Inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out, and they’re getting out.

This lengthy article in GQ is mostly just one long victory dance over the apparent fact that Milo Yiannopoulos is deeply in debt. But along the way, Luke Darby of GQ (which is supposed to be a fashion magazine, as far as I know, but today the Leftist agitprop is everywhere, with no letup) makes some revealing statements about the Left’s mindset and agenda. David Horowitz has famously said, “Inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out,” and now, as the Left grows increasingly shrill and deranged in its hatred for Donald Trump and failure to contain the populist groundswell, they’re getting out.

Darby says:

“He also owes money to a rogue’s gallery of other right-wingers, including the anti-Muslim zealot Pamela Geller.”

Why is Pamela Geller an “anti-Muslim zealot”? Because she opposes jihad mass murder and Sharia oppression of women, gays, and others. Luke Darby, if pressed, which he never will be, would probably admit that he also opposes jihad mass murder and Sharia oppression of women, gays, and others, but he would claim that Pamela Geller “hates” Muslims and he doesn’t, or tars “all Muslims” as jihad terrorists and/or Sharia supremacists, and he doesn’t. She doesn’t do those things, however, and it is reflexive now among Leftist “journalists” to smear as “anti-Muslim” any and all opposition to jihad and Sharia, and to try to discredit and marginalize it as “racism,” “bigotry,” and “Islamophobia.” If the jihadists and the influence of Sharia continue to advance in the West, Darby may someday regret that he jumped on this particular bandwagon without a moment’s thought, but by then it will be far too late.

More Darby:

“Liberals who buy into Yiannopoulos’s bad-faith arguments for free speech, that the only way to defeat his punchy bigotry is to validate it with debate, should take note: When Yiannopoulos made his pedophilia-friendly comments, his conservative patrons and audiences didn’t invite him to a public forum to weigh the pros and cons of what he said.”

It is Darby who is in bad faith here. There was nothing for Milo’s “conservative patrons and audiences” to debate, because Milo immediately apologized and backtracked. It wasn’t as if he was out there calling for debate on the pros and cons of pedophilia.

Note also Darby’s phrase, “Yiannopoulos’s bad faith arguments for free speech.” Darby is referring to Milo’s calls to Leftists to debate him, not about pedophilia, but about political issues. Darby, however, simply labels Milo’s views “punchy bigotry” and wants him silenced. This is increasingly how the Left deals with dissent. Leftists, like Muslim spokesmen, appear to know that they can’t win debates, so they simply want those whom they hate to be shut down. Darby doesn’t contemplate the possibility that once he and his allies have opened this door, their own views could be shut down if they fall out of favor with the elites; apparently he doesn’t think that could ever happen.

Darby adds:

“Media personalities like Jones and Yiannopoulos don’t just rely on attention to ideologically thrive. They also need it just to financially survive. Taking their megaphones remains the best way to mitigate the damage they’ve already done.”

Darby here openly endorses the deplatforming and silencing of those whom he hates. He appears to have full trust in the social media giants that they will wield this power in a way of which he will approve. Once again, it doesn’t seem to occur to him that if Milo and Alex Jones can be deplatformed, so can Luke Darby. He is a totalitarian, and totalitarians don’t contemplate being out of power, for power is their god, and they will do anything to attain it and keep it.

It is, of course, nothing new that Leftists want to destroy the freedom of speech. Luke Darby is by no means the first Leftist “journalist” to applaud the deplatforming of Milo, Alex Jones, and others whom the Left hates, but the fact that he is writing this in GQ is as disquieting as it is incongruous. It is another confirmation of the fact that frank and open authoritarianism, with its centerpiece the forcible silencing of dissent, is increasingly taken for granted as axiomatically necessary in the Leftist mainstream. For the defenders of the freedom of speech to prevail against this will take a massive cultural transformation.

Such a change may be on the horizon; Trump may be its vanguard. But whether it comes, and whether the U.S. is preserved as a free society, will be up to us.