Chuck Palahniuk - Getty - H 2017
Renard Garr/GettyFight Club writer Chuck Palahniuk says he coined the term “snowflake” long before Trump supporters began using it.
Fox News contributors and Donald Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway have been using the term referring to Trump protesters, but the author says the phrase started with him.
“It does come from Fight Club,” he told the Evening Standard. “There is a line, ‘You are not special. You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.’”
Palahniuk says that the term “snowflake” is even more accurate today than it was when the film Fight Club was released in 1999. “There is a kind of new Victorianism,” he said. “Every generation gets offended by different things, but my friends who teach in high school tell me that their students are very easily offended.”
Conway and Mike Huckabee have been using the term “snowflake” to refer to protesters who took to the streets after Trump’s victory. “Get over it, snowflakes, your snow has melted,” Huckabee said of the election results on Fox & Friends this month.
Just after the election, Fox News’ Sean Hannity asked Conway about the “liberal crybabies” who wouldn’t accept Trump as the then president-elect, and the college students who either didn’t go to class following the election or flooded their campuses in demonstration of the election results. “We’re treating these adolescents and millennials like precious snowflakes,” she told the Fox News host.
On the rhetoric, Palahniuk added that he believes liberals and the political left need to rethink their strategy when it comes to protesting Trump: “The modern left is always reacting to things, once they get their show on the road culturally they will stop being so offended.”