Breitbart Tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos might consider himself social justice-proof, but even he must have been unsettled yesterday when two feminists called for him to be incarcerated for his tweets on live television.
Self-proclaimed comedienne Kate Smurthwaite called for Yiannopoulos to be “locked up” on the BBC’s The Big Questions yesterday, after having lost a debate to him previously by losing her temper.
Smurthwaite and Yiannopoulos had previously locked horns on the show last year, as her “institutionalised sexism” outburst was the source for the unforgettable “I’m talking about men, darling” viral video. For her disappointing performance, Smurthwaite received ridicule and criticism that she later sought to depict as “abuse” and “harassment.”
After complaining as to why Yiannopoulos, who refers to himself as a “Dangerous Faggot,” gets so much airtime, despite the fact his social media followings are over ten times the size of her own and probably more than the whole room combined, she argued that until we see some “high-profile individuals, perhaps including some in this studio, locked up, it’ll be time for other people to back off.”
This is not the first time feminists have called for Yiannopoulos and other free speech activists and writers critical of modern feminism to face criminal charges.
After his invitation to debate gender politics at Bristol University, the University’s LGBT+ Officer Charlie Oxborough defended prosecuting Milo on the basis that his “transphobic hate speech is not within the confines of the law.”
Calls were also made by Massachusetts Congresswoman Katherine Clark to open criminal proceedings against proponents of GamerGate such as Yiannopoulos, on the basis that the consumer movement for better ethics in video game journalism has been wrongly associated by the press with threats of murder, rape, violence, and the harassment of women.
It was also the police who feminists called into action in order to eject Yiannopoulos and Lauren Southern from the Amber Rose Slut Walk in Los Angeles last October, as women cried to police officers, “Thanks for taking out the trash!”
The progressive Left’s censorious instincts started with banning wrongthinkers from campus but is now escalating, with calls to effectively criminalise freedom of expression.
In fact when social justice warrior Bahar Mustafa, Goldsmiths University Student Diversity Officer, was arrested on the grounds of “sending a threatening communication” after she used the #KillAllWhiteMen hashtag, it was Yiannopoulos who was the first to speak out against her arrest.
As Yiannopoulos said at the time: “I mean, it’s only a matter of time before such a state would come for me, isn’t it?”