wherever the AfD is planning to mass deport all the non-Aryans to.

I’ll leave that to President Trump, Vice President Vance, Secretary of State Rubio, and Minister of Propaganda Musk, or whatever his title is these days, to work out.

In the meantime, if you’re a member of the Sensitivity Editing Community, or are one of the other “woke” fanatics that helped usher the new totalitarianism into being over the course of the last ten years, and who are now hypocritically excoriating the Trump administration for doing exactly what you did, just in a more ham-fisted fashion, well, I suppose you can try to “cancel” me, but that might also get a bit tricky.

You already got me convicted as a “hate criminal” for tweeting the cover art of one of my books, so you can’t really damage my reputation and income much more than you have. And I have been blacklisted by my former friends and colleagues in the theater and literary communities since I challenged the official Covid narrative in 2020. So I don’t really have much more to lose at this point, professionally. I suppose you could attempt to pressure Skyhorse Publishing and Arcade Publishing into cancelling the forthcoming publication of my next two books and issuing some kind of pussy-assed press release regarding what a horrible, Covid-denying, far-right-anti-vax-extremist-aligned, disinformation-disseminating hate-criminal I am.

Good luck with that!

Oh, and, thanks again for making a mockery of the rule of law and democratic rights and principles like freedom of speech and the press, and demonizing, deplatforming, and censoring anyone who challenged your official propaganda and ridiculous woke ideological horseshit over the last ten years, and otherwise giving the Trump regime carte fucking blanche to go full-fascist and justify their actions with the “dangerous,” “harmful,” and “extremist-aligned” speech arguments you pioneered.

Well done, you fucking idiots!

Best wishes and kindest personal regards,
CJ Hopkins

CJ Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing and Broadway Play Publishing, Inc. His dystopian novel, Zone 23, is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. Volumes I and II of his Consent Factory Essays are published by Consent Factory Publishing, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amalgamated Content, Inc. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org.

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