So there's a song out that has "broken the Internet", It's by a white Canadian named Tom MacDonald, it's called "Snowflakes", and the man thinks he's the new Eminem. He ain't. 

I checked in with Jayvee and this was one of the songs he chose to react to. I had never heard it myself, either, Now that I've heard it, I need to attack it, because while it makes a couple of good points, it's also full of idiocies that can't be allowed to stand...

Lyrics copied verbatim from Genius.com:

If you lie to the government, they'll put you in prison
But when they lie to all of us, it's called being a politician

Good point, this. Very good point. Especially given that one side of the political spectrum has constructed an entire "reality" based on lies told them by "their" politicians. 

You think taking guns away will save our kids from the killings
But you're pro-choice, Abortion kills way more children

Leave it to a man to confuse abortion with infanticide. No child has ever, and I mean EVER, been killed by abortion. Also: being pro-choice does not necessarily mean you're "for" abortion. All it means is that you know how to mind your own fucking business.  I have my own arcane thoughts about abortion: I figure the aborted fetus simply goes off and reincarnates elsewhere, same as anything else that dies. I realize that's way out there. Regardless, anyone opposing abortion needs to admit they promote reproductive slavery for women, and grapple with that. 

And then there's the fact that nobody is "taking the guns away". I've been hearing that fearmongering for forty years and the guns are still here. 

If America's so terrible and racist
It probably isn't safe to encourage immigration, just sayin'

Actually, this is precisely backwards, and I'll tell you why.

I used to be racist. I still am: we all are, because we are products of a deeply racist society. But I used to be proud of it. Same goes for homophobia. You put your dick...where? IN the shit? Ewwwwww, you sick fuck. Of course, more straights than gays practice anal sex and with even a modicum of cleaning, you're not sticking your dick, or your tongue for that matter, in shit. But you know what helps get you on the path to confronting the bigotry within you? Meeting the objects of your scorn and realizing over time that they are not objects, they are people. Maybe not "just" like you, but a lot more like you than you thought. Exposure kills hatred dead. 

All the contradictions are embarrassing
You know who hates America the most? Americans

I'm probably unqualified to rebut these two lines on account of being Canadian. Oh, wait, so's Tom MacDonald, who wrote them. So: no, the people trying to change America (and Canada) don't hate it. They love it. They love it so much it kills them to see our countries not living up to their ideals. 

Mark and I just rewatched Hamilton a week ago, and he came out of our second viewing even more appreciative of Lin-Manuel Miranda's tour de force. "America was something genuinely new in the world," he said, "and you can see them to this day trying to renew themselves." That's true.  It's also true that regressive forces want to keep things just the way they've always been, so that straight white men have all the power.  Anyone who denies either impulse is half-blind. 

Trigger warnings used to be on TV for seizures
And now they're everywhere to protect millennials' feelings

I'm not a millennal, and I'm grateful for trigger warnings. The ones I most appreciate are those warning of animal abuse. I do not understand people who aren't affected by sensitive content. Do they even have feelings? 

I'd frame it more as judicious attention to energy allocation. Just as so-called 'cancel culture' is only the free market in action, trigger warnings are a tool to help us determine what we want to personally 'cancel', or at least postpone. Those who don't understand this have not experienced trauma and are unable to imagine its effects on those who have. 

Hе, she, his, him, hers, them, thеy
Screw a pronoun 'cause everyone's a retard these days

Until this couplet, I have disagreed to varying degrees with everything past the first two lines, but could defend it if asked. This? This is transphobia writ large, compounded with a wearyingly familiar ableist slur that I haven't even heard for years, but which used to be applied to me daily, if not hourly. 

It's left unsaid why "everyone's a retard" because you're supposed to just know. If you're a seasoned veteran of the culture wars, you've seen the handwringing. Not even gay marriage infuriates the Right half as much as acceptance and justice for nonbinary people. Despite these people having been with us for all our history -- and in some cultures, venerated -- the Right wants these people cancelled and it will stop at nothing to do it. And just as with gay marriage, any 'reason' they're able to sputter out for their hatred falls apart under the slightest scrutiny. Memo: if you're against trans people because some cis males will pretend to be trans to gain access to women's bathrooms, your actual problem is with cis males. 

You know, it does seem as if transgenderism is everywhere lately. It can even get a little tiresome, until you stop to think wait a minute, CISgenderism IS everywhere and always has been.

