Safe Spaces and the Cult of Anti-Trump

Typical college dorm

A friend of mine is a student at a major public university. He has the misfortune of living in the residence halls (dorms). Recently, his RA left a note on his door and the door of every one of his neighbors asking questions like 'what's your favorite kind of music?' 'what's your favorite food', and the creme de la creme, 'what's your preferred gender pronoun?' As I've written endlessly about here and elsewhere, the universities are the breeding ground for the leftist lunacy that denies basic truths, beginning with denying that there are only two genders.


But it goes far beyond that. Here is a basic list of insane ideas taught at universities:

• Gender is a social construct. There are as many genders as there are people. Assuming that 'male' and 'female' are the only options makes you a bigoted oppressive shitlord.
• Safe spaces are essential. We must be protected from wrong opinions that might challenge our way of thinking and 'trigger' us.
• Speaking of wrong thinking, conservatives, and especially Trump and his deplorable supporters, are racists who should be silenced. They can be silenced using free speech.
• Free speech isn't free. While true on its face Leftists mean that free speech is offensive and the best way to silence public speech is to make it impossible for someone to speak publicly using something they call 'no-platforming'. 
• Men, while being a social construct, have special privileges that all other genders don't have. This is especially true of white men. 
• Trump is a fascist. By fascist they mean 'not leftist' because he has the insane idea that government isn't the solution to all problems.
• All social problems can be solved with more multiculturalism and fewer white people.

I just included this to trigger SJWs

The Cult of Anti-Trump opposes Trump because he is anti-political correctness...and because ultimately he objects to socialism. Make no mistake: if Ted Cruz had been the nominee, or John Kasich, the charge that Republicans are racist fascists would be leveled at conservatives with the same level of vitriol that Leftists level against the GOP and especially Trump supporters now.

While the presidential election is drawing near and it appears that Trump might win, the university year is just beginning. On college campuses now professors are proselytizing to students, spreading the anti-Gospel lies of socialism. While that is going on the student government associations and their state-wide partners are registering students to vote in 'non-partisan' voter registration campaigns while actively promoting Leftist ideas like the Israeli Disinvestment movement, Black Lives Matter, and free college for illegal immigrants. These are the future leaders of America, and the only way to stop them is to remove all federal funding from universities until they stop being Leftist seminaries (to borrow a phrase from Dennis Prager). 

Freedom of Speech

Original photo courtesy of the PSU Vanguard

I don't keep it a secret that I am still a student attending university. If you read my Twitter profile (Yes, follow me) you'll see that I'm a graduate student finishing a doctorate in public policy. I attend Portland State University, the site of two recent Trump rallies that turned into riots instigated by communists on the #RegressiveLeft. Everything I learned about the #RegressiveLeft was from my time as a social justice warrior.

One of the things I've learned is that the far left is hostile to freedom of speech.  This isn't a profound observation now but in my time in the far left I and my peers believed that we were stalwart defenders of free speech. Only the Right was hostile to speech, in our view, as evident by their opposition to pornography, video games and music they didn't like. Today opposition to those things is the sole province of the left, not the right, with maybe the exception of pornography. When I was a leftist I would've agreed with the idea that 'speech is free but it comes with consequences,' though I wasn't a supporter of no-platforming, which is itself not a new phenomenon.

There is a stock line that Leftists remember and recite without thinking: "freedom of speech only applies to the government." By this they mean that freedom of speech is only guaranteed against government censorship. This is of course absurd, as they love the Heckler's Veto. This is by definition a a redefinition of free speech because freedom of speech isn't only a value enshrined in the US Bill of Rights. No, freedom of speech is a cultural value that any democratic society requires to remain free. Yet many societies don't have free speech. One only has to look to what the leftists in Europe have done to see the effect of restricting free speech.

Power is not just in the hands of the state. There is a contextual side to power that these regressives purposefully overlook when they organize mobs to take over events and turn them into propagandizing sessions. In short, mobs have a lot of power and when mobs move to silence opposition they fail the most basic test of free speech. Freedom of speech includes the right to be heard. The purpose of free speech is to promote a dialogue. If you watch the video above you'll see heckler's using noise to silence those they disagree with at the PSU Trump rally in April.Some mocked the Trump supports with sarcastic 'I can't hear you' while banging on drums. It is only through the unhindered expression of unpopular ideas that our own ideas are challenged.

Of course, the typical Social Justice Warrior doesn't want their ideas challenged. As I've written about endlessly here, they are authoritarians (scroll through the articles to see what I've said on that subject). At its core, contemporary Leftism is a utopian movement and to achieve this utopia, like past attempts, they will stop at nothing. Even their own claimed non-violent views are malleable, as can be seen at the recent Trump rallies in California, where Trump supporters were assaulted by Sanders supporters.

