Less than a week in, the Trump presidency has had its first official special snowflake moment.
At Monday’s press briefing, White House press secretary Sean Spicer complained (twice!) about how “demoralizing” it was for Donald Trump and his staff to endure reports that the turnout at Barack Obama’s two inaugurals was larger than at Trump’s.
While Spicer walked back from his belligerent assertion on Saturday that Trump had “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period,” he blamed “unbelievably frustrating” media negativity for his much-lampooned tantrum.
Talk about “your facts hurt my feelings,” an attitude frequently mocked by critics of thin-skinned “social justice warriors” who see racist, sexist, transphobic, or fat-shaming slights everywhere!
The backlash against political correctness, with its calls to restrict and penalize “hurtful” speech and its demands for “safe spaces” where no one will assault you with arguments that challenge your beliefs, has been cited as a factor in Trump’s surprise victory at the polls.
It’s hard to tell how much of a factor it was, but it almost certainly played a role. (In a recent poll, 16 percent of Trump voters chose “He tells it like it is” as the main reason they voted for Trump—almost certainly, for some, a reference to his perceived rebellion against PC.)
All the more ironic, then, to see Trump and Team Trump on their own crusade against traumatizing—excuse me, “demoralizing”—speech. Until recently, for instance, it seemed that the complaining about offensive comedy was coming mainly from the social justice left. (For instance, back in November, a Saturday Night Live joke poking fun at 37 different gender identities was deplored as not only hurtful but “actually dangerous” to “trans and non-binary people.”)
Now, it seems that our main critic of insensitive SNL material is the President himself, who has repeatedly griped on Twitter and elsewhere that his portrayal by Alec Baldwin is not only “bad television” but “biased” and “mean-spirited.”
To be sure, not every criticism or complaint about bad speech is “PC.” Obviously, freedom of speech includes the right to call someone else’s speech inappropriate or even repugnant, and freedom of speech is not freedom from criticism. There was widespread consensus, for example, that SNL writer Katie Rich was out of bounds when she posted a since-deleted tweet joking that Barron Trump, the President’s 10-year-old son, would become “this country’s first homeschool shooter.”
To refrain from attacking a public figure’s child is not PC but simple decency. (On the other hand, many believe that Rich’s indefinite suspension from her job with the show is too harsh and fits the PC-culture pattern of destroying people’s careers over thoughtless but trivial jokes in social media.)
But it’s pretty difficult to deny that there are many on the right who share the PC left’s impulse to silence “offensive” speech—if not by intervention from the authorities then by public shaming, disruption or intimidation. Incidents of such speech suppression happened during the patriotic upsurge that followed the September 11 terror attacks and the invasion of Iraq.
In June 2003, then-New York Times reporter Chris Hedges used his commencement speech at Rockford College in Illinois to criticize the war as a “betrayal of the young by the old [and] of soldiers by politicians.” He was met with a response not unlike Breitbart firebrand Milo Yiannopoulos’s recent skirmishes with enraged campus SJWs.
Not only was Hedges booed and jeered, but some students stormed up the aisles, one threw his cap and gown on the stage. The microphone was unplugged twice. After a few minutes of this mayhem, the college’s president, Paul Pribbenow, told Hedges to wrap up the speech and leave the stage.
And how did conservatives respond? Well, then-Washington Times editor-in-chief Wesley Pruden jeered “pieties from the sophisticates” who were voicing concerns about freedom of speech. He argued that freedom doesn’t prevent the audience from “rewarding [the speaker] with the boo of the month.”
If you want more examples of outrage culture on the right, look no further than the annual War on Christmas. Sure, we can all make fun of progressives such as the diversity mavens at Texas Woman’s University, who recently issued earnest advice to not only avoid all Christmas-themed holiday decorations (even secular ones such as red-nosed reindeer), but to ditch the word “holiday” itself since it “connotes religious tradition and may not apply to all employees.” (“End-of-semester party” is fine—as are, appropriately, snowflake decorations.)
But then we have the snowflakes at the other end of the political spectrum who get bent out of shape over the word “holidays” because it’s too multicultural, not religious enough, and doesn’t explicitly mention Christmas.
In a December survey by Public Policy Polling, 19 percent of Trump voters and 21 percent of Americans who consider themselves “very conservative” said they were offended by the phrase “Happy Holidays.” Meanwhile, just 5 percent of Clinton voters and 10 percent of “very liberal” respondents were offended by “Merry Christmas.”
Maybe soon, “Happy Holidays” will be the first conservative entry on the list of microaggressions.
Twenty-five years ago, the great journalist and civil rights advocate Nat Hentoff, who passed away earlier this month, wrote a book called Free Speech for Me—But Not for Thee: How the American Left and Right Relentlessly Censor Each Other. Looks like the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Wait till the Trump White House gets its own safe space.
