I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of leftists suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly triggered. 2016 claims another victim, RIP America.

I didn’t have a vote but if I did I’d probably vote somewhere in the order of Stein, Clinton, Johnson and even that-guy-whose-name-I-can’t-be-bothered-googling before I’d vote for Trump. I’m just about as left-wing as it gets and that’s by Scottish standards which is a country more left than most. I’m a left-wing liberal feminist who votes for the Scottish Green Party, I’m secular and I’m for the decriminalisation of drugs and all that other good liberal stuff.

The fact that I feel I need to point that out before daring to critique my own “side” of the political spectrum lest I lose my membership to the exclusive club of those who toe the line of the established way of thinking is an ode to how distastefully shackled thought and speech have become. There’s a reason the polls got it so wrong, people are afraid to speak their minds for fear of being shamed and derided.

This is the fruit reaped from the left’s crusade over the last half-decade to slap classic literature with trigger warnings, ban Halloween costumes, no-platform speakers and brand anyone who has concerns about the mass importation of hyper-conservative versions of Islam as a racist. Then when they lose the vote they shit the bed and ask us to be careful with their feelings while they cry — some literally cry — over how “uneducated” everyone is. The types of people who have lived such comfortable privileged middle-class university-educated lives that even just losing an election is enough to cause them trauma. This is the side of the political spectrum I drearily call my own and they wonder why the populist voters are feeling disenfranchised.

The philosophers of our time have now been replaced with websites like EverydayPhlegminism.com and any ideological nut with a tumblr blog. Students no longer learn about free speech from JS Mill’s On Liberty but instead by reading safe space policies which have bastardised the word “safety” to the point that it no longer means physical safety but instead refers to freedom from speech. All this is done in the name of social “progress” or social “justice” or whatever other rhetoric they use to style themselves as the arbiters of morality and the guardians of rightthinking and rightspeaking.

In the space of a sentence the far-left will claim to have a monopoly on compassion while simultaneously dismissing half the electorate as “uneducated racist plebs that voted for hate and fascism who should have to pass an intelligence test before voting.” The “compassionate” left can no longer win by shaming the masses and then just shoving a love heart emoji on the end, they need to bring facts and arguments now.

All the celebrities and mainstream media outlets stepped in line to support the establishment and possibly the worst candidate the Democrats have ever run but the ivory tower has finally fallen. Ordinary people have placed the elites squarely on the naughty step and until they learn to stop demonising and sneering at people they disagree with they’ll keep losing elections.

It happened here with Brexit and it’s happened in America now too. The far-left can nuzzle themselves deeper inside their ideological “safe space” if they like and echo back to each other that they’re the ones that are “woke” but if they do then their ludicrous constraints on language will be ignored while everyone else has an open dialogue.

“But it’s not against a person’s right to free speech to shame, shun, exclude and no-platform them for having the wrong opinion!” That argument’s a red herring. It’s not enough to have the legal right to free speech, we also need a culture of free speech.

Brendan O’Neill said it best as he invariably does. “The return of fascism? A victory for white supremacy? Everyone needs to calm down and grow up. To marshal the dead of the Holocaust and the lynched of the early 20th century as walk-on actors in your own petty moral psychodrama is really low. Leave the dead be, you history-plundering melodramatists. Come up with your own language to describe your feelings and your political concerns.” — Brendan O’Neill

The sad irony of intersectional identity politics is that by attempting to understand the personal experiences of prejudice people might experience it only ends up dividing people further into pigeon holes and then makes generalisations about those groups.

“UCLA says ‘Color Blindness,’ the idea we shouldn’t obsess over people’s race, is a microaggression. If you refuse to treat an individual as a “racial/cultural being,” then you’re being aggressive. This is a profound perversion of what has been considered the reasoned, liberal approach for decades — that treating people as “racial/cultural beings” is wrong and dehumanizing. […] New college speech codes don’t only infantilize students and stymie open, frank discussion. They also point to the creeping re-racialisation of society, and to the rebranding of universalism itself as a form of racism. Call me microaggressive all you like but, as a humanist, I will not treat my fellow citizens as ‘racial/cultural beings.’” — Brendan O’Neill

Classical liberals and freedom feminists despair as authoritarian identity politics run amok in the hijacked and sullied name of liberalism and feminism. Feminism that opposes honour killings, acid attacks, body shaming, slut shaming and victim blaming — that’s good feminism. But if all your movement has to offer is rebranding the fact that 80% of suicides are men as male privilege or toxic masculinity then when they disagree you dismiss them as mansplainers and then when they vote against you it only reaffirms your conspiracy theory of white supremacist patriarchy, then you are trapped inside a cultish bubble of misinformation and terrible ideas that are self-righteously marketed as being “woke”.

“Intersectional feminism is a repressive ideology. It infantilizes women. Trigger warnings, microaggression-monitoring, privilege-checking … These are not really about protecting vulnerable, marginalized people. They are illiberal means of preventing the free exchange of ideas. It fights racism and sexism by classifying everybody according to their race and sex.” — Christina Hoff Sommers

As my side of the political spectrum continues to lose its mind it’s comforting to know that I’m not the only person that disagrees with this lunacy. Sam Harris has always been a bastion of reason so it’s nice to know that he’s cutting through this identity ideology as effectively as he dismantled religion.

