James Morrow: Who are the real fascists here?
Commentator Milo Yiannopoulos cancelled a university talk after protesters started fires and threw stones, writes James Morrow. That’s not free speech. That’s fascism.
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Back in the heady days of the US presidential election it was often suggested that if Donald Trump were to win, America’s constitutionally-guaranteed freedom of speech would be under threat and those with unsanctioned opinions would have to cower in fear lest they be thumped one way or another into silence.
Well, as is it turns out, they were right.
On Wednesday evening, professional provocateur and right-wing commentator Milo Yiannopoulos was scheduled to give a talk at the University of California, Berkeley.
For those unfamiliar with him, Milo (as he prefers to be known) is not everyone’s cup of tea. He sets out to offend (a key to his popularity, particularly among the so-called “all-right”), can be deliberately awful (likewise), and to further irritate his enemies he calls Donald Trump “Daddy”.
He also deliberately targets everyone from feminists to Black Lives Matter activists to Islam which, as a gay man, he sees as a particular threat to his and other gays’ life and liberty which the Left refuses to recognise, even after last year’s massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando.
Alas Milo was forced to cancel his Berkeley talk after hordes of demonstrators upset by Milo’s mere presence threw stones and launched commercial-grade fireworks at police, destroyed property, used metal barricades to smash the windows of the Student Union and set a light generator ablaze.
That’s not free speech. That’s fascism.
What makes it all the more ironic is that Berkeley birthed the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s. Of course, that was when the Left liked freedom of speech and questioning the status quo. Now that they are the status quo (or were, until Trump was sworn in), not so much.
What happened to Milo is hardly the only example of America’s new totalitarian chic, which flows not from the Oval Office but rather the activist Left who, in the name of “resisting” the new administration, are using many of the same tactics they claim to fear.
Look no further than Hollywood performers being pressured not to perform at Trump’s inauguration under threat of black-listing (sound familiar?) to yesterday’s news that the CEO of Uber had resigned from a presidential advisory panel after demands by leftist activist groups.
So much for the days when your livelihood depended on your politics being left behind in history with the Berlin Wall. Because at heart, what is happening in the US (or “Trump’s America”, as some ominously call it) is about power and the upset of an old order that no longer applies.
Just look at the events of the past week and recall that in 2011 Barack Obama ceased processing Iraqi refugee visa applications for six months — an act about which there was barely a peep of protest or “resistance”. Fast-forward to 2017 and Trump’s temporary restrictions on migrants from Iraq and a handful of other nations and all of a sudden it’s a “ban on Muslims”.
Beware those who claim to be worried about how power is used but in truth are just upset that they’re not the ones who are getting to use it.
James Morrow is the Daily Telegraph opinion editor
Originally published as James Morrow: Who are the real fascists here?
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