UC-Berkeley rioters threaten democracy, and make Milo look like a genius

Only days ago, I had a conversation with a friend who stated that violence was a reasonable response to the ideas expressed by Milo Yiannopoulos. The violent protests that have since erupted at Berkley University to prevent Milo from giving his final talk on his extremely successful “Dangerous Faggot” tour, indicates that many others on the progressive left believe that this is a perfectly reasonable position. As elaborated in my previous post What’s so bad about Nazism?, it is my opinion that meeting ideas with violence is a fundamentally fascist tactic which creates the climate of fear and oppression that protestors claim to be fighting against.

There are three more points about Milo that need to be made in order to develop a bit more clarity about the issues at stake in the Berkeley riots.

1. The mainstream media and opponents of Milo consistently describe him as far right. This may well be true of many of the opinions that he is known for, however, the fundamental issue that he is advocating and pursuing - THE IMPORTANCE AND NECESSITY OF FREE SPEECH TO  LIBERAL DEMOCRACY - is one that has been emerging as the new centre of politics for some time now. It is the centre because free speech is an issue that is uniting people from the left and the right of politics under the moniker ‘cultural libertarian’. Cultural libertarians may disagree with what other libertarians say, but they will defend to the death their right to say it. To see how traditional political “rivals” can productively engage with each other as cultural libertarians, check out Milo’s interview with Dave Rubin on the Rubin Report, a political commentator who often describes himself as being on the left of politics. Also see the grounds on which Tucker Carlson defends Milo in the video below.

2. Milo is a self-described provocateur, and his entire schtick is designed to catalyze outrage on the left. Why? He seeks to prove his main argument, that the ideology and tactics of the progressive left - that their blurring of the distinction between words and action - is a dangerous threat to the future of civil society and liberal democracy. To prove this point he says outrageous things that violate the taboos regarding the representation of race and gender established by the progressive left, then he watches as the progressive left slash and punch and burn and throw rocks and riot. Result: Milo is proven right, and the public bears witness to the intolerance of the left.

3. MEET BAD ARGUMENTS WITH BETTER ARGUMENTS. When you respond to Milo with violence, when you advocate violence as a solution to bad ideas, you are basically saying that you do not have a better argument, that you fear the fact that people have no good reason to side with you, and therefore you must scare people away from listening to Milo with the threat of violence. Let's look at how Milo really does look like the reasonable party at the end of the day:

The only other possibility - and highly likely given that the violence is emanating from universities - is that you think that everyone else is too dumb to understand why you are right and Milo is wrong. The general public is too dumb, they have no capacity for critical thought, and they need to be protected from themselves. And again, through his performance, Milo is is exposing this insidious form of university elitism. When ordinary people watch the riots on their TV and computer screens, what they are seeing is entitled brats having large scale tantrums that are only paralleled by two-year old toddlers frustrated by their inability to properly express their feelings. Use your words people, if you want a better world, if you want Milo to disappear into irrelevance, MAKE BETTER ARGUMENTS. If you need help with this, Hank Green has some great tips below.