Who would have guessed that the most important victory in the culture wars against the hard left this year would be won by a former radical Islamist?
British Muslim Maajid Nawaz – once arrested and imprisoned in Egypt for five years for his membership of the proscribed Islamist organisation Hizb ut-Tahrir; now a campaigner against radical Islam – is probably far from most conservatives’ idea of a natural hero.
But the $3.4 million settlement Nawaz has just won in a defamation action against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is a victory for us all.
And I really don’t just mean people who identify as conservative.
I mean the broad coalition that embraces moderate Muslims, Brexiteers, Trump voters, internet shitposters, Breitbart readers and writers, libertarian bloggers, European populists, Nigel Farage, Lionel Shriver, Paul Joseph Watson, Sargon of Akkad, Count Dankula, Morrissey, Thomas Sowell, Douglas Murray, Kanye West, Ann Coulter, the Imam of Peace, Andrew Bolt, Andrew Neil, Eric Weinstein, Joe Rogan, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Jordan Peterson, Christina Hoff Sommers – anyone, in fact, whether they’re on the left or the right, who has been called a “Nazi” or “far right” or an “extremist” or a “fascist” or an “Uncle Tom” or similarly vile, reductive, hysterical, hate-filled, sometimes even life-threatening epithets by the increasingly aggressive forces of the radical left.
Read the rest at Breitbart.