You are 100% correct, but I don’t know that the failing is my article. People naturally tie themselves to the mast of their own beliefs if it helps them reject the dangerous notion that they could be wrong about something.

This article is the result of my own reckoning with safe space culture. I don’t agree with the institutional rejection of some ideas, for instance, but I also understand trigger warnings as a matter of courtesy (we’ve had them for years: “The following program may contain graphic content…”).

But that doesn’t really seem to be the target of conservative nationalists like Breitbart and Yiannopoulos. They seem more interested in defending the dominance of the current hegemony than open debate. They attach it to criticisms of this new generation of whiny liberal Millennials — kids-these-days populism — but what they seem most interested in defending is their right to spread racial animosity, antisemitism, and misogyny.

I said above they appropriate liberty in the name of ideals antithetical to liberty — namely the persecution of people for their ethnicity or gender identity. Once I realized that, I thought it useful to put into words.