Essentially, the "campus free speech" crowd's playbook consists of: one, saying liberal college students are hostile to free expression; two, going to college campuses and saying things that will piss off liberal college students; three, declaring the protests that inevitably ensue—which they had the clear intent of attracting—constitute a campaign by liberal college students to "silence" them. There's never any mention of, say, the extensive efforts at both the state and federal level to make it functionally illegal to criticize Israel's policies towards its Palestinian residents. And of course there's no mention of the fact that the President of the United States has declared the free press to be an enemy of the state. Those are the kind of First Amendment issues these folks are less concerned about.

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Speaking of the president, his oldest failson, Donald Trump, Jr., went on over to UCLA on Sunday to run The Playbook in order to promote his new book, Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us. (We first had the location as Berkeley, once the home turf of the free speech movement but known more nationally in recent times for the raucous protests, which have sometimes turned riotous, that have greeted various free-speech grifters. We regret the error.) As usual, the complaint that a conservative is getting silenced is coming via extensive TV appearances, public events, and a book deal. Junior went in the hopes of causing a reaction from liberals there that might boost sales.

But as The Guardian reports, Junior's event with Turning Point USA, a right-wing campus group that complains constantly about collegiate speech policing while operating a "Professor Watchlist" targeting educators who they deem insufficiently sympathetic to conservative politics, caught a different kind of backlash.

Donald Trump Jr ventured on to the University of California’s overwhelmingly liberal Los Angeles campus on Sunday, hoping to prove what he had just argued in his book – that a hate-filled American left was hell-bent on silencing him and anyone else who supported the Trump presidency.

But the appearance backfired when his own supporters, diehard Make America Great Again conservatives, raised their voices most loudly in protest and ended up drowning him out barely 20 minutes into an event scheduled to last two hours.

The audience was angry that Trump Jr and his girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, would not take questions. The loud shouts of “USA! USA!” that greeted Trump when he first appeared on the stage of a university lecture hall to promote his book Triggered: How The Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us quickly morphed into even louder, openly hostile chants of “Q and A! Q and A!”

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Here's what that looked like, complete with Guilfoyle's return-fire suggesting that the protesters, uh, use Tinder.

Apparently, some of the loudest voices were affiliated with a group called America First, a far-right young conservative faction led by a 21-year-old podcaster named Nicholas Fuentes. These folks have been disrupting Turning Point USA events and tormenting the group's founder, the once-bediapered Charlie Kirk, on the basis that it's essentially for RINOs. It was probably inevitable that the mainstream pro-Trump youth group, Turning Point, would eventually be challenged by folks who are even more...out there.

The nationalism that Fuentes and Co. are pushing is no laughing matter, however. The Washington Post has the scoop on him.

The host of an ultraconservative podcast and YouTube show called “America First,” Fuentes has appeared on YouTube with bloggers who advocate for a white ethnostate. He has used slurs and promoted anti-Semitism in his broadcasts, which has put him at odds with Daily Wire editor Ben Shapiro. Fuentes marched in Charlottesville with white supremacists during the deadly Unite the Right rally in 2017, the Boston Globe reported.

For those who need reminding, there is no way to have a white ethnostate without somehow getting rid of nonwhite people, or at least stripping them of citizenship. So what is it, do you suppose, that these people are really suggesting?

Fuentes was once invited to speak at a Turning Point event, but since seems to have identified space to the group's right and sought to exploit it. Now it appears they'll do battle for the next generation of Young Republicans: will they merely be extreme conservatives who try to intimidate college professors with watchlists, or literal advocates of an American ethnostate? What an exciting time to be alive. This all should be proof enough that the ideological disease that has infected the Republican Party will not be excised if and when Donald Trump departs the nation's highest office. The reactionary impulse is here to stay, ready to be seized on by the next right-winger with the will to power and an ethics deficit to match.

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It is funny, however, to see the Stop Silencing Me! meme used against the Stop Silencing Me! crowd. You either die a free-speech hero, or live long enough to become a safe-space snowflake.

Editor's Note: This post has been updated to reflect that Donald Trump, Jr. visited UCLA, not Berkeley.