Oh my god, this book is hilarious. It is also kind of sad, because even though it is satire, I’ve seen a lot of this on sites like Tumblr and Democratic Underground. There are people who talk like Blue Jade, Darius, Ally, O-O and Jacob Chu.
Hulbert grew up in an ordinary home, and he is a total mama’s boy. His father hit him once, and he thinks he’s a victim of severe child abuse. His mother indulges him and spoils him, even going so far as to buy him a $300 microscope after his father clearly said they couldn’t afford it. His father leaves the family for good, and Hulbert eventually leaves home for college. He, of course, is terrified of being out in the world without his enabling mother, who ‘protects’ him from all the bad feels in life.
But when he gets to Banksey University, he sees that he needn’t have worried. Campus is full of spoiled, coddled wannabe victims such as himself, and he changes his name to Blue Jade (it is not masculine and gender neutral) to better fit in.
He meets the following: Darius, an angry black guy who had an upper middle-class upbringing; a gender-whatever chick named O-O, Jacob Chu, an angry Asian guy, Ally, a slutty feminist who accuses almost every guy of rape, and the leader of their group, Ms. Earthlover. Together they aim to make Banksey University a more inclusive, diverse and tolerant place.
Of course, if you are a conservative or libertarian, you know where this is going. The group dubs themselves the Vigilance Committee, and they even come up with their own logo – the All-Seeing Eye of Progress. They make it their mission to stamp out micro aggressions and punish anyone that isn’t sufficiently diverse and tolerant enough. Anyone that doesn’t meet their lofty standards gets their picture on the Wall of Exposure – a bulletin board in their meeting space full of the photos of the people who they’ve slandered, censored and harassed.
Their first victim is their English professor, then a black guy named Bryan Jones, who absolutely refuses to censor himself for their approval and comfort, noted activist and historical figure Frederick Douglass and finally the Dean of Students, Roger Snarley, who, throughout the story, had bent over backwards to accommodate the Vigilance Committee.
I don’t want to spoil it any further. It is really funny, because the character and their antics are so over the top, but if you regularly read conservative blogs, you know that a great deal of this stuff is true. Liberals, or progressives, or whatever they’re calling themselves this week, actually talk like this. They’re really like this, and they’ve left a trail of destruction in their wake.
Some of the things that made me laugh: the repeated use of ‘intolerant asshole cunt’, the favorite words of many idiot libtards, and the convoluted euphemisms used to describe Asians (people whose ethnocultural heritage originates east of the Turkish Straights and the Caucasus and Ural Mountains), Hispanics (people of South American, Central American or in some cases Caribbean provenance), Arabs (people whose ethnocultural heritage originates between the Sinai Peninsula and Rajasthan and south of Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and the Caspian Sea), and of course, black people (People of Color).
The ending is sad, though, but not surprising. I fully expect something like that to happen at the hands of the demented social justice warriors.
I caught a couple of misspellings, one incorrectly used word, and the spelling of Bryan Jones’s name kept shifting between Bryan and Brian (in the last chapter anyway). Everything else was fine, though.
Finally, a funny book savagely mocking the progressives. I highly recommend it.
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