Intolerance begets intolerence

A sad side effect of Leftist intolerance is that it makes radical Right intolerance more acceptable.

A Telegraph editorial entitled, "The student Left’s culture of intolerance is creating a new generation of conservatives" makes this case:

Student demands for censorship get a lot of coverage. Spiked Online’s Free Speech University Rankings, now in its third annual edition, argues that there is a “crisis of free speech on campus”.

By analysing the censorious policies and actions that have taken place on British campuses, Spiked concluded that 63.5 per cent of universities actively censor speech and 30.5 per cent stifle speech through excessive regulation. You can barely go a few days without encountering a new op-ed covering censorship on campus.

Maajid Nawaz describes the students demanding censorship as members of the “regressive left”. Milo Yiannopoulos calls them “snowflakes”.

With all of this book-burning and platform-denying madness sweeping up much of the media’s interest in campus culture, the gradual rise of another group of students has gone under-reported. British and American millennials and post-millennials – also known as ‘Gen Z’ – are warming to conservatism.

If it was simply "warming to conservatism", that might be ok. But in a binary culture, where everything is either Left or Right, that leaves room for bleed over from the cultural extremes.

So when the "sane" Left ignores the intolerant Left, that taints the entire progressive/socialist movement as authoritarian. This makes the entire conservative movement, including the intolerant Right, seem at least equal, if not better. When the mainstream media equates the intolerant Right with the entire conservative ideology, while ignoring "the beam in their own eye", which is the willingness to overlook free speech rights within their own ideology, they create a choice between different forms of intolerance.

People on the Left wonder how a sexist like Donald Trump gets elected president. The answer lies in the moral relativism which says it is acceptable to deny freedom of speech in certain circumstances. Neither of these cultural sins should be acceptable, yet the MSM makes them equivalent.