I hear 'em preachin' at the protest that hatred's a problem
But hating straight men, white Folks, and Christians is common

Hey, Tom! You're straight and white and maybe Christian, I don't know, but tell me: which of these things got you evicted? Which one did your family disown you for? Do you get beaten up when people find out you're straight? Do police stop you outside your own home because "people like you don't belong in places like this"? No to all? How about your family and friends, how many of them are in jail for the heinous crime of walking while White? Do the other straights in your family have to act gay so they won't be attacked? I think you get my point: you're lying.

Nobody hates any of these categories. Nobody. What there is is a well-justified hatred of the people within those categories who use them to crush those who aren't. Learn the difference.

Coca-Cola telling people they should be less white

This actually did happen. Coke tried to weasel out of it by saying it wasn't their own diversity curriculum, only LinkedIn's that they were using. Now, you and I understand that "be less White" means "embody fewer of the attitudes used by Whites to oppress". But be is a strong verb. I'd probably have used "act" or "think" in its place. 

They preaching tolerance, but if you disagree, they fight

This one has bothered me for years. It's one of the Right's favourite axioms, that we are hateful people because we insist on a basic standard of respect for all persons. If you refuse to treat people as human beings, you're not human yourself. 

I went to university with a man named Remi. He was one room to the left in MacDonald 2 West, and I lived with him the following year in one of the five houses I once resided in that have been replaced by high-rises. Anyway, I fell out of contact with him immediately after I moved on (my student life was nomadic, always searching for the cheapest rent so I could have more money to waste on frivolous shit), and in the last year or two we've reconnected on Facebook. He's grown up to be my kind of people. He shared something on Facebook that has since been reshared over 2600 times.

There's a race war here, elections based on fear

There's not a race war in the United States. Yet. But the Proud Boys and their ilk dearly want there to be one. And oh, Tom is right about elections based on fear. Fear that "those people" will vote and level the playing field. Nothing terrifies an entitled holder of privilege more than others being treated the same way.

Black lives only matter once every four years

Oh, this is such bullshit. To one side, black lives don't matter at all, never did, and never will. To the other, they're working tirelessly to raise awareness of just how ugly systemic racism is, and trying hard to change it, against intense, existential opposition. 

I can hear you now. They're not doing shit except looting and rioting. There was actually an exchange on Twitter that speaks to this. 

Martin Luther King said "riots are the language of the unheard". I don't like riots either. Maybe we should listen, whaddaya think?

Soldiers died for this country and every one of us benefits
Give welfare to the bums and forget about the veterans

No soldier has ever died for any country. 

I mean that.

Soldiers don't "die", they are murdered.  That's what war is: socially sanctioned murder on a grand scale. And at least in American imperialist wars, it's vastly more accurate to say soldiers are murdered for corporate profit. For the record, I believe the way we treat veterans is despicable. I also believe we treat veterans despicably because on some level we know we sent them into hell, and we can't deal with that.

Black folks and white folks divided by the news

But we are all the same, we are red, white, and blue

Sigh. Black folks and white folks are NOT "divided by the news". They're already divided: the news is reporting it. This is the worst case of 'blame the messenger' I've ever seen, and members of the Fifth Estate are beaten and killed whenever this attitude takes hold. 

Look, Tom, I get that you don't want to see anything that might make you uncomfortable, because a white person being uncomfortable is so much worse than Black people being murdered in their beds by the State without consequence, being deprived of the right to vote, getting punished far out of proportion to any crime they may commit, and so on.  Awww, little baby white supremacist, do you need a TRIGGER WARNING?

Ashamed to be American? Okay, that's cool
'Cause honestly, we are all ashamed of you too

You're ashamed of people trying to make the country better. That says it all, right there.

[Chorus]

Y'all are so fake, oh no

How are we "fake", Tom? How can you know that? This is that stupid "virtue signalling" crap, isn't it? Defined as "since I don't care about people, you must not either: you're only pretending to." Fuck off. 

The forecast said that there'd be snowflakes, whoa
You can make us see it your way, no way
Gasoline and propane, more flames, oh no
No more snowflakes

I'll answer this at the very end. 

[Verse 2]
They set us up to fail, that's what they built the system for
Put an ammunition shop across the street from a liquor store

Buried in the middle of all this manure is a real, genuine insight. It's too bad Tom lacks the intellectual capacity to examine this more closely. Who built the system? What colour were their skins, pray tell? And who did they set up to fail, and why? Hmmmm.