This from the Catholic Herald sums up the authoritarian nature of the #RegressiveLeft beautifully:

The generic name for the well-organized leftist gangs is “antifas,” short for anti-fascists—an Orwellian irony if ever there was one, seeing that the antifas’ tactics are thoroughly fascist. When anti-Islamization groups such as PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West) hold peaceful rallies or candle-lit “evening strolls,” they are often met by much larger gangs of antifa thugs intent on shutting them down and shutting them up. If they’re lucky, the peaceful protesters are protected by the police, and, if they’re not lucky, they get beaten up.

At Portland State during the first attempt at a Students for Trump meeting, the campus police refused to show up, leaving the small group of pro-Trump supporters at the hands of the mob. Thankfully that didn't turn violent, unlike the second attempt at a meeting. The media and leftists say that Trump and others bear responsibility for violence at his rallies, which is utter nonsense. This view was beautifully destroyed by Robert Spencer, noted educator on Islam who is often targeted by the Left because he dares tell the truth about that 'religion of peace.' What the Left, especially younger Leftists, fails to grasp is that people are accountable for their actions. If someone is 'triggered' by speech into doing something violent the guilty party is the person who engaged in violent behavior, not the speaker. Rarely can someone be legally held to account for speech because the nature of action is that an actor has to make the decision to engage in behavior. Disagreeable speech cannot be used to justify violence regardless of what is said because in the end we are all responsible for our actions.

As an aside I can guarantee everyone reading this: if Ted Cruz were the front runner there would be a similar reaction to him. Why? Because the Left does not want the left-wing establishment governance of America challenged. That is the truth. A front running Ted Cruz would be met with violence for his opposition to gay marriage, transgendered bathroom access, or any number of other positions. Trump is the front runner and likely nominee and as such is the target of the Left despite his general moderate positions on most policy issues.

When violence is a hallmark of a political movement that movement is authoritarian by definition. Whether it was the Bolsheviks in Russia, the Nazis in Germany, or the myriad movements in South America against foreign occupation, these movements all have in common an outcome of authoritarian dictatorship. I doubt this will play out in the US and UK in a similar manner simply because culturally these forces are so far outside the mainstream that they are already being soundly rejected by the population. But it is a cautionary note that in this we may see similarities from other regressive movements from history.

Emergency Culture and the Left

When your alma mater makes international news for violent
illiberal values you know you're in trouble.

Perhaps you've noticed that we live in a state of perpetual crisis. In the US it's a fixed part of our experience: after 9/11 we were in a constant state of vigilance against Islamic terrorism. In the Cold War it was a constant culture of emergency because of the threat of communism. Today our cultural emergencies are numerous, to which the left has added to crisis of 'rape culture' on college campuses as well as the shocking idea that some students at these same colleges in fact support Donald Trump (oh the horror). In comparison to the Cold War these 'emergencies' are trifling at best, or at worst non-existent.

My best example of this are the now two student radical protests against the Portland State University Students for Trump. I'm a grad student at PSU and I know from experience that the student radicals at my university don't care that they do not represent students. They believe themselves to be the revolutionary vanguard in the purest Marxist sense. The student newspaper ran the headline in all-caps "SUPPORT FOR TRUMP POLARIZES CAMPUS CLIMATE," which is nonsense because the vast majority of students just don't care about the political opinions of other students. The students who crashed the Students for Trump rally declared it an emergency to motivate their members and those students who sympathize with them (ie, the easily triggered) that there is a problem with white supremacists being on campus. The underlying assumptions are revealing too: that Trump supporters are white supremacists, the idea that it's okay to silence those students you disagree with because they say things that offend some identity-based group, and that freedom of speech only applies to the government.

In a state of emergency the government will curtail liberty. In the context of an earthquake, riot, invasion, plague or any horrible event you can think of it makes total sense for the government to temporarily use methods that in a democracy would otherwise never be accepted. But when talking about individual action and social justice warriors in particular this is a much more murky issue. I've been told many, many times in relation to the PSU Students for Trump fiasco that freedom of speech only applies to the government and that when you support hate speech you should expect consequences. Freedom of speech is a cultural value essential to a functional democracy that the population must respect, for without that the government will not respect freedom of speech. A democracy cannot function when the response to 'offensive' speech is censorship by the population, especially in the form of mob justice.