“As you probably intuit I think identity politics are just poison unless your identity at this point is homo sapiens.” — Sam Harris

“As far as I can tell becoming a part of a movement doesn’t let anybody think clearly so I distrust identity politics of all kinds. […] I’m not the first person to notice that it’s pretty strange that knowing a person’s position on any one of these issues generally allows you to predict his position on the others. This shouldn’t happen, some of these issues are totally unrelated. Why should a person’s attitude toward guns be predictive of his views on climate change or immigration or abortion? And yet it almost certainly is in our society. That’s a sign that people are joining tribes and movements, it’s not the sign of clear thinking. If you’re reasoning honestly about facts then the colour of your skin is irrelevant.” — Sam Harris

Dave Rubin is a shining beacon of free speech and a bulwark against no-platforming. He keeps me sane knowing that there are still people on the left that are staying true to classical values of liberalism.

“It’s almost as if you endlessly call people bigots and racists they’ll eventually get fed up and turn on you.” — Dave Rubin

“Blame is squarely on [the regressive left]. They drove decent liberals to the right and they energized people who were tired of being mocked and belittled.” — Dave Rubin

As media outlets that I used to respect like Huffington Post descend deeper into the ideological rabbit hole, Reason.com provides an island of moderation in a sea of zealotry for those still committed to reason and liberty that isn’t simply nominal.

“Still others will say the country is simply racist to its core. […] Trump won because he convinced a great number of Americans that he would destroy political correctness. I have tried to call attention to this issue for years. I have warned that political correctness actually is a problem on college campuses, where the far-left has gained institutional power and used it to punish people for saying or thinking the wrong thing.” — Reason.com

Identity politics jumped the shark and completed its descent into absurdity when BLM reared its fanatical head in the UK to let everyone know that actually climate change is now racist too.

“Climate change is a racist crisis: that’s why Black Lives Matter closed an airport” — The Guardian

Just when you thought the Clinton campaign couldn’t be any more out of touch with the people, they continued their war on humour by insulting meme culture using leftists’ favourite word to brand a cartoon frog a “racist!”

“Why is there a frog standing directly behind Trump? That’s Pepe. He’s a symbol associated with white supremacy.” — HillaryClinton.com

Milo Yiannopolous is infamous for being the most offensive person on the internet. I don’t think I need to waste time convincing anyone that his beliefs are disagreeable but he is right about one thing.

“There’s a sense in the media in America also that the range of acceptable thoughts and opinion — the ones that you can safely express without risking your newspaper column or risking your career — that’s becoming narrower and narrower all the time and also being shoved quite far to the left. So irrespective of your political positions, my view is that you should want your adversaries to state their arguments in the strongest possible terms and you should want — if you’re confident that you’re right and your facts are right and that your way is the best possible way — then you should want a free marketplace of ideas. […] I would say probably about thirty percent of the audience everywhere I go are disaffected liberals. People who don’t like their own side who wonder how their own side went so crazy and who come up to me afterwards and say you know what I don’t really agree with you on anything but it was really important for me to be here.” — Milo Yiannopolous

If you haven’t done so yet then you need to watch Jonathan Pie, he will heal you. If ever there was a speech to cut through safe space culture and maybe even just sow the seeds of doubt in some of the most dyed-in-the-wool leftists it’s this perfect piece of delectable diatribe.

“The left have now decided that any other opinion, any other way of looking at the world is unacceptable. We don’t debate anymore because the left won the cultural war. So if you’re on the right you’re a freak. You’re evil, you’re racist, you’re stupid, you are a basket of deplorables. How do you think people are going to vote if you talk to them like that? When has anyone ever been persuaded by being insulted or labelled? So now if you’re on the right or even against the prevailing view you are attacked for raising your opinion. […] All the polls were wrong because when asked people can’t admit what they think. They can’t admit what they think because they’re not allowed to. The left don’t allow them to. We have made people unable to articulate their position for fear of being shut down. They’re embarrassed to say it, every time someone on the left says you mustn’t say that they’re contributing to this culture.” — Jonathan Pie

For the first time in recent history the left have got it completely wrong. There’s a modern crisis of free speech as it’s strangled by the recent resurgence of political correctness. Many things that aren’t politically correct happen to be factually correct and facts don’t care about your feelings. When it comes to things like trigger warnings — the trendy alternative medicine for anything from PTSD to mild mental discomfort — it’s not enough to have our hearts in the right place, we also need to have our facts in the right place. The truly liberal left have formed an unlikely alliance with the libertarian right to defend free speech from the radical versions of Intersectional Feminism that have become prevalent on university campuses and the sneering shaming attitudes of the far-left elites. Trump is some distasteful medicine, but some lessons need to be learned the hard way.

More and more people are standing up to this bullying establishment of censorship-in-the-name-of-safety. Shaming and insulting someone for having the wrong opinion won’t work anymore. This basket of deplorables is taking back free speech.

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