Protected speech isn’t just for white people who agree with you

By Clarence Page

Monday, Feb. 20, 2017 | 2 a.m.

Everybody loves free speech, it seems — and just about everybody also knows someone who they wish would just hush up.

That’s an old saying that I just made up. It came to mind amid some of the protests that have been busting out all over Donald Trump’s America.

Back in the 1960s, progressive college students campaigned for free speech. Today we see a new generation of college students and faculty who seem to be campaigning just as passionately to restrict speech — as long as it is somebody else’s.

Conservatives have made hay for decades out of this censoring impulse, especially when they think it is only found on the left.

An exquisite example is provided by Milo Yiannopoulos, author, public speaker and senior editor at the conservative Breitbart news sites.

I almost felt sorry for Yiannopoulos when his speaking engagement sponsored by the College Republicans club at the University of California, Berkeley, was canceled after peaceful protests turned into a riot.

Police blamed about 150 masked troublemakers out of a crowd of more than 10 times that many peaceful protestors. The university defended Yiannopoulos’ right to speak and only shut the event down after violence broke out, he wants you to know.

“The left is absolutely terrified of free speech,” Yiannopoulos posted on Facebook after the Berkeley episode, “and will do literally anything to shut it down.”

Ah, but not just the left, it turns out. Yiannopoulos, who has gained national infamy — and suspension from Twitter — as a snide and profane critic of feminism, Islam, political correctness, “social justice warriors” and other ideologies has now, at long last, encountered some speech that he is eager to muzzle.

He and numerous other fellow travelers in right-wing circles are upset by the promotional YouTube trailer of an upcoming Netflix comedy series called “Dear White People.”

They’re calling for boycotts of Netflix in protest of the series they claim promotes “white genocide.”

Does it? Hardly. Even though Yiannopoulos and other right-wing writers, bloggers and trolls have helped to run up the thumbs-down “dislike” votes on the YouTube video, the series and the 2014 movie on which it is based are so benign as to make one wonder what all the panic is about.

After all, conservatives voted for Donald Trump, admiring how he “tells it like it is.” Why do these same folks feel threatened when black folks tell it like it is, too?

Sample: Biracial student Samantha White begins her radio show: “Dear white people, the amount of black friends required not to seem racist has just been raised to two. Sorry, your weed man Tyrone doesn’t count.”

That’s from the 2014 movie. There are some tender moments, too. And some moments when — spoiler alert — a white character actually makes the black characters rethink their assumptions.

Most important, the movie provides solid entertainment, as I expect the new TV series will, and is very hard to capture in a quick 30-second spot.

Yet, Yiannopoulos, who seems to think he’s a fairly witty dude, shows a tin ear to the humor in this series.

“Netflix is following in the footsteps of Twitter, the NFL and the Democrat party,” he fumed in a sarcastic Breitbart commentary, “with a brilliant strategy of insulting more than half the country in one fell swoop.”

Oh, look who’s talking. If anyone has insulted more than half the country at every available opportunity, it is Yiannopoulos.

“Basically,” he writes, “(the series is) an opportunity for spoilt (sic) brats of color to lecture ordinary Americans on how unconsciously racist they still are — you know, just the sort of social-justice finger-wagging that lost Hillary the election and makes decent people everywhere gag and heave and run for the hills.” Steady, Milo.

Too bad. I am saddened to hear that Yiannopoulos has such a low opinion of his fellow white people. His outrage makes him sound exactly like a term that the alt-right invented to describe hypersensitive liberals: a snowflake.

I only use that term because I enjoy the sweet justice of using it to describe a guy who has been quite quick to use it on others.

I thought the mighty young men of the alt-right were supposed to have thicker skins than that. They insist that, after all, that provocative speech should be protected. People need to listen to one another.

I agree. But that protection isn’t for whites only.

Clarence Page is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune.