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When A-list Hollywood director James Gunn got fired last month due to an alt-right (some say “alt-light”…I’ve learned that certain trolls get steamed if you don’t recognize the distinction) campaign to embarrass Disney with decades-old pedophilia jokes, a lot of prominent (and respectable) rightists were beaming. “This is how we’ll stop censorship against us on social media! Now that we’ve taken out one of theirs, they’ll think twice about ever coming after one of ours again!”

How’d that work out, geniuses? In the weeks since the Gunn firing, the deplatforming of people on the right has gone into hyperdrive. Gavin McInnes? Gone. Proud Boys? Gone. Candace Owens? Gone (then restored after an outcry). Republican congressmen, the Republican Party chair, and Donald Trump Jr.’s spokesperson removed from Twitter search results (Laura Loomer, Gateway Pundit, and Stefan Molyneux have been similarly “filtered”). And, of course, Alex Jones was booted from every platform except Twitter. Granted, Jones doesn’t fit the traditional model of left/right; he’s his own nutty thing. But it’s important to note that Facebook and YouTube banned him not for his lunatic conspiracy theories, but rather for using “dehumanizing language” against Muslims and trannies…language like what I just used, language that a lot of people on the right use.

The leftist censors are feeling so empowered right now, they’re brazenly announcing their next round of targets.

I think it’s safe to say that the “James Gunn’s firing will ‘eye for an eye’ the left into de-escalation” theory has been debunked. So why did so many otherwise intelligent people support such a foolish notion? Townhall’s Kurt Schlichter, a man I respect, a man I knew during my Republican Party Animal days, assured his readers that as long as the right “fights back” and “deals the pain” by taking “two of them” for every one of us they silence, it will “deter them” and they’ll stop “taking scalps.”

“Your best case is we all go down. Mutually assured destruction works, but it only works if it’s mutual. So, we shouldn’t stop. We should ramp it up.”

This is the toxic by-product of Andrew Breitbart’s legacy. Everything is #WAR! LARP like you’re on a battlefield (and considering that Schlichter has donned an actual uniform and served his country honorably in real combat zones, such cosplay is beneath him). For the record, in his book Hollywood, Interrupted, Breitbart expressly defended comedian Andrew Dice Clay when he was protested by feminists for making pedo jokes. I asked Breitbart’s coauthor on that book, Mark Ebner, if he thinks Breitbart would have approved of Gunn’s firing. “Andrew was one of the most politically incorrect men I have ever known,” Ebner replied, adding that Breitbart “would have been disgusted” by those who invoke his legacy to get people fired for speech.

The “scalp for a scalp” theory failed due to a profound misunderstanding of the left’s mindset. Above all else, the left wants speech regulation. Nothing is more important. Everything the left wants to ban, from guns to border control to proper pronouns to legitimate gender science, starts with silencing the opposition. The left wants speech regulation so badly, it’s totally willing to sacrifice some of its own speech if necessary. Writing about the Gunn affair in the Daily Caller, Scott Greer commented, “Leftists do not care for free speech. They only believe their side should be exempt from the consequences of the anti-speech world they created.” Nonsense. Leftists police their own speech, too. Leftists are scared to death of inadvertently saying something “racist” or “sexist” or “transphobic.” The demon-haunted mind of the modern leftist is always censoring itself, and leftists are constantly being censored by other leftists. Have you been in a room full of young leftists recently? I have. They’re petrified of saying the wrong thing. Leftists don’t want the “right” to say “nigger” or “tranny.” Leftists are Br’er Rabbit, and censorship is their briar patch. You think you’re punishing them by tossing ’em in, but whereas to you it’s a prickly nightmare, to them, it’s where they were “born ’n’ raised.”

Sarah Silverman, Jimmy Kimmel, Amy Schumer…did they fight for the right to continue telling the race- and gender-based jokes that made them famous? Of course not. As leftists, they agree that some hurty speech needs to be suppressed, so they happily denounced their old work.

Free speech matters to us. It doesn’t matter to them. Because their side doesn’t need it. On social matters, the right represents normal: There are two genders. A man in a dress is not a woman. Whites are not evil, and all whites are not “privileged.” Many women actually like being moms and wives. The left, which represents a forced remaking of normal, gets what it wants by government intrusion. Affirmative action, forced busing, Title IX, Title X, “trannies in the ladies’ room” laws, “antidiscrimination” laws, etc. We’re the ones who need the social-media platform, because we’re the people who don’t have the “mainstream” media and the D.C. establishment as our front men. So go ahead, deplatform leftists as they deplatform us. It won’t inhibit them. They have an entire party of activist politicians (and many in the opposing party, too) and the “mainstream” press on their side. They don’t need social media. Whereas for us, social media was a last gasp, a final chance to be heard. So if “we all go down” on social media, both sides don’t lose. The left still wins.

