May 31, 2005

South Park Conservatives: Is This New Anti-Left Trend Right?

By Gavin McInnes

As a self-proclaimed “guy who knows things about trends” I could not agree more with Michelle Malkin and Bryanna Bevens. South Park Conservatives are not conservatives at all. They are simply well-informed Gen-Xers who are not slaves to either end of the political spectrum’s dogma.

To understand, why one needs to go back merely one generation.

The Baby Boomers started out self-obsessed and smug and decided at a very early age they were going to be better than their parents. They were going to abolish racism and institute a strict regimen of looking for love and feeling groovy. They thought their parents were infected with dogmatic labels like Catholic and Protestant and life’s too cool for that. It’s time for change.

Instead of abolishing religion however, the Boomers just invented their own. Their dogma was just as stifling—only this time it was Right vs. Left.

Despite attempts to classify Gen X and Y into the spectrum of liberal, neocon, paleocon etc., today’s youth are bucking the whole idea of them vs. us, replacing conservative and liberal with—nothing.

The mainstream media sees a group of kids turning their nose up at liberal bias and they instantly assume it’s their grandfather’s soul reincarnated two generations later. They shudder in horror and call this new group Hipublicans or South Park Conservatives (even my own magazine took these paleoconservative characteristics and ran with them).

But to assume laughing at the left means blindly embracing the right is naïve. If the “South Park Conservatives” are conservatives, why does Pat Buchanan dry heave every time he accidentally channel surfs past the show?

The truth is this new generation is too sexually promiscuous, drug friendly, atheist and, more specifically informed to let the pendulum swing back all the way to the right.

More information has become available to the average human being in the past 5 years than all of history combined. When boomers heard liberal dogma back in the 60s, it was a chore to dig up the other side of the argument. Today it’s a mere Google click away. Thanks to the never-ending memes of the Internet we are able to glean the truth of both sides.

Is it any surprise then, in an era when even politicians have trouble differentiating between Democrat and Republican, there would be a generation that doesn’t even bother trying?

You can see examples of this new dichotomy within every hot topic.

Avant-garde filmmaker Bruce LaBruce is anti-gay marriage but he’s also a raging homosexual. If you think he’d fit in with the born again Christians give it a try and get back to me.

Today’s 18-25s hate Sharon with a passion but they also despise the latent sexism so intrinsic in Islam.

Yes, they consciously cringe when papers like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal ignore the workingman and blindly praise the few upsides of globalism. But they also roll their eyes when the war on drugs claims another victim or the Republicans sweep into Iraq.

A great example of this recently appeared in Rolling Stone. The gay liberal tabloid features a comic called Get Your War On which spends most of its panels sarcastically praising the impossible task of erasing terrorism. However, when the painfully-out-of-touch Thomas Friedman leapt out of his leather chair and exulted “the world is flat”—i.e. globalism is good— with the rest of the ignorant left, Get Your War On accused him of "uncanny optimism?", and said “That makes no sense.”

Go over some Get Your War On archives. [Here]

Is this comic right or left? To quote the band Crass in their song White Punks on Hope, “Left wing, right wing, you can stuff the lot.”

Nothing sums up what I’m talking about better than a line from a movie the South Park guys made named Team America World Police.

Ironically the paleocons that are so ready to adopt these new anti-lefties will find this quote unread ably vile.

Maybe so but I challenge you to find a better example of the so-called South Park Conservatives gleaning the best of all the political spectrum has to offer.

The quote is from the end of the film when the protagonist Gary Johnston (played by South Park co-founder Trey Parker) is forced to defend America:

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