Robert Spencer on New Left Fascists

Spencer:

This contempt for the freedom of speech is rapidly becoming commonplace on the Left. Washington Square News is the student newspaper of New York University, but it is editorially and financially independent from the university, and has a circulation of about 60,000 in lower Manhattan — one of the nation’s foremost epicenters of the far Left. An indication of how quickly the restriction of the freedom of speech has become a fashionable opinion among the Leftist intelligentsia at universities and elsewhere came last Wednesday, when the News ran a piece calling for restrictions on the First Amendment.

Referring to the AFDI ads, author Faria Mardhani wrote: “The decision that the United States must now make is whether hate speech like this should be legal. Do values of free speech override the values of equality and of preventing profound personal offense to any singular group? Was the First Amendment passed with the intention of grouping very diverse people into one entity and then vilifying them?”

In the 1930s, when the Nazis were taking power in Germany, brownshirt storm troopers regularly terrorized Hitler’s foes, shouting them down when they spoke, vandalizing their messages, and even physically threatening them. We are rapidly approaching the same situation, not due to a resurgence in “right-wing extremism,” but because of the Left’s increasingly positive attitude toward thuggery. Hundreds of people have hailed Eltahawy on Twitter and elsewhere as a hero, and many have echoed the calls from Aslan and Abraham to imitate her vandalism. When Geller or I or any other speaker who opposes jihad terror and Islamic supremacism speaks on a college campus, it’s a scene that could easily have taken place in 1934 in Berlin or Munich: we have to go with bodyguards and prepare to be shouted down by self-righteous thugs.

Spencer should have noted that the 20th century fascists in Germany and in Italy got their strongest support from universities and from the young. No segment in German society was more pro-Hitler than university students.

If you aren't chilled by the Left's embrace of censorship and force, you aren't paying attention.