What’s one thing worse than left-wing snowflakes? Conservative hypocrites.
Conservatives, after all, ought to know better than to engage in the outrage-mongering and cancel culture we so often decry on the Left. Whether it’s gun rights activist Kyle Kashuv getting hounded out of Harvard over old racist comments dug up by angry liberals, the use of old high school yearbooks to smear conservative Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, the liberal media’s insane targeting of Trump appointee Leif Olson, or any other of the innumerable instances of cancel culture gone wrong, conservatives have seen firsthand the injustices wrought by the Left’s outrage-mongering.
Yet some are still apparently unprincipled enough to forget this all when an opportunity to “own the libs” presents itself. Breitbart reporter Kyle Morris is the latest conservative to embrace leftist tactics, after he reported on old, supposedly offensive tweets from University of Alabama Dean Jamie Riley, with the clear goal of jamming up the left-wing academic.
Mission accomplished. After amplification from right-wing pundits such as Laura Ingraham, an outrage mob quickly pounced. Just a day later, Riley was out of a job.
Torments from the Twitter Attic: University of Alabama Dean Claimed American Flag, Police are Racist https://t.co/UGdHfj409j
— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) September 5, 2019
A look at the actual tweets in question reveals this shameful campaign for the blatantly political stunt that it is. Riley’s tweets were certainly questionable, and did denigrate the flag, but he wasn’t exactly screaming bloody murder. In fact, his positions were pretty much in line with what most woke leftist academics think. Conservatives can’t seriously think that being hopelessly wrong is a fireable offense, especially at a public university bound by the First Amendment to honor freedom of speech.
Here’s one of the tweets Breitbart hounded on: “The [American flag emoji] flag represents a systemic history of racism for my people. Police are a part of that system. Is it that hard to see the correlation?”
Newsflash: woke liberals think America is racist. They might be wrong, but it’s not even that uncommon a stance, let alone one worthy of termination. Meanwhile, Riley’s other tweets invoked white privilege and questioned whether movies about slavery were really just meant to “keep black people in their place.”
Silly and insufferably woke? Sure. Fireable, or even worthy of media coverage? Hell no.
Think of the inverse: Conservative professors who say, believe homosexuality is a sin, well, their beliefs are probably equally outrageous in the mind of a leftist mob.
Ought they lose their jobs as well? Of course not, but that’s the dangerous precedent conservatives such as Ingraham and Morris are, wittingly or unwittingly, setting.
In his reporting on the incident, Reason’s Robby Soave hit the nail on the head:
One of the worst arguments I hear conservatives make in defense of the right de-platforming the left is “we are just making the left play by their own rules.” They are no longer the left’s rules, if you are enforcing them. Then they are your rules. https://t.co/cFEpWjPFzK
— Robby Soave (@robbysoave) September 6, 2019
Soave is exactly right. But unfortunately, these illiberal, tribal instincts seem to be increasingly prevalent on the Right, whether it’s the outrage mob Republicans led against comedian Bill Maher for saying something mean, conservative writer Brett Stephens’ shameful attempt to get a critical professor fired, or one of countless other examples.
As long as these prominent conservatives continue to participate in outrage culture, they shouldn’t be surprised when no one takes their (perfectly valid) criticisms of political correctness seriously.