The emergency culture permits egregious violations of civil liberties. The best example is the warrantless wiretapping that began in the Bush administration and continued (and was expanded) under the Obama administration. Social justice warriors have either directly taken advantage of this climate or stumbled into this phenomenon through creating a climate of fear and perceived emergency by using classrooms and social media to suggest that there are institutionalized racist, sexist, and transphobic systems of oppression that cannot be proven yet are widely accepted in SJW circles as an article of faith. These founding religious myths of the social justice movement are believed with the fervor and certitude that Christians recite and believe the Apostles Creed, or perhaps a little closer to the truth, with the same obdurate fortitude that Islamists believe the most violent parts of the Qu'ran.

These myths, when combined with the air of emergency, combine to create a toxic environment that is hostile to liberty. Authoritarian movements ALWAYS have foundational myths. For the communists in Russia it was the proletarian struggle and the dialectic of history. The Nazis had bizarre racial theories about the 'Aryan' race. Social justice warriors have institutionalized systems of oppression that target women, people of color, and those who live the LGBTQ lifestyle. This toxic soup is a real threat to the culture of democracy in the US, for without a vibrant love of democracy and liberal values a liberal republican democracy cannot survive. It isn't enough for the state to respect our critical liberties, as we've seen the Congress, the Courts, and the President disrespect liberties. The people, regardless of political loyalties, must respect first the values that make a culture of democracy possible.

SJWs and the Culture of Comfort

The rise of the #RegressiveLeft in recent years in the West has left many regular people confused about how this happened in the first place. I'm about to make a couple of ugly comparisons to prove a point, so consider this your 'trigger warning' if you're easily offended. We've been trained to think that authoritarian movements gain purchase during times of economic upheaval and unrest. Case in point, see the rise of the Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union, which was caused by a confluence of economic problems including agrarian and labor issues, as well as issues related to the educated class, among others that were not solved in the 1905 revolution; Russian activity in WWI would be the catalyst that allowed the authoritarian movement to win final victory and found the USSR.

The second example is the uglier one, the rise of the Nazism in Germany. As is well document, the rise of Nazism can directly be linked to the economic conditions imposed on Germany after losing WWI. Unemployment was rampant, the currency was worthless, and the government inept to fix conditions imposed by unfair treaty conditions that left the country helpless to fix its condition. The political environment was fertile for the rise of a demagogue.

In comparison, the rise of the Regressive Left is mystifying. The concept of a Social Justice Warrior hadn't taken hold prior to the Great Recession, though conservatives were warning the rest of us about the worst tendencies in the left for decades running. Even so, the Great Recession was not even remotely on the same scale of economic instability as the other mentioned periods were. Instead, Regressives have risen amidst a condition of plenty and material comfort. The rise of the Regressive Left bears all the hallmarks of a bourgeoisie movement, coming from the sheltered ranks of the colleges and middle classes in the US and UK.

I use the 'b' word on purpose. George Orwell described the middle classes as the shock absorbers for the bourgeoisie, as the middle class would take the brunt of the negative consequences of economics and political disorder while the upper crust would fare fine. In Orwell's time it was the elites who lead the leftist movement. Today, as in the leadership of 'Black Lives Matter' and the rise of the Regressive Left on college campuses, again we see the children of the elite fighting against perceived privilege. One wonders if they've ever looked into a mirror.

When I was growing up in the 90s I distinctly recall spanking being a hot button social issue. Parents were admonished to put their kids in 'time out' (a sort of precursor to the safe space today) to punish them instead of giving a few well-measured swats on the butt. This was the first coddling that people my age and younger received from society and it's only gotten worse since. Poor kids weren't coddled, at least at home, but the children of the middle class certainly were.

The Social Justice Warrior culture is the direct result of this coddling. When you attend college you take your first steps into something like the real world. You encounter ideas that are different than the ones you were raised with, you gain a modicum of responsibility and you come face to face with the specter of crushing debt. Add in the propaganda administered in many classrooms by cultural Marxist professors and the result is a toxic environment that brainwashes people at a very impressionable age. The comfort has been altered – not even removed, just altered – and the result is a troubling environment that is always hostile to the mind that had previously been coddled. President Obama famously and rightly said that we shouldn't coddle college students. The problem is that we are talking about people who have been coddled their entire lives. The merest reduction in coddling has left these people unhinged, especially when radical political ideas that prey on the biases their parents raised them with have been hammered into their heads.

This is the result of comfort and a society that hasn't challenged people in a meaningful way in the lifetimes of the youngest people identifying as SJWs. There hasn't been a real conflict in the US since the Vietnam era. The Cold War and its accompanying threat of annihilation is as real to them as the Civil War – that is, things they read about in school and nothing more than that. Even 9/11 is historical, as it and the war in Iraq happened when they were children. Many SJWs barely remember George W Bush and the culture of terror fear that gripped the US from 2002-2006.

