by Guy Walker

Not all children throw tantrums when they lose a game on the schoolyard. The kids who make certain they win next time sure don’t. It’s the already unpopular ones, those who flail their arms gruesomely like a dying pigeon, tears streaming down their cheeks because they lost in tetherball—the same runny-nosed children who tattle on their peers for saying a bad word—they actually make certain they lose every time, because in a way, they relish in being the victim. This is the problem with the left. They keep losing because they deserve to lose, because they enjoy throwing fits of self-flagellation for everyone else to see.

This is most obvious in the context of freedom of speech. Last week, the “gay conservative provocateur” Milo Yiannopoulos, was supposed to finish his Dangerous Faggot Tour of US campuses at the University of California, Berkeley—the same university that celebrated its 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement just two years ago, but also the same university who tried to ban Bill Maher from speaking on their campus a little over a year ago for his criticisms of Islam. After the escalation of violence and property destruction from so-called anti-fascist demonstrators, the talk was forced cancellation, shoving the name “Milo Yiannopoulos” further into the mainstream—or simply as “Milo,” as he is now of the pop-star status of a single name.

A year-and-a-half ago, the name was little heard of—he was the technology editor for Breitbart News, and rose to stardom through the Gamergate controversy, which, if you forget, was nothing more than trolling women in the video game industry on Twitter. He’s more an inevitable phenomenon than anything else—a charismatic hero for the online trolls to claim as their own. As a writer, he’s desperate to be provocative, picking fights with Perez Hilton about who’s the better gay icon, asking Trump to “deport fat people,” mocking conservative pundit Ben Shapiro for being shorter than him. His content is insubstantial at best, but he’s struck a nerve with political internet culture, making his newly published book Dangerous the number one bestseller on Amazon.

And it’s obvious why. The history of banning controversial thought has never given victory to censorship. Banning Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer from import into the United States only dramatized its luster. The federal court cases of Joyce’s Ulysses or Ginsberg’s Howl became landmarks of hugely successful titillation. When the UK tried to ban the Sex Pistols from their Anarchy tour in 1976, it completely backfired. And for good reason: these were advancements in freedom of speech and freedom of the press—they further liberated the prurient thrusts of thought and language, they shoved our sheer humanness into the light, sending the dying generation of proudly overgrown pubes and milky underwear forever into the past.

In August of last year, Yiannopoulos spoke at the launch of the Young British Heritage Society—essentially a band of internet goons describing themselves as the “new conservative and libertarian national student organization dedicated to opposing political correctness on the university campus.” A newfangled trollish political organization who’s entire ideological platform is centered around confronting political correctness. And not through rational constructive means that psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Jordan Peterson, and former philosophy professor Christina Hoff Sommers, have worked on, but through meme culture and name-calling. Herds of socially awkward male bovines who hunch behind their PC’s on 4chan and Twitter, securing their fear of women in their group-curated echo chambers, are envisioning an illustrious futuristic utopia where students can freely pass one another exchanging insults.

The problem with “being against political correctness” is the same as any unwavering position taken in politics: there’s no nuance. It’s always one side against the other. As if “being PC” were one huge agglutinative eating mass of the same substance, as if the group of people that said it’s no longer acceptable to call a black man a nigger is the same group of people that now self-identify as animals or non-humans and require you to call them by their appropriate pronouns. Yes, in this unfortunate hell of reality there is an ever-expanding list of made-up nonbinary pronouns—and not just the gender-neutral pronouns of “zie” and “zir,” but even more sinister ghoulish ones: “pedal,” “pan,” “sprout,” “wormself.” Like man-eating cartoon figures, this new tribe of leftists has emerged on the horizon, chanting their unacknowledged rights to be worms and pixies, taking attention away from the truly dire issues of our time. It is similar to the uproar every Halloween when a celebrity dresses up as a pilgrim or wears a sombrero on their head. The problem is the fanatics are always the loudest. They contaminate the rest of the party, sending the whole charade to the circus.

For all our quantum computing and rocket engineering, we hominids are soft tribal beasts. We’re taught to despise the Little League football team one neighborhood over; Protestants were long taught to hate Catholics; Sunnis against Shiites. It’s what Freud termed the “narcissism of small differences”—the glorious dramas that erupt out of superfluities. When one identifies an example of absurdity within PC culture they often conclude they are entirely anti-PC, consequently making it much easier for them to call out much more reasonable cultural advances in our language also to be absurd—hence the rise of racial rhetoric in our modern political arena.

But it can be far more sinister and dangerous than this. Look at Charlie Hebdo. When twelve people—including eight journalists—were murdered for drawing cartoons of Mohammed, thousands marched the streets, hand-in-hand, with signs that read “Je Suis Charlie,” to decorously express their solidarity, assumingely to stand for a free and open press. The irony was, most major newspapers and television stations refused to publish the inciting cartoons, in fear of retaliation. There was a faction of the left that said Charlie Hebdo was hate-speech and although they may not have deserved to be massacred, they sure were asking for it. This kind of thinking is incredibly regressive, and it invalidates the seriousness and urgency of other issues.

The right to free speech is more fragile than we moderns deem it to be. When the anti-fascist demonstrators prevented Yiannopoulos from speaking, they were being profoundly fascist themselves. In a moment of blinding anger, they stood for the fundamentals of tyranny, for everything they thought they were fighting against, for everything the United States was founded on.

If the left continues in these petty quarrels, throwing fits every time they’re offended, they’ll continue to lose elections. There are principled issues of urgency to debate and wrestle over, and without defending the right to free speech we will only encourage the oppression of ideas.