“South Park” dodged a bullet. The show’s 19th season premiere is about PCU, a new frat whose members are political correctness vigilantes set on blasting their sirens before violently “checking someone’s privilege”; a new character, the aggressive PC Principal, spends his time enforcing a microaggression-free campus. When resident smartass Eric Cartman stumbles over his (for once) well-intentioned words, PC Principal beats him unconscious in a school bathroom.

If Comedy Central’s schedule had been a few weeks off, the channel would have been looking at a big, ironic PR problem: On Oct. 26, a Columbia, South Carolina, school resource officer threw a teenage student out of her desk and dragged her across a classroom. The video of the attack went viral. In the absence of a full-on scandal, the juxtaposition nevertheless makes the writers of “South Park” look small-minded and foolish. The episode is a classic PC-police story, and it shows how little the caricature of an uptight lefty has changed in 30 years: These stuck-up people, the line goes, become so opposed to oppression that they start oppressing other people.

“South Park” has long represented a brand of libertarian cultural conservatism that’s enchanted with blasphemy and playful hate speech. It’s a political aesthetic that made a lot more sense in the days of Lenny Bruce, when comedians risked actual prosecution for off-color routines. But today, a new national understanding about how the police do their jobs, spurred by videos like the one from Columbia, shows just how stupid the police metaphor is. A child being beaten by the police for using the wrong words isn’t a silly joke; it’s the real evening news.

In the face of actual police violence, calling people out for policing because they’re aggressive about their politics would be laughable — if it weren’t so pathetic. In an excellent feature for The East Bay Express earlier this month, Sam Levin explored the use of the neighborhood organizing site Nextdoor in Oakland. Nextdoor is an electronic bulletin board where neighbors can post messages, sort of like an online telephone pole; it also makes it easier to reach out to authorities about suspected crime. Some white Oakland residents have used it to report “suspicious” black people who weren’t doing anything wrong. When black neighbors complained about racial profiling on the site, an administrator said these folks they were being “pretty aggressive at being the political correctness police.”

Comparing someone to the police for asking people not to call the police is the height of libertarian cultural conservative contradiction. All the anti-PC platitudes about free speech and the right to one’s opinion in a free society fly out of the window when people defend not their safety or well-being but their right to live free from nonwhites. By any consistent ethical standard, a black person’s right to walk down the street unmolested trumps homeowners’ right to use the police for real estate segregation. Yet the cop callers are more concerned about the overpolicing of their language than the overpolicing of their streets.