A forceful essay by Mark Citadel, The Ritual Humiliation of Misunderstanding Power.
These passages stood out:
Liberals shut down what they feel is threatening to the individual, to his self-esteem and self-image. They don’t care about free speech, and never have in any sincere way.
If you truly believe that the ideas of the left are dangerous and poisonous to society, then it is a complete dereliction of duty to allow Liberalism to have any kind of platform.
They don’t believe in families, they believe in ideologically tinged warfare in the name of evil’s emancipation. The only reason that this warfare isn’t conducted with force of arms is that, looking at their own track record, they find the success average is far higher in parliaments and senates as opposed to trenches somewhere in Majadahonda.
Rather than through arms, they (the left) have a much more powerful weapon: policy and the courts, whether it’s discrimination laws, public school curriculum, regulation, or, say, George Soros and his push to flood Europe with refugees, in addition to leftist control of most of the media. Liberals control the platforms, and those (including even other liberals) who don’t conform to far-left orthodoxy have their platforms pulled from beneath them, also known as ‘no platforming’. It’s the 21st century version of excommunication. You see it over an over again…a recent example even being Wil Wheaton, a self-described liberal, who was forced to pen a statement of contrition for not sufficiently understanding his ‘white male privilege’.
We tend to value the nation, the larger group, the collective, the civil society, while Liberals value the individual as paramount, but the application of power remains the same. Liberals shut down what they feel is threatening to the individual, to his self-esteem and self-image. They don’t care about free speech, and never have in any sincere way. They laugh at the fools who bought into it because while Ben is crying about his free speech rights being violated, the Liberals go on churning out loyal party voters, enraged ethnic minorities, and freaks who sexually identify as civil attack helicopters.
As stated by Mark above, for the left, it’s never about ‘free speech’ – it’s about controlling who associates with whom. But conservatives are part of the problem, too, by playing the left’s game, thinking that it’s a battle over ‘free speech’ when it’s really about total control.