If you treat people like trash…

As London played host to a mass tantrum over the weekend following Donald Trump’s inauguration, someone elsewhere was taking utter sense. In a piece titled “Trump! How did this happen?” Brendan O’ Neill, the editor of current affairs magazine Spiked, writes: “It happened because you banned super-size sodas. And smoking in parks. And offensive ideas on campus. Because you branded people who oppose gay marriage ‘homophobic’, and people unsure about immigration ‘racist’. “Because you treated owning a gun and never having eaten quinoa as signifiers of fascism. Because you thought correcting people’s attitudes was more important than finding them jobs. Because you turned ‘white man’ from a description into an insult. “Because you treated dissent as hate speech and criticism of Obama as extremism. Because you talked more about gender-neutral toilets than about home repossessions. “Because you cried when someone mocked the Koran but laughed when they mocked the Bible. “Because you kept telling people, ‘You can’t think that, you can’t say that, you can’t do that.’ “Because you turned politics from something done by and for people to something done to them, for their own good. Because you treated people like trash. And people don’t like being treated like trash. Trump happened because of you.”

Common sense part two this week comes from the University of Kent’s student newspaper Inquire. Writer Miles Howell highlights the intolerance of the Stop Funding Hate campaign which aims to deprive publications that hold the wrong opinion of advertising revenue. Miles nails it when he argues that a democracy affords all shades of opinion their right to be heard, while censoring those with whom we disagree belongs to dictatorships.

Why Trump won