"Owning the libs" is a political strategy used by some conservatives in the United States that focuses on upsetting American liberals. Users of the strategy emphasize and expand upon culture war issues intended to be divisive to provoke a reaction in others, much akin to "Trolling" on the internet.
Terminology
Variant phrases such as "triggering the libs" and "melting snowflakes" are also used to refer to the strategy.
The phrase "own the libs" comes from a slang usage of the word own, meaning "to dominate," "to defeat," or, "to humiliate." The phrase was coined and popularized by critics of the strategy, including politician Nikki Haley, who increased the prominence of the phrase in a 2018 speech in which she criticized the strategy as unpersuasive. It is also used by some who practice the strategy, such as Dan Bongino. The phrase dates back to at least 2015.
The "trigger" variants of the phrase come from the idea of trauma triggers and "trigger warnings" intended to avoid them. In his 2019 book Triggered, Donald Trump Jr. says that the purpose of triggering liberals is to oppose political correctness.
The strategy is associated with confrontational political slogans such as "fuck your feelings," and "make liberals cry again."
History
Conservative student activist groups like Turning Point USA and remixes of campus speakers like Ben Shapiro played a key role in developing the strategy during the 2000s and 2010s. The 2008 vice presidential campaign of Sarah Palin was a precursor to the owning the libs method, according to former Republican strategist and Lincoln Project co-founder Rick Wilson. Palin marked a merger between politics and entertainment, causing an anxiety among educated elites that her voters found thrilling. Wilson says owning the libs assuages insecurities of people on the American political right, and has become central to the Republican Party because of its success at this. More recently, the strategy is associated with Donald Trump and Donald Trump Jr. The method was adopted by the alt-right and alt-lite as a form of trolling and antagonism in the mid/late 2010s.
Goals
Online troll Jacob Wohl has stated that the goal in owning the libs is to evoke in people "the type of unhinged emotional response that you would expect out of somebody who is suffering a serious mental episode." The strategy uses trolling to portray political opponents as weak, biased, or overtly emotional, and to portray oneself as superior because of a lack of emotion. Users of the strategy sometimes seek to be deplatformed — for example, to have their own speaking engagements canceled — in order to gain notoriety.
Shared enjoyment of owning the libs maintains group cohesion among a conservative voting bloc, according to Nicole Hemmer of Columbia University. Hemmer views the strategy as a substitute for the cohesive conservative ideology that existed during the Cold War.
The phrase "the cruelty is the point" was coined from the title of Adam Serwer's 2018 article in The Atlantic about Trump supporters building community together by delighting in the suffering of those they consider outsiders. The phrase and the observation about shared joy in cruelty have been written about in the media as the purpose of owning the libs.
Rutgers University media scholar Khadijah White says the strategy serves to excuse corruption from one's political allies by portraying one's opponents as equally corrupt.
Art critic Ben Davis has written that the painter Jon McNaughton's stated goal of creating work that "triggers the left" undersells the sincerity of his work. McNaughton's paintings communicate a "real and popular viewpoint" sincerely held by conservative or reactionary consumers of art, even as the paintings also function as memes intended to upset perceived political enemies.
Criticism
The strategy of owning the libs has been criticized by both liberal and conservative observers as an unsuccessful strategy, or as leading only to counterproductive Pyrrhic victory.
At a 2018 Turning Point USA event, Republican Nikki Haley remarked: