On the phony right not to be insulted (from terrorists in France to liberals in America)

The recent terrorist attack in France, by Islamists angry that someone had spoken ill of their Prophet Mohammad, should be read partly as evidence of what is horribly wrong with the idea that people who are members of minority groups, who are supposedly (or in fact) "oppressed" as such, have some special right to not be insulted.

Much of American liberal identity politics is about that. The truth is that, while everyone has the right to not be harassed (as I have been), imprisoned, or killed by rogue tendencies in their nation's government, no one in a democracy can have the right to not be insulted. Yet many people on the "liberal left" do not see it this way. As a result, we have not only political struggles against runaway state violence, but also the tendency of corporate and government institutions to enforce speech codes and the interdiction of the mysterious and subjectively attributed "micro-aggressions." The people who want this are not on the radical left but the "liberal" center (although these views are not liberal in fact, as they do not favor liberty or tolerance). Even Joe Biden has made genuflections in this direction. In the first debate with Trump, he said (emphasis mine):

“The fact is that there is racial INSENSITIVITY. People have to be MADE AWARE OF what other people FEEL LIKE, what INSULTS them, what is DEMEANING to them. It’s important people know. Many people don’t want to HURT OTHER PEOPLE'S FEELINGS, but it makes a big difference. It makes a gigantic difference in the way a child is able to grow up and have a sense of SELF-ESTEEM. It’s a little bit like how this guy and his friends LOOK DOWN ON so many people. They look down their nose on people like Irish Catholics, like me, who grow up in Scranton. They look down on people who don’t have money. They look down on people who are of a different faith. They looked down on people who are a different color.”

A real left politics would differ from those of liberal Democrats in worrying less about preventing anyone from "looking down on people who don't have money," and a lot more about making it so there are not so many people who don't have money.