Milo Yiannopoulos vs. America's So-Called Left: Front Lines in the Free Speech Battle

Let’s face it. The American left is a sick joke. I don’t even call it the left anymore. The “left” rather.

The current American left retains none of the positive aspects of the 20th-century left, but virtually all of the negative ones. It cares little about the serious social problems engendered by crony capitalism, focusing instead on the minutiae of political correctness vis-a-vis this or that clan of professional victims. It’s not so much interested in anyone’s actual rights. No, it is interested in groupthink and authority and its own ability to invent new “rights” to impose on society so as to demonstrate that authority. It is a cult, almost a new religion, of political correctness.

And worst of all, our left is now actually proud of the fact that it hates free speech. Its idea of progress--stated over and over in manifesto and university policy paper and demand list--is to ensure that every walking, breathing citizen agrees to its every ideological demand, and it will bully and silence them until they do so. It claims to champion diversity, but the only kinds of diversity it values are race or sexual preference. Diversity of thought is forbidden. Pro “diversity”, it is anti-pluralist and anti-liberal.

This left was on prominent display again last week at Berkeley, when SJW students threw a hissy fit that ended in a riot in protest against fact that Milo Yiannopoulos was going to speak there. And must of the left press gets it almost exactly wrong. Here’s David Kaye in the Guardian: "Our constitutional commitment to debate, dissent and freedom of expression is bumping up against hateful, attention-seeking speakers who rush up to, and often cross over into, incitement to violence, harassment and hatred."

The problem? The left has no “constitutional commitment to debate, dissent and freedom of expression". Kaye’s piece goes on, predictably, to blame the victims: Milo and those conservative students who wanted him to speak, and some of whom were seriously beaten by left protesters.

“Hateful, attention-seeking speakers”? “[Crossing] over into incitement to violence”? That is a description in this instance of the protesters, Mr. Kaye, not the conservatives who criticize those protesters.

University campuses are regularly visited by hateful speakers, employ hateful professors and are rocked by hateful gangs of students. But hateful as they are, and provocative as their speech might get sometimes, they are almost never called out as hateful and their comments are never called "harassment" or "incitement". Why not? Because these groups target, mock, or “call for action” against 1) men; 2) white people; 3) Christians. It’s not hate or harassment if you’re target isn’t one of the protected identities beloved of our SJW left.

I have spent plenty of time in these milieus, and the hatred that motivates these people is palpable. Yes, most of them do not call for actual violence in their pronouncements, but they do everything they can to shut up or ruin the careers of anyone who does not repeat their mantras. That this is true in our universities is depressing, but not surprising. But it is growing almost equally true in the corporate world.

Milo has never to my knowledge encouraged his admirers to engage in violence, but he has encouraged them to engage in scorn and laughter, neither of which (sorry kids) are "hate speech”. Scorn and laughter are elements of ridicule, and they fit with biting criticism, a necessary part in any democratic society. Ridicule or criticism is in fact what scorn and laughter ARE called when they come from the left. When Milo employs them, however, suddenly it is “hate speech”, and he must be shut up or shouted down or, if a lot of those Berkeley students had their way, beaten to death.

Let's be clear: Milo doesn’t consider black people, or transsexuals, or whatever group of people ridiculous or deserving of mockery per se. He doesn’t consider people ridiculous because of what they are. This is obvious to anyone who takes the time to listen to even a couple of his talks. Rather, what Milo seeks to ridicule are the hypocritical ways different groups politicize what they are through the playbook of our current left politics.

In America we have plenty of hard-edged satirists. One of them, a brilliant satirist on the liberal left, was Jon Stewart. Stewart employed the same arsenal of tropes and tricks used by Milo to make great fun of and throw scorn at: 1) political conservatives; 2) southern people; 3) rural people; 4) religious conservatives. But America called Stewart's work "comedy" or "satire", not "incitement" or "hate speech".

The lesson is: If you are on the left and point out the hypocrisy and stupidity of the left's favorite punching bags (southern whites, rural folks, Christians) it is “comedy”. If you are on the right and point out the hypocrisy and stupidity of left-wing campus ideologues, you are "inciting violence", "harassing", etc.

Our universities are in dire need of reform. It’s getting more obvious by the year. Universities must provide space for speakers or students or professors to speak their minds as long as they do not call for violence. But our campus administrations, fearful of the ire of the student left, functions by a glaring double standard. They do not apply the same standards to speakers on the left as it does to speakers on the right.

University administrations should enact strict policies ASAP that make it clear that protesting visiting speakers is any student’s right, but disrupting their talks or shutting down their talks through mass bullying is censorship and will not be tolerated. Campus police need to start monitoring events and protests and identifying those who seek to disrupt and censor in this way. I’m thinking: One strike and you’re warned, two strikes and you’re expelled.

In fact I'm not optimistic. Most American universities already are going out of their way to implement authoritarian speech codes so as to make everyone feel "welcome" and "safe". This is a grave mistake. University must be a place where young adults debate, where they are challenged out of their comfort zones and shaken out of their preconceived notions. University is not a place where students come to be coddled and celebrated.

It is time to stand up strong against this debased political movement that calls itself the left. Respect for open debate and free speech must be re-established in our public square and especially on our campuses. We need to recognize that free speech is not valuable when it protects popular opinions, but becomes valuable when it protects marginal opinions from being censored. Milo’s talks are well within the bounds of protected free speech. Universities that cannot protect his right to address students who invite him have failed in their most basic mission: to foster open debate between competing social or political views.