“Mutually assured destruction” doesn’t work when the other side doesn’t fear death. Lemme LARP a little myself. Think in terms of Muslim suicide bombers. When the enemy hates your life more than it values its own, “a scalp for a scalp” doesn’t work. The left hates your right to speak more than it treasures its own. Leftists have been voluntarily self-censoring for decades, and they’ve been censoring us since long before social media. So even if Kurt Schlichter could magically press a “M.A.D.” button and vaporize every platform for every person, the left would still have the tools to win. We’d suffer from the silencing; they would not.

Which brings me to porn. Porn is not my thing. Porn culture has always seemed rather pathetic to me…men seeking vicarious thrills by getting off on watching videos of other men enjoying themselves. To quote Donald Trump, “sad.” I’ve written previously about my “Youthful Ward,” the 21-year-old girl who, for almost two years, lived with me. What I never mentioned is that she was an internationally famous porn star, an A(cup)-lister with the porn name Kirsten Lee. I took her in (strictly platonically; I’m not just old enough to be her father, I’m older than her father) to help her get out of that industry (which she did, eventually scoring a small but vital role in the upcoming DC blockbuster Aquaman), and in the course of the wacky sitcom that was my life for those two years, I learned a hell of a lot about a business that had never interested me.

Porn might just be the last bastion of what the left is trying to extirpate. There’s a freedom (and dare I say an honesty?) in that industry that exists in fewer and fewer corners of American society. In porn, you can actually say, “White girls are more desirable,” and you can pay women different rates based on their race. Where else in America can pay still legally be determined by skin color?

And politically incorrect speech? Pornhub is a top 10 U.S. website, and in the top 20 globally. And you can find videos of women having relations with black men while screaming “nigger” (literally, that’s a subgenre), and videos of women having sex with Muslims while slandering Muhammad. Things that in any other context would get content creators banned or murdered. Porn is the last corner of the entertainment industry that caters to its fan base with no concern for social justice.

I’m not saying porn is good, I’m not saying porn is healthy. But the more I was exposed to that world, the more I kept reflecting on the decapitated robot Ash’s words of praise for the titular creature in Ridley Scott’s Alien: “I admire its purity. A survivor…unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.”

For the record, I was floored by the number of “race realist” white chicks I encountered in the porn industry. In fact, my porn girl and I got kicked out of a West L.A. restaurant in November 2016 due to her boisterous declarations of support for Trump’s immigration views. Having been around non-porn actresses my entire life, I was fascinated by how porn actresses grow in different directions from “normal” actresses due to the contrasting conditions of their terrariums. Your average mainstream white actress is a politically correct leftist, because that’s what her industry demands. The white porn actresses I met were the complete opposite. The porn industry asks a lot of grotesque shit from its women, but the one thing it doesn’t demand is blind allegiance to an ideological orthodoxy. Truth is, having been exposed to both worlds now, I found porn way less coercive. If a porn girl refuses to do interracial, she doesn’t do interracial. If a Hollywood actress refuses to support the “social justice” agenda, she loses work.

So why do I bring this up? Because the left is coming for porn. In the past few months, a concerted campaign has been launched to drive “racism” from porn. And this campaign will probably garner support from some on the Christian right (“immorality!”), the neocon right (“cultural debasement!”), and the alt-right/alt-light/alt-whatever (“degeneracy!”). Just as with James Gunn’s pedo jokes, many folks on the right will likely see the attack against porn as either a positive thing (because “some content deserves to be banned”), or as another case of taking enemy “scalps” in the name of mutually assured destruction.

I say this as a man who dislikes porn, and as a man who helped one of its brightest stars find her way out: This last little corner of America where profit trumps ideology, where you can still say “nigger” and blaspheme Muhammad, is important. Ugly, but important. I know that’s going to be a stretch for many of you. Why care about such a sleazy business? Maybe because the left has successfully used bully tactics to force its agenda on the film industry, TV, social media, videogaming, comic books, music, sportscasting, and even pro sports, where a “racist” tweet can now guarantee a trip to a reeducation camp.

It kills them that there’s one remaining arm of American entertainment that’s still untouched.

James Gunn’s pedo jokes were awful, Alex Jones is a crackpot, and porn producers are slimy, but their silencing is a victory for the left and only the left.

Fighting the anti-speech agenda means defending nasty stuff, and I doubt many people have the desire to do that. Cosplaying about #WAR! and “scalps” is far more pleasing and less messy. And safer…but only in the short run. Long-term, we’re only hurting ourselves.