The lack of existential conflict has lead to really watered down social movements that are themselves vehicles for authoritarianism. To be sure, the Regressive Left promotes authoritarianism through raging activism that shows that the SJW-on-the-street thinks they are the member of the Revolutionary Vanguard, when really they are merely the shock absorbers for people like the privileged leaders of BLM. The irony would be funny if the results weren't terrifying. My only consolation is that the Regressive Left is failing. The growing movement against the authoritarian movement they represent illustrates that.

DISPATCHES FROM THE PATRIARCHY!!!! Part 1

BREAKING NEWS: It is my distinct pleasure to announce that I have formally been appointed as a member of the Patriarchy. I take my duty very seriously to report to everyone about what this sophisticated, all reaching conspiracy does.  Don't worry intrepid reader: I'll be reporting from the inside of the Zionist – er, Patriarchy from time to time while still reporting on the madness of Social Justice Warriors.

The following is a transcript of the first meeting of the Patriarchy that I attended, with my induction ceremony deleted. Trust me you don't want to know what was involved in that. I'm still sore.

Scene: A poorly lit room somewhere in western Europe. On a dais is seated the projected hologram of someone who looks suspiciously like the bad guy from the new Star Wars film. The dais sits, somehow, at the head of a long table. Not a single person sits at the table. Every position at the table is a hologram projection station. At each 'seat' is the projection of a different member of the Patriarchy High Council. Each station is active save for one.

Supreme Leader: Gentlemen, I trust that the rampant oppression of women by the white, male and sometimes Jewish power structure is continuing unimpeded?

Across from the Supreme Leader is seated a young, smarmy looking man in his late 20s or early 30s. He's clutching a Wu-Tang one of a kind album in one hand and in the other are grossly inflated HIV drugs. We'll call him 'Smarmy'

Smarmy: Your Greatness, things are going well despite the setback in Europe. As you will recall from our last meeting we had assumed that the coordinated sex attacks by a tacky and not terribly subtle group of 'refugees' across major European cities would have earned a response by feminists. To our total surprise the feminists either ignored the attacks completely or called for a general curfew of men regardless of identification.

Supreme Leader: Yes, I was surprised myself. Our adversaries are at-times canny. They've even gained control of the major social media outlets.

To Smary's left is seated a renowned biologist and atheism advocate. Publicly he claims to be a feminist but he was recently exposed for his true opinions.

Biologist: They managed to use social media to get me temporarily disinvited from a famous skeptics conference I was going to attend.

Supreme Leader: Didn't you Tweet a videocomparing feminists to Islamists?

Biologist: Unfortunately that was a misstep.

Smarmy: It was hilarious though.

Biologist: The affair turned into a victory. I was recently reinvited to speak, which I will be doing.

Caesar: That's a great start darling but the feminists and SJWs are now censoring Twitter feeds. My many wonderful followers can't see what I'm tweeting most of the time.

Caesar is a gay conservative anti-feminist journalist for one of the bigger conservative internet news sources that will likely be censored once the feminist candidate for president is elected.

Smarmy: Isn't that new Trust and Safety Council that Twitter established almost all anti-free speech advocates?

Candidate: It's true. Thankfully I've avoided this topic on the campaign trail. I'm not sure I can lie convincingly about free speech.

Caesar: You've done a masterful job of making young impressionable leftists believe that your plan to tax the rich to pay for everything is remotely plausible. Daddy is very pleased.

The one empty seat is reserved for Daddy, a candidate for President of the UnitedStates. His membership in this body would shock no one. Candidate is a old, Jewish, white male who has managed to divide the SJWs and Feminists in the US in the presidential primaries. He is presently running as a Democrat, claims to be a Democratic Socialist, and has slowed the Feminist candidate's ascension to the nomination. Amazingly no one has noticed that anti-semitic, anti-white racists in the US are supporting an old white Jewish man for president.

Candidate: I've been manipulating the impressionable my whole career. It's what I do. But how do we manipulate the Trust and Safety Council?

Supreme Leader: Do you have any connections within the organizations that make up the Council?

Candidate: Unfortunately I don't. I'm not sure where the impressionable demagogue who runs Feminist Frequency's allegiances lie in the election. If she supports my candidacy then I may be able to get a meeting with her.

Supreme Leader: See if you can get a meeting with her. If you can...Bring. Her. To. Me.

With that the Supreme Leader sits back and vanishes, drawing the meeting to an end.