In my experience conservatives often think progressives are wide-eyed idealists who just don’t understand the world yet. Well-meaning but stupid. While progressives often think conservatives are acting from self interest or prejudice, which makes them bad people. I’m sure there’s lots of variations, though.
Babale has achieved the impressive Double Vilification: vilifying conservatives for vilifying liberals.
Well, certainly not all conservatives, but the ones who call all democrats babykillers on NextDoor, for sure 
The problem is that neither “liberal” nor “conservative” are monolithic hive minds. There are those that identify as conservative that don’t care much about anyone’s sex life and simply think that tax rates should be lower and there are those that identify as liberal or leftist who believe eating meat is morally equivalent to the Holocaust.
But, when looking at the larger power structures and general membership of these groups, Babale’s position is a lot closer to accurate than the idea that conservatives are being persecuted. First, the free speech being squelched by banning speakers is very over blown. According to a study from Georgetown, between 2016 and 2018, there were about 60 incidents of speakers being dis-invited or disrupted or faculty being fired for political speech on campuses. On the conservative side, the speaker problems revolved around of very small group of controversial and confrontational speakers (Milo Yiannopoulos, Ben Shapiro, Charles Murray, and Ann Coulter). The more surprising thing was that as far as faculty firings go, about three times more faculty were fired for liberal speech than conservative speech.
Then there is the fact that current conservative Republican party depends greatly on the white evangelical vote. A group that realigned itself around the idea that abortion is murder when their alignment around race became embarrassing.
Glen Beck, Rush Limbough, Alex Jones, Shawn Hannity and their like have been feeding the Republican base a steady diet of diatribes about how liberals are either soulless communsists out turn white people into slaves, or literal demonic beings who want to rape and kill children.
Twitter doesn’t “discriminate against users” on the basis of political opinion. You can be an anarchist radical-Naxalite Maoist Nazi if you want, and you can still sign up for a Twitter account and use Twitter’s services.
What you can’t do is post on your Twitter feed any of your anarchist radical-Naxalite Maoist Nazi views that violate Twitter’s terms of service. And that wouldn’t change even if “political opinion” were an officially protected antidiscrimination category.
Again, Twitter users are not Twitter “customers”, they are Twitter volunteer labor. If Twitter doesn’t like the tweets that a particular user is crafting, Twitter can choose not to display them in its tweet product line. And if a particular user does a consistently shitty job at crafting tweets that Twitter wants, Twitter can fire them from their volunteer position for counterproductive uselessness.
You seem to be having difficulty with grasping the nature of “protected category” in the US. Here’s another analogy that may make it easier: If, say, dietary choices were made a protected category, then a vegetarian deli wouldn’t be allowed to refuse to hire a non-vegetarian employee on the basis of their carnivory. But that doesn’t mean that the non-vegetarian employee would be entitled to put ham sandwiches into the deli’s display counter or sprinkle bacon bits in the deli’s egg salad.
The employer still has the right to control what product they’re selling, even if they can’t refuse to serve or hire a particular individual on the basis of that individual’s membership in a protected category.
Nope, that’s not the way to solve the problem of unaccountable billionaires controlling (some of) our discourse. Even if the social media universe ends up being diversified by antitrust actions against the tech giants, and even in the unlikely scenario where political affiliation would actually become a protected category, all the individual for-profit social media companies will still have the right to control what content they display on their platform.
Private social media companies are not a guaranteed free-speech domain. Your terms of service do not enable you to post on the social media site any content that the company doesn’t want to see there.
I will not defend milo or coulter. They are trolls.
Ben shapiro and charles murray are mostly guilty of unpopular speech. Their unpopular ideas are often met with violence.
Twice as many white men have been shot to death by the police as black men. But that’s not the whole story.
How many black men are there compared to white men? What were the conditions under which they were shot?
Similarly, how many conservative professors are there compared to liberal professors? What did the conditions under which they were fired?
Professors self identify as liberals 5 times as frequently as they identify as conservatives. Based on voting patterns professors vote democrat more than 10 times as frequently as they vote republican.
Now does the the 3::1 disparity still look like liberals are getting fired at higher rates?
This assumes that the conditions of the firing are comparable.
I would also point out that ben shapiro became harder and harder to defend after he got a daily program and had to start filling air time and attracting an audience. He went from “principled conservative” to “partisan talking head”
Ben “Facts Don’t Care About Your Feelings But They Do Care About My Feelings About My Religion” Shapiro? That guy was never easy to defend.
I disagree. There were two areas where he admittedly did not have an open mind. Israel and abortion. But he did not whine about people hurting his feelings. He liked to remind people that he was the number one target of anti-semitism in america for several years running.
I suspect that a person’s ability to defend ban shapiro has more to do with where they are on the political spectrum than on the actually defensibility of ben shapiro.
And gay marriage.
Eta: and the fact that he’s the number 1 target of antisemitism in the US is entirely predictable; I’d expect a black man who panders to the same racist parts of society that Ben Shapiro ponders to would be one of the highest targets of racism. Lay down with dogs, wake up with fleas and all that.
Shapiro may at one time may (and it is a stretch to say may) have been an honest intellectual conservative. He’s been sliding steadily towards the defend-whatever-atrocity-the-Republicans-has done-lately-by-any-means-necessary, because he knows where his pay comes from (he has the challenge with keeping up with others who have far less scruples then he ever had like Crowder and Owens). I mean he tweeted the other day that everybody own zip ties, what’s the big deal (paraphrasing)? It is profoundly intellectually dishonest to suggest that the zip ties that most people have are in a way similar to the zip ties the terrorist was photographed with in the Capitol Building.
And let’s face it, he’s really good at debating junior undergraduates because he doesn’t follow proper debate etiquette and they don’t know enough to call him on it. His arguments are unsound, and he would be obliterated in a real debate.
I don’t recall him talking about gay marriage a whole lot. He claims to be libertarian on the issue.
Is Ben Shapiro Jewish, then? I really cba to keep up with American pop culture.
If by “libertarian” you mean “insists that God would not have forbidden gay sex if it wasn’t harmful for you and society and believes that gay couples are inherently worse at raising children” I guess you are right.
I linked you his professed policy position. If you have a quote of him pushing for other policy positions, I would be open to changing my mind.
He first hit my radar after an episode of piers morgan tonight after the sandy hook shooting here in the states when a mentally disturbed man shot and killed 26 3rd graders.
It was on one of his Joe Rogan visits, I don’t really want to trawl through Rogan’s podcast to dig it up.
Bloody hell. I can’t believe people are still opposed to gun control after that.
The (incredibly, incredibly stupid) party line is, “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun”, coupled with “when guns are illegal only the criminals will have guns”.
This, of course, explains why your homeland of the UK is a blasted hellhole utterly decimated by gun violence while the US is a peaceful paradise guarded by good guys with guns.
Something he said on joe rogan?
Fercrissake.
Who (if anyone) do you consider an honest intellectual conservative?
I agree that his show is garbage, he’s just making a buck by throwing red meat to idiots.
I agree he frequently makes fools of college students (and college professors) but he has also had public conversations with sam harris, jordan petersen, cenk uygur, sally kohn. It’s not all punks and pikers.
He has offered aoc $10,000 to debate him. She likened it to sexual harrassment.
He has certainly made a fool of himself on occasion but he is not regularly “obliterated” by these folks