Roger Scruton, Toby Young, Jordan Peterson: The real snowflakes are on the right, not the left Their ideas are now more assertively challenged. As natural born elitists, they find that disorienting and awfully hard

A new oppressed group has arrived: male, white, educated, still powerful, yet full of self-pity. Right-wing malehood, in particular, is getting wobbly and seeking attention.

The grouch of last week was Professor Roger Scruton, an Englishman philosopher, a fox-hunting, traditionalist prelapsarian who, for years, has railed against left-wingers, diversity, and other “enemies” of western civilisation.

Always controversial, Scruton wrote pro-smoking articles while getting paid £54,000 per year by a tobacco company. After this was revealed, his reputation crashed, but soon recovered. The ideologue is a longtime friend of Viktor Orban, the anti-immigrant Prime Minister of Hungary. These are some undeniable, unsavoury facts.

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‘These free speech fundamentalists, it seems, can’t live by the credo’

Recently, a leftie New Statesman journalist interviewed Scruton and, as it later transpired, misrepresented what he said. (It was indefensible journalism.) Tweets appeared quoting some of the professor’s previously aired unsound views. The Government dismissed him from his unpaid role on a housing commission.

Silenced… on national radio

Fellow political travellers howled; Scruton became an instant martyr, claiming the right was being “demonised” and “silenced”. Sure it is. Just ask Nigel Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg, and Liam Fox and Ukippers. In truth, Scruton is always on the airwaves and in the right-wing press. He was invited on to Radio 4’s Today programme to discuss how very silenced he was.

On to other such cynical operators and moaning minnies. Toby Young is the most ubiquitous. He too was dropped from some government education advisory role after some of his more colourful tweets were circulated. Now he gets jumpy whenever anyone on the right is held to account or robustly questioned. And so, there he was, predictable and pathetic, defending Scruton’s honour.

Freedom fighters

Before this furore, another academic “freedom fighter” had fallen to earth and was kicking up a storm. Canadian professor Jordan Peterson, handsome, incisive and enemy of progressives, got himself a fellowship at Cambridge University. This best-selling author of regressive tomes gets his fans worked up over “unfair” discrimination, propagates the idea that white privilege is a “Marxist lie”, and had a happy pic taken with a man from New Zealand whose T-shirt displayed the words, “I am a Proud Islamaphobe”.

Cambridge University withdrew his fellowship, suggesting that Peterson did not “uphold our principals”, and the messiah of masculinity, mightily dismayed, is talking about it relentlessly.

By the weekend another bloke had joined this gallery of the peeved. And it’s Bret Easton Ellis, American lit’s bad boy, now turned into a sad mass of resentment. His new book, White, is a polemic against contemporary life, especially social media. Lacking self-awareness, he bangs on and on, just like those sleepless, hopeless blokes who tweet rubbish all night.

He is furious that gay jokes are “banned”, that millennials are weak and weepy, that Orwellian censors are everywhere, that a female friend thought he was horribly wrong to criticise the “aesthetics” of Black Lives Matter. (Sir, did you want the bodies presented like art objects?) What he hates most is “self-victimisation”. And yet, like other unreconstructed cultural dinosaurs, he rants hysterically about the changed world where men like him can’t walk tall any more; in which they are victims.

These free speech fundamentalists, it seems, can’t live by the credo. Their ideas are now more assertively challenged. As natural born elitists, they find that disorienting and awfully hard.

Shall we call them snowflakes? Or, better, help them understand that they no longer dominate the world of ideas, and really should stop acting like spoilt, entitled, intellectual aristocrats.

Twitter: @y_alibhai