In an effort to draw attention away from MILO’s campus events, students around the country have been scheduling alternate and opposing talks to occur at the same time.
Students at both the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the University of California, Davis, have scheduled alternative events for the same time as MILO’s upcoming talks on campus.
Students at the University of Colorado, Boulder, invited transgender actor Laverne Cox, a star in the hit Netflix show “Orange is the New Black,” to speak on campus at the same time as MILO on January 25th, while the UC Davis College Democrats invited former Obama speechwriter Kevin Samy for an alternative speech to MILO’s on January 13th.
Samy, who will be speaking about the “politics of hate,” has teamed up with Special Operations Iraq War Veteran Chris Roessner, in an effort to speak out against xenophobia around the country.
There are also plans to offer alternative discussion events during MILO talks at several of the Dangerous Faggot Tour’s planned stops, including UC Santa Barbara, Cal Poly, UC Berkeley, and UCLA.
While this strategy is a step up from coating one’s face in red paint and screaming like a lunatic in a crowded lecture hall, it still illustrates a core flaw in the strategy and attitude of the American left.
Emmet Rensin addressed this in an editorial for Vox Magazine, in which he argued that modern liberals hold the “belief that American life is not divided by moral difference or policy divergence… but by the failure of half the country to know what’s good for them.”
This liberal arrogance is reflected in the decision of the students to schedule speakers at the same time as MILO events.
As a result of existing in such an ideologically-lopsided environment, progressive students have developed a moral and intellectual superiority complex. Despite existing in this filter bubble, where progressive worldviews are constantly reaffirmed by slates of progressive instructors, these students can’t see value in letting a dissident voice speak on campus unchallenged.
A recent editorial piece in Quartz magazine illustrated this issue of the liberal superiority complex, where columnist Annalisa Merelli argued liberals make no effort to understand those with whom they disagree.
Instead, they speak down to the conservative and libertarians that they encounter, never placing themselves on equal footing long enough to understand other perspectives.
For the first time in my life, I was on the outside of the so-called liberal bubble, looking in. And what I saw was not pretty. I watched as many of my highly educated friends and contacts addressed those who disagreed with them with contempt and arrogance, and an offensive air of intellectual superiority.
It was surprising and frustrating to find myself lumped in with political parties and ideologies I do not support. But it also provided some insight into why many liberals seem incapable of talking with those who hold different opinions. (This is, broadly speaking, not just a liberal problem.) In so much of what I read, there was a tone of odious condescension, the idea that us no voters were perhaps too simpleminded or too uninformed to really grasp the situation.
Some attributed Donald Trump’s victory in last year’s presidential election to the left’s inability to hear those on the other side. The condescension that coastal liberal elites tend to have towards those that live in flyover country, and in red states, has cultivated a sense that all Democrats don’t need to take the concerns and struggles of Republican voters seriously.
Over the past year during The Dangerous Faggot Tour, MILO has been the voice for a disenfranchised portion of the American demographic that has been marginalized and forgotten by the left with their undying insistence on toxic identity politics. If the left truly wants to defeat him, and the movement that he has created, it’d be in their best interest to sincerely engage with the concerns of his supporters by attending his events and participating in a dialogue.
Conservative and libertarian students are forced to engage with opposing perspectives almost every day in the classroom. Perhaps it’s time for left-leaning students to open their minds and do the same.
Tom Ciccotta is a libertarian who writes about social justice and libertarian issues for Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter @tciccotta or email him at tciccotta@breitbart.com
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