Pick up a copy of my collection Idiocy, Ltd. today, deadpan humor so dry it will make your eyes sting, your hair fall out, and paint peel from your walls.

The Truth in Pope Francis’ Charlie Hebdo Remark

When death threats and riots followed a Danish newspaper’s publication of satirical cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad back in 2005, I found myself in agreement with most Westerners. Liberals and conservatives both argued that Europe’s Muslim communities needed to learn to live with the long-established traditions of free expression in the nations they’d immigrated to. At that time I’d have been happy to see more western European papers reprint the comics, if only in brave defiance of the threats. Likewise immediately following the Charlie Hebdo attack: I found myself agreeing with a friend online that the best thing Westerners could do in response was “draw Muhammad”--keep printing such images until the jihadis realized that the more they attacked, the more their icons would get tarnished.

Then I went and looked through more of Charlie Hebdo’s content in recent years. I no longer felt so convinced. In some ways I could say, yes, “Je suis Charlie”, but in others, no--I was not Charlie at all. The artists working at Charlie have busied themselves not merely satirizing or criticizing the excesses of some Muslims, but aggressively heaping muck on whatever Muslims hold sacred. As they have with any and every other religion.

I think Pope Francis’s recent in-flight comment on the attack, though his words were somewhat ill-chosen, was essentially correct. The right to freedom of expression must be defended, but such freedom has limits. When you wantonly attack what is sacred to millions, you should expect fury in response, and this fury is bound to provoke reaction. As the Pope indicated, reaction is only natural. That the jihadis’ threshold of tolerance is so low, that their resort to physical violence is to be condemned, doesn’t however refute the general truth: there are things people hold sacred, and one shouldn’t trample on them to provoke.

Whereas before I saw Muslim intolerance for such cartoons to be mainly a problem particular to the Muslim religion, I now see these events linked to a wider variety of extremisms at work in the world.

As Westerners we have ourselves fallen prey to certain dangerous kinds of extremism. For one, the extremism of our own market fundamentalists, in the form of neo-liberal capitalism, risks destroying the ecological fabric on which humanity depends. It is obvious to myself and many others that the environmental threats our civilization now poses are much more dangerous than any radical religious movement. And yet how many of us have gotten to the point where we recognize the obvious truth: This is truly a problem of extremism, of radicalism, run rampant in our dominant culture. It is an extremism that insists the planet exists as raw material for a market, and that the planet as well as its populations must submit to the dictates of this “free” market. Submission to the market is called “progress”.

This extremism ultimately threatens all of us and all we hold dear. And the weapons it wields and the forms of ideological persuasion it has in its arsenal far outweigh anything ISIS can muster.

Second, there is the extremism of our mindless faith in technology--an extremism that is now beginning to tamper with the building blocks of life. Genetically modified crops and animals and organisms of all kinds are on the horizon, and it is only our technological arrogance that insists this is business as usual--that it is all for the good of humankind. We really don’t know the monsters we’re on the verge of creating, and our faith that science is good is making us blind to the threat. Science, in service to the technological demands of a capitalism run wild, is no longer a disinterested search for the truth of the universe as much as it is a matter of R&D for huge corporations seeking new and irresistible products. Further, our governments, which should be watching out for our welfare, are all in the pay of these corporations.

And finally, to come back full circle, we have the extremism of our current notions of freedom of speech. We now think it all part of normal political debate to hurl the most offensive insults at those different from us. To willfully knock down anything that may suggest a limit to what we can say or do or be is seen as progressive per se; and of course it goes without saying that anything anyone might consider sacred should be tarnished ASAP so that these benighted medieval people will “finally get over” their “outdated” notions that there is such a thing as the sacred in the universe. Personally, as a Catholic, I believe there are indeed things that are sacred in the universe. And contrary to the thinking of many around me, I know very well that people like myself are not going to go away any time soon. I would certainly not endorse violence against people who desecrate churches, but I do believe there should be strict laws against such desecration.

The Pope’s down-to-earth words on the attack have a basic truth behind them, regardless of being somewhat ill put. One needn’t tiptoe around religious people, but at the same time one shouldn’t intentionally offend them in service to one’s own secular faith. If one does, one can expect, at the very least, to be offended back. And if the offense dealt out to religious people is chronic and repeated, one should not be surprised if, sooner or later, crazies appear out of nowhere to deliver a punch. This is the nature of humanity.

Finally, in conclusion, I’d point out that Europe’s principled support of free expression is not so principled after all. There are many double standards that have long been in play, as argued cogently by Mehdi Hasan in the Huffington Post this week. If you think Europeans truly support absolute freedom of expression, try to publish comic books there downplaying the seriousness of the Holocaust; or try to make a documentary on the joys of sex with children. Freedom of expression has limits, and nearly everyone, religious or not, will have areas that are clearly out of bounds.

I do not think European states should codify laws against depicting Muhammad, but I do think, given that there are millions of Muslims in Europe who are law-abiding citizens, that everyone should show at least a minimum of respect for what these people hold sacred. It is, after all, forbidden for Muslims themselves to depict their Prophet, even if they would seek to show him in some glorious manner. To repeatedly show him as a buffoon, as Charlie Hebdo did, is a kind of double insult.

Living sanely side by side requires some mutual give and take. I know very well the Muslim radicals of ISIS refuse to respect this basic rule of pluralist society. But for most of the citizens of France or Germany or the US it should be second nature by now. Too bad, in this generally extremist climate, that some factions in the West have started willfully breaking this rule.