While it probably made Chuck Palahniuk feel unique and special to believe that he invented one of the alt-right's favorite insults, it turns out he was wrong. Last week, Palahniuk told the Evening Standard that the term "snowflake" was first used as an insult in his 1996 novel Fight Club. "You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone, and we are all part of the same compost pile," Palahniuk wrote in the book that was later turned into a popular Brad Pitt film. It's the mantra of Project Mayhem, the nihilist patriarchal proto-fascist group that's actually pretty similar to the alt-right.
But, even though Palahniuk claims to have invented it (and agrees with the metaphor's usage to describe liberals), "Snowflake" as an insult dates much further back, as Merriam-Webster pointed out.
In the 1970s snowflake was a disparaging term for a white man or for a black man who was seen as acting white. It was also used as a slang term for cocaine. But before either of those it was used for a time with a very particular political meaning. In Missouri in the early 1860s, a "Snowflake" was a person who was opposed to the abolition of slavery—the implication of the name being that such people valued white people over black people. The Snowflakes hoped slavery would survive the country's civil war, and were contrasted with two other groups.
Even though I don't doubt many of the alt-right identified with Fight Club's sad impotent men destroying society to feel powerful, the "snowflake" insult did not begin with Palahniuk. But if Palahniuk wants to believe in alternative facts, he can keep feeling unique and beautiful and take credit for inventing the term.
