2016

I don’t mean to cause offense by saying this. I share this humbly, re the screenshot above. If Ted Cruz had retweeted me ten years ago I would have shut down my social media for a year. No disrespect to Senator Cruz. It’s me, not you.

Circumstance forces people to change. I adapted. Society forced my hand. I was either going to be shoved off the bridge, or I was going to build my own life raft.

I'll be honest. In more ways than one I preferred my life ten years ago - it was the life I created. It was a lot easier being one of the dominant freelance culture writers of the West. I hobnobbed with what I then thought were the coolest people on the planet. My biggest challenge was navigating the singer-songwriter drama of LA’s east side.

We all know I would never have been able to sustain the silence required to keep my seat. My inability to wire my mouth shut made me the observer of culture I was celebrated as. I was a rebel. Brainwashing never worked on me - clearly.

I’ll never forgive "liberals" for stripping our lives away for the sake of a difference in opinion. They’ve destroyed everything good about our free world. They are not liberal. They have no humility. They cannot admit fault, cannot admit mistake, even innocent. They attack the free world instead of seeing the face of true evil in real time.

I see it - and I also say it – because I think I might be a true liberal.

I was raised by conservatives. I imagined a discomfort in conservative circles because I'm gay. A projection of my own fear. Now I feel safer in conservative circles. It’s nobody’s business who we all have sex with. Identity politics has destroyed the West.

I wish we could turn back the clock and do it all differently. I really do. I wish I could talk to my old friends. I wish we could take the sting out. Say - remember that night? Remember whatshisface? I wish we could laugh again without conflicting emotions. I wish I could do my old job at times. Research a public figure, pretend to be just another hack in the press line, then reel them in with questions worth discussing. I wish I could get it all back. I wish nothing had changed.

Thing is, it did. There are way more important things to get upset about. The world changed, and now it could change again. Now we could enter an age of correction, forgiveness, and true progress. And the pain we have endured has the opportunity to become the power that guides us out of the woods. At long last.

If I could reach them all now, I would tell them:
Hey, remember me? I never changed a single value I hold dear. I just had to survive…
And so did you, I guess.

I am loyal to only one thing now – the truth.
My friends, my career, even my country of birth, has given me no other option.

Today I spoke with a group of teenage leaders of the future from around America, and they asked me what the “secret” cost has been of speaking the truth. How do I cope. (Do I cope?) Well, I have not been very secret about the cost because I have not been granted the privacy. The laundry list of cost feels uncomfortable to indulge. I don’t love a sob story. Alas, I gave an honest answer to prepare them for the possibilities…

I will never Google my name. I imagine you get a link to Hasan Piker circa 2022 on YouTube making sexually degrading comments about me. The memes of my face. My name as a trending toilet joke. That threw my career into a volcano, which erupted my bylines alongside all my pop star party friends. Who cares about them. I grow old. I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. My deepest relationships, however.

Therein the private cost: the cost to my heart. If I let go of all I loved, I might drift deep down to the ocean floor, and may never find myself again. You can’t let go of that which is too big. So my imagination has kept me alive in these years of war. Imagining it isn’t actually all gone. The dream of reconnecting with what I’ve lost keeps me in it.

Is that fucked up? Probably. What else am I going to do about it? How do you accept that what you cherished the most is gone. How do you accept being so hated you’ve been forgotten. Can they really forget you? You have the photographs, the voice memos, the postcards, the memories. You’re holding the bag. Where does it go?

There’s a stupid trend on Instagram at the moment, where people are posting images from the year 2016. At first, I found it too hard to participate. Then I relented.

A decade. It feels more like a century. I made a playlist to listen to my favorite songs of the year. Take me back to narnia, Spotify. You know, 2016 was a vintage year for music. Maybe the last great year of the album - that old relic. Beyonce’s Lemonade, Rihanna’s Anti, Frank Ocean’s Blonde, and (sorry again) Kanye’s The Life Of Pablo.

It should be illegal the amount of fun I had in 2016. I was away with the fairies. I was as light as a feather. I lived in a castle in the sky. Is it I, the saboteur? Could I have known? Would I have done it differently? No. Never.

When I look at my hands, I know time is taking me farther away from it. The hands that held my dreamy ambitions, also destroyed them, because I kept typing. I kept pressing “send”. My ambitions are not mine anymore. They are ours. We want to be heard. We want to stop the infection from spreading any further. I have sacrificed my own frivolous desires, my passion for things that rock and roll. Cast that aside for a far bigger purpose.

And yet I am sorry. I am so sorry.

I am sorry for trying so hard to convince you of the truth.

I am sorry I tried everything I could to protect you from the evil in your midst.

I am sorry I couldn’t just be a follower, and make life simpler for you.

I am sorry that I couldn’t keep my name and my voice free of controversy.

I am sorry that my integrity hurt so much that it became the enemy.

I am sorry I loved so much, and tried so hard.

I’m sorry to that person I was, and those people who depended on her.

I told the students today that it doesn’t matter what the cost is, because there’s one thing I did not lose: my ability to complain. Dissent is not something anyone should give away. Unfortunately too many people have. They surrendered their power to the cult of serfdom; to their goody-goody master. Now they have to do as they’re told and accept their fate. Not us. We will not do as we’re told. We will be free.

So with a freedom I do not take for granted, let me remind you that 16,500 people at least are dead in Iran and 330,000 are injured. Thousands have been imprisoned and await excruciating torture in what activists are referring to as “slaughterhouses”. The country is still in a state-wide enforced blackout. Yet, Gaza is the world’s biggest open air prison, is that it?

Everything is “genocide” apparently – except the genocide that’s unfolding in Iran.

This morning I watched a video of a mother wailing over the body of her dead son, in one of hundreds of black bags, lying out in the streets of every province of Iran. We don’t know the half of what’s happening there. The United Nations has still made not even a whimper. They will follow Khameini to his grave. How did the UN become the chambermaid of this century’s Hitler?

Those who say nothing take their freedom for granted. Freedom has never been less affordable. It’s a price that must be paid.

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