Vice News on Thursday published an homage to the YouTube political personality Natalie Wynn. Deferring to Wynn’s thinly veiled authoritarian tendencies, Vice disregarded that which normally makes it great: respect for free speech.
Operating the ContraPoints channel, Wynn describes herself as on a mission to “deradicalize” young, white, conservative men. Wynn apparently does this by dressing up in a variety of outfits and styles of makeup. But watching Vice’s fawning interview, I quickly realized that Wynn isn’t so much interested in deradicalizing the far-right as she is in delegitmizing social debate.
The best evidence for this comes when Wynn describes young white men and states,
Well, yes, Natalie, a lot of people are of the mindset that it is “terribly oppressive” to be denied free speech rights. A lot of people don’t like to be told that they can neither use the words they see fit, nor escape the lecturing arrogance of those who say they are evil for resisting conformity. That’s why academics such as Jordan Peterson and commentators such as Ben Shapiro have been so successful. They speak to a large constituency of otherwise moderate young men who resist the Left’s aggressive demand to salute absolutism with made-up pronouns that, frankly, most people wouldn’t even know. Wynn is a branch of the same left-wing tree that argues in favor of preventing Fox News reporting.
This doesn’t mean that we should embrace bigotry. Of course not. But there’s a big difference in deliberately insulting a homosexual or transgender person and refusing to adhere to a specific identity politics. The former is a breach of common decency; the latter is a rejection of Orwellian intellectual collectivization.
Vice News failed to bring out that nuance here. It’s a shame. Anyway, you can watch the interview below.
