I’ll never forget the moment, in one of the 2015 Republican primary debates, when Donald Trump looked into the camera and declared that destroying political correctness was his No 1 campaign issue. His fans went berserk, both in the crowd and, especially, online. Oh my God, I thought, even then. He’s courting the troll vote.

Sure enough, over the subsequent year, I watched as wildly disparate groups of men from the slimiest corners of the internet – anti-feminists, antisemites, anti-choicers, white nationalists, gun fetishists, Islamophobes, rightwing talk-radio toadies, garden-variety good old boys – coalesced into one sprawling, frothing hydra behind Donald Trump. When mainstream news outlets started churning out thinkpieces about the mysterious “alt-right”, the wicked green engine of Trump’s base, I wanted to scream.

Feminists and other social justice activists already know what the “alt-right” is – it’s a roll call of the angry men who’ve been stalking, harassing, abusing and trying to silence us for years. The only thing they have in common is a fixation on the spectre of “political correctness”, a vaguely pejorative catch-all for post-Martin Luther King social activism, and in Trump they found their champion: the alpha male who was finally going to give these bitches what they deserve. (I can’t adequately convey how sickening it has been to watch groups of men who have posted my home address online, dug up photos of my husband and children, and threatened to rape and murder me lie and steamroll their candidate to the presidency.)

For 18 excruciating months, we were expected to entertain the fantasy that a person could vote for Trump without voting for racism, for xenophobia, for rape culture – when that campaign’s very slogan vowed to drag us backward to a time when the US was “great”, a time before people of colour and women and LGBTQ Americans had inked, in blood, our few hard-won protections into law. It’s gaslighting on a galactic scale.

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I know that “alt-right” seems like a shiny new buzzword, but Trump didn’t win the election because of new ideas; he won because of old ideas. Call it whatever you like – activism, social justice, basic respect and decency – but “political correctness” is our dissent, our watch keeping those old ideas (barely) at bay, our avowal that our humanity matters as much as white men’s, our insistence that you cannot simply erase the line between racist actions and racism, our hope for building a more inclusive future.

The Ku Klux Klan is planning a “victory parade” in North Carolina next month. Hate crimes are at their highest since 9/11. More than a dozen women have accused the president elect of sexual assault.

This week, I had to listen to supposedly reasonable, leftist men – not trolls this time – insist that Trump’s victory was at least partially a result of “divisiveness” and “incivility” and “political correctness gone too far”. This is the consequence of “confrontational movements”, one man told me on Twitter. There’s always a backlash. “Learn from this,” he admonished. As though any social-justice movement in history got anywhere by asking politely and taking a seat. As though there was some magical moment in the semi-recent past when we’d reached a perfect stasis – no racism, no sexism and white dudes could still have a chill time – but those greedy feminists just had to keep pushing.

There is no such thing as a non-confrontational social movement. A non-confrontational movement is acquiescence. A non-confrontational movement is not a movement at all. It is stillness. It is the status quo. The Trump campaign counted on that stillness – on the unfashionableness of being a bleeding-heart dork – to give hate speech and sexual assault the space to grow and normalise. What if you’d validated us instead of them, helped us normalise firm boundaries against oppression instead of letting century-old hierarchies reassert themselves?

Political correctness is the backlash. Blaming political correctness for President Trump is like blaming the civil rights movement for Jim Crow, or feminism for rape culture, or Stonewall for anti-gay hate crimes. It’s every battered wife who has been murdered by her husband when she tries to leave. It’s “I wouldn’t have to hurt you if you’d just behave.” It’s a disingenuous rationalisation peddled by people who know they did nothing to help when Trump’s Voltron of hate was gathering steam and are suddenly terrified because the stock market is crashing. Oh, now you’re afraid? Now you’re angry? Welcome. You’re late. You spent eight years obsessing over college students’ opinions on standup comedy and now a racist clown is president.



Trump is a man who believes in registering Muslims, restraining black protesters with violence, building a wall on the Mexican border and non-consensually grabbing women by the genitals – and you don’t think he has a vested interest in tamping down the dissent of Muslims, black people, immigrants and women? He is institutional silencing personified. Are you sure political correctness went too far? Are you sure we were overreacting?

And what do you actually want us to do on a practical, day-to-day level? Shrug at blackface when black churches are burning? Accept being misgendered when trans women of colour are murdered at staggering rates? Smile at catcallers when only 3% of rapists in the US are ever punished? Never defend our boundaries until they shrink down and garrote us? It’s not an option. Political correctness is not voluntary; it’s survival.

If you consider yourself a good progressive, but you spent the past eight years parroting the troll party line and tittering at the silly activists – mocking us, baiting us, treating us like children, eroding our credibility – and now you’re pointing at black people, Muslims, rape victims, immigrants and everyone else who is petrified for their lives under a Trump regime, and insisting that we brought this on ourselves by fighting too hard, then screw you. You didn’t fight at all. And you will suffer the least.