Mark Steyn writes:
Notice that even his defender Jerry Coyne feels obliged to qualify his defense: “Dawkins is not Milo Yiannopoulos.” And that’s true: Milo has bigger hair. Dawkins is also not Ann Coulter. Dawkins is not Germaine Greer. Dawkins is not Ayaan Hirsi Ali. And yet he has joined all of them in the Pantheon of the Hurtful. Funny how that works.
So, as a practical matter, Richard Dawkins is Milo Yiannopoulos. Which is where this sort of thing always leads. As I noted early on during the above-mentioned dispute with Canada’s “human rights” commissions, restrictions on speech always start out on the far fringes – ensnaring wacky peripheral figures nobody cares about. But you should care about them – because those scalps are just the warm-up act, and the restrictions always move inwards, to (in my case) Canada’s mainstream, impeccably respectable dentist’s-waiting-room news magazine and (in Dawkins’) to the winner of the Royal Society’s prize for most inspiring science book of all time.
