Дональд Трамп - Triggered

If you answered “yes” to only one or two, hold on. We’re not done yet. Here’s the second part of the list:

Is the person you disagree with:

African American/Asian/Hispanic/Native American?

A woman?

A Muslim?

A Democrat?

Poor?

Transgender?

Under a lot of stress right now?

An illegal immigrant?

If you checked off any of these boxes, unfortunately, you’re also going to have to shut up. In fact, why don’t you just strap a dog muzzle on your face. These days, that’s the only way you’ll be able to make the radical left in this country happy. This kind of muzzling has been going on for so long that most people probably don’t even realize the strangeness of it anymore. The left owns most of the space in the public square, having all the major news organizations on its side. It’s the same with social (or not-so-social) media. They have a literal army of social justice warriors across every medium. They even have the vast majority of colleges and universities covered, to ensure that the next generation of voters are brainwashed young! Don’t get me started on safe spaces, where you can express all your feelings in a three-foot-square designated box on campus.

But what happens if you reverse the roles?

Well, then, none of the above applies. If you’re a black Muslim woman looking to criticize a white male, not only can you do so with complete impunity, you get to be a guest on The Rachel Maddow Show . And once you get there, whatever you say is gospel. Your feelings—and you—are infallible.

Today, those on the left are allowed to say whatever they want with zero consequences. They’re allowed to question anyone, protest anyone, and start riots in opposition to anyone, and nothing will happen in return. The liberal press will make them look heroic. CNN, the Washington Post , and the New York Times have all used the phrase “antihate protestors” to describe Antifa thugs. You don’t hear the press say a bad word about the extremely dangerous rhetoric that comes from Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and the rest of the Squad. But if a conservative says or does something they don’t like—such as, I don’t know, getting booked to speak at the University of California, Berkeley, or some other bastion of higher learning—well, then, he or she is a racist or a sexist or a person without a soul.

Nowhere is this double standard more evident than on college campuses, where everything is permitted and no one is in control. During the time I spent on the campaign in 2016, I learned that some of the most dangerous ideas that permeate our culture today originate in the classrooms of our most liberal universities. That’s where liberals have their feelings coddled, their worst impulses encouraged, and their brains warped by weird radical theories. They want diversity in everything except thought. Conservatives, on the other hand, are told to shut up and stay in the shadows. Countless times on college campuses I’ve had scared conservative students come up to me to say thank you for making them feel normal and welcome in their school. It is that bad and worse. Below is the first paragraph of an op-ed piece written last year by a student on the staff of the Yale Daily News .

Republicans are single-handedly destroying the Yale community. They do not offer anything substantial to our campus. They are all racist, bigoted, homophobes, whose mere presence serves as an unwelcome reminder that Donald J. Trump is our president. The very idea that there are Republicans lurking among us is truly disturbing and offensive. I am tired of having to share a campus with people who hate minorities and support the patriarchy. If Yale is truly a progressive school that cares about the safety and mental health of its students, it will stop accepting Republicans.

The insanity probably reached a tipping point around September 2017, when a mainstream conservative named Ben Shapiro was invited to speak at UC Berkeley. It had been a while since I had been on a college campus long enough to know just how crazy they were. But I was watching the news coverage in my office, and the whole thing seemed very familiar. As the event drew closer, protestors gathered where the event was going to take place. The crowd began chanting “No Trump. No KKK. No fascist USA!” in unison.

Around the building, there were police in full riot gear. Obviously, the Berkeley administration had learned from its mistakes. A few months earlier, it had allowed a speech by a conservative British political commentator, Milo Yiannopoulos, to be shut down by the social justice mob. Student activists and members of Antifa had shown up with weapons and wearing hockey pads, ready to rumble. The campus police hadn’t been prepared to deal with that kind of assault. By the end of that night, the protestors had caused about $500,000 worth of damage and brutally assaulted dozens of people who had stood in their way—or, in some cases, people who had just happened to be walking by.

The next time someone tells you that free speech is not under assault or in danger in this country, remind them that we often have to deploy full SWAT teams to make sure it’s protected, which is what was done at the Shapiro event. Combine that with the constant threat of doxing by the online outrage mob and you can see that the left has made great inroads to limit freedom of speech and thought. The threat is real. Watching the news coverage, I couldn’t help but laugh. I met Ben Shapiro only once, but anyone who’s read a few lines of his work can tell straightaway that he is not a “fascist” or a member of the KKK. In fact, he’s among the few people in this country who have been willing to speak the truth about the Democrat Party’s association with racism, slavery, and the KKK. He’s also an Orthodox Jew, which would probably make it hard for him to be a Nazi, too. And, he’s not a Donald J. Trump supporter.

But those distinctions don’t matter to people who show up at speeches to protest, burn things, and cause violence. There’s no nuance in their view of the world. To them, you’re either with them or against them. And if you’re against them, you’re evil. (I’ve always found it funny that the same people who’ll tell you there are something like fifteen genders are the same people who tell you that politics boils down to either “Nazi” or “not Nazi.”)

Before Shapiro’s appearance, the University of California, Berkeley, smugly released this message: “Our commitment to free speech, as well as to the law, mandates that the students who invited Shapiro be able to host their event for those who wish to hear him speak.”

In other words, yeah, we’re committed to free speech, and we’re so gloriously tolerant of other opinions that we’ll let this event go on as planned.

Also, we might get sued if we don’t.

In the same statement, the university announced that it would offer counseling services to anyone who was traumatized or triggered by the speech, saying it was “deeply concerned about the impact some speakers may have on individuals’ sense of safety and belonging. No one should be made to feel threatened or harassed simply because of who they are or for what they believe.”

Bear in mind that we’re not talking about people who were tied to a chair and had Shapiro’s speech blared into their ears through headphones. We’re talking about people who didn’t even attend the speech, who just happened to be on campus (no doubt wearing scarves and tossing Frisbees) while the event was going on—people who probably wouldn’t even have known Shapiro was even there if it hadn’t been for the university-wide email blast about it. In some sense, it was almost as if the university wanted to make it clear how much it hated Ben Shapiro and wanted to suggest that anyone who wasn’t upset like a little baby about it was some kind of moral Neanderthal.