It's no surprise that The New York Times used the word "hipster" more than 250 times in the past year. 

Dawn Beattie

Of course, most people are not a complete hipster package deal. Many seemingly un-hipstery people have a hipster attitude, without even realizing it.  And many, if not most, people who dress and party like hipsters don't have the hipster attitude at all.

Actual hipsters and people with hipster attitudes are really two, totally different things.  

A hipster in attitude but not in lifestyle or dress would basically be an aggressively cynical person.  A hipster attitude is a cutting edge way of arguing with people, that celebrates irony and insults traditionally-held beliefs. A hipster attitude is a counterintuitive one that ridicules positive things like idealism and sentimentality.  A hipster attitude is an attitude that is supposed to offend people. At the very least, it should be provocative.    

Before, when someone argued with you just for the sake of it, you would accuse them of playing devil's advocate or being argumentative. Now, you'd probably call them a troll. Trolls are essentially just trying to be hip. So, trolls have very hipstery attitudes.   

At the top of the intelligence food chain, you might have counterintuitive writers argue that New Orleans shouldn't be rebuilt, that pimps are good for prostitutes, that breast-feeding is not worth the trouble, that obesity isn't really an epidemic, or that Radiohead sucks. 

These essays and books are hip, because they are so provocative and original.  

At the bottom of the intelligence food chain, you have counterintuitive commenters on YouTube write that the Holocaust never happened. You have young women watching other young women being raped on the internet and laughing about it.  They might even call the rape victim a slut.  You have passive-aggressive white ladies from The Real Housewives Of D.C. insulting Obama and Tyra Banks but championing George W. Bush in their black friend's house. You have Dr. Laura Schlessinger using the "N Word" 11 times on her radio show.

In other words, Dr. Laura isn't actually racist. She just thinks racism is hip.  And she's clearly not alone. 

Racism, along with its cousins, bigotry and sexism, has attracted a large following of people who want to shock people, but who have nothing original to say. Atheism, rock and roll, drugs and sex just don't shock people anymore like they used to. 

To be sure, many people are not racist to be hip. Some of them genuinely do hate other races.   

Police officers can become racist out of a combination of fear, ignorance, and mob-mentality.

People who grew up in a small town, exposed to only one race, might feel distrustful of other races, too.

But Dr. Laura, who is surely exposed to other races all time, who converted to a religion that has been subject to persecution for years, and who calls herself a "doctor," could not possibly care as much as she claims she does about her so-called first amendment rights.

Her rant was likely not motivated by rage against a politically-correct world, like she made it seem. She really isn't that jealous that black people get to use the "N Word" all the time while she can't. Her rant was really all about vanity. 

Wouldn't I look like such a badass, Dr. Laura thought, to go against the grain, and kind of defend racial slurs?  

This is a problem because it can lead to actual racism in people who listen to Dr. Laura. 

Worse, it sends the message to talentless trolls across the world that being racist gets you a lot of attention.  For some, the fact that it's negative attention doesn't even matter.