Empowering women used to be different than this before
The role models got OnlyFans or dance on a stripper pole

I used to agree with this, too. Is this what feminism means by empowering women? To imitate all the shallow behaviours of men? Answer: why, yes, among many other things. Feminism, so far as this man can see or say, is about letting women be who they are, whether or not they test or outright break the role men have always assigned to them. 

Screw it, I ain't trippin', I don't mean to be mean

Yes, you do, Tom. You relish being mean. If you didn't mean to be mean, most of this song wouldn't exist. 

But if our children are the future, then our future is bleak
They're taking Adderall to focus, hit McDonald's to eat
They're addicted to phones, and they take Xanax to sleep

Do conservatives actually inhabit the same reality as the rest of us? Verses like this truly make me wonder. Our future IS damned bleak, but it's the result of "adult" behaviour that is remarkably childish.  If anything will save us, it will be our children. But we make it hard for them, don't we? Really hard. Nobody gets rich anymore, and in urban deserts it's cheaper and much easier to hit McDonald's than to procure food at the grocery store twenty miles away when you don't drive. To live somewhere healthy food is available is beyond your budget and your dreams. Autism and other disorders are skyrocketing in. the population, quite likely due to environmental factors.  If you saw the world as it outside your whitewashed paradise, Tom, you'd need Xanax to sleep, too. 

They blur the lines, dividing communism and democracy

EVERYTHING I DON'T LIKE IS COMMUNISM

I would invite Tom to show me where, in either country, the State has seized the means of production. Because that's what communism is. If you don't know what communism is, perhaps you should leave the word to grownups who do. If that comes across as snobbery, it's not actually meant to. Words don't mean anything to your side, Tom, I know that. You don't have meanings, you have usages. We all do it with words like "red". To a physicist, "red" has a concrete meaning definable thusly: "the longest wavelength of light visible to the human eye, in the range of 620-750 nanometers in the visible spectrum". For the rest of us, we know "red" when we see it. We define it as the colour of something that is red, and not many of us stop to realize that's tautological. 

We do it with red. You do it with "cancel culture", "political correctness", "communism", "socialism", and a host of other terms, none of which mean what you think they do. 

In 2021, we paint the patriots as nazis

How patriotic is it to run over protestors with your car, Tom? Your version of patriotism takes as its slogan "Make America Great Again". For whom, Tom? For whom was America ever great in the first place? 

The men playin' women's sports, get trophies for winning
Like great, let's celebrate a man for beating some women

Are we ever hitting every single right-wing talking point. 

I will admit I'm not educated on this yet, and unlike Tom, I'm not going to say much until I am. There is a book at the top of the bestseller lists right now called "Unsporting: How Trans Activism And Science Denial Are Destroying Sport", which strikes me as a great example of hyperbole. But I do wonder about the role of testosterone and whether AMAB ("assigned male at birth") people do have a competitive advantage. What makes me think they don't: I  don't see widespread opposition to this from anyone who isn't already convinced transgendered people don't exist at all. That and "science denial", which is pure projection. THIS is the science. Read it and weep, Tom.

If you're black, your life matters, you're supposed to embrace it
If you're rich or you're smart, then you're probably Asian
If you're gay, then you're brave, all of that I'm okay with
But if you're white, the stereotype is you are a racist

Yep, Tom, all of this is bang on. That white people are racist is not their fault: the society we're born into is deeply, deeply racist. That you don't recognize and confront this head on IS your fault, Tom. 

Blaming capitalism like that's the reason things are tough

While you tweet from an iPhone and sip on a Starbucks
You're supporting what you stand against, you don't think you are, but
A Percoset addict don't donate money to pharma
Damn dawg, we're all afraid to speak the truth

Again and again and again: NUANCE! Only the most radical people want to abolish capitalism completely. The vast majority of us want nothing more than to abolish UNFETTERED capitalism, where corporations are not just people, but  the most important people in the world. Where companies are required to think about something, anything, beyond raw profits. Where the environment is something to preserve, not plunder, and where people -- I mean people with bodies --  have value. I don't think that's too much to ask, but apparently it is.

And the more afraid we get, the more we hate the ones who do

Speak for yourself, Tom.  The hatred you show for anyone who exposes the flaws in your society speaks very, very loudly. 

You're ashamed to be American? Okay, that's cool
'Cause honestly, we are all ashamed of you too

[Chorus]
Y'all are so fake, oh no
The forecast said that there'd be snowflakes, whoa
You can make us see it your way, no way
Gasoline and propane, more flames, oh no
No more snowflakes

[outro omitted]

My last word isn't mine.