Yeah, It's Funny That Donald Trump Junior Was Silenced by Free-Speech Conservatives

From Esquire

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.

Speaking of the president, his oldest failson, Donald Trump, Jr., went on over to Berkeley 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. As usual, the complaint that a conservative is getting silenced is coming via extensive TV appearances, public events, and a book deal. Junior went to 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—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.

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 group 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.

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.

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.

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