Statesboro, Ga. — DEPENDING on whom you ask, political correctness is either an effort to expunge offensive expression from our culture, or it’s a weapon fashioned by the left to brainwash the next generation. If you believe the right-wing media, the next generation’s brains have already been sufficiently washed: The internet is flooded with disparaging articles about “trigger warnings,” “microaggressions” and “safe spaces” where, the right charges, frail young liberals seek shelter from unpleasant realities.

I could not help but think of that idea, the “safe space,” during a recent assignment to cover a Trump rally at the Coliseum Complex in Greensboro, N.C. Inside the auditorium, men gleefully referred to Hillary Clinton with misogynistic slurs; those same smears were printed on T-shirts sold by vendors outside. The men and women sporting them were constantly being pulled into photographs with their fellow Trump supporters, all of them slinging their arms around one another and flashing smiles and thumbs up.

Seemingly emboldened by the atmosphere of serial transgression, a man a few feet away from me answered a warm-up speaker’s call for solidarity with the victims of the massacre in Orlando, Fla., by shouting, “The gays had it coming!”

As expected, Donald J. Trump’s speech that night paid necessary lip service to those victims, but he wasted no time in blaming the tragedy on political correctness, which, he explained, was “deadly” and kept people from talking about the problem of violent extremism. Like most of his directionless ramblings, the rhetoric was short on specifics and heavy on blame, of which there was plenty to go around — Mrs. Clinton, President Obama, Muslims, liberals and pretty much everyone else save for the sort of people represented by that night’s crowd.