As Judith Collins once said, the more a man assures you of his honesty, the more you should check your pockets. Collins was referring, of course, to Jacinda Ardern’s constant protestations of ‘kindness’ – and the stark contrast with her actions and the consequences of her authoritarian policies.
The only people who blatherskite more about ‘kindness’ are student leftists. Like so many Uriah Heeps, the more they pontificate and protest – if not their ’umbleness, then certainly their ‘kindness’, ‘inclusion’ and ‘welcoming’ – the more you can be absolutely certain that they’re violently intolerant bigots and bullies.
We do, in fact, ‘have the receipts’, in this case. Multiple studies have shown that left-wingers are more intolerant of other opinions than their opposites. They’re also the far more likely to be siloed in echo-chambers: the next time you try to argue with a leftist and it seems like they’re on another planet… it’s because they are. Several other studies show that left-wingers are remarkably intolerant: far more liable to ostracise, isolate and un-friend people.
This is, perhaps not coincidentally, classic feminine bullying behaviour. So it should be no surprise that female leftists are the worst of all. They’re so ugly and intolerant that they hate even their ideological fellow-travellers.
It may be reasonable to assume someone with a similar ideology would be more tolerant of your views, but new data by FIRE suggests that’s not the case. Amazingly, it turns out men are often more tolerant of the opposite side than women are of their own side.
FIRE is the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a nonprofit that defends free speech rights for all Americans. FIRE is nonpartisan and has challenged Democratic and Republican politicians for threatening First Amendment rights. The nonprofit receives funding from conservative, liberal and libertarian donors. A survey of FIRE email subscribers found 28 per cent identify as left-leaning, 32 per cent as right-leaning, and the rest as ‘other’. In 2024, 60 per cent of FIRE’s casework involved people threatened by censorship attempts that came from their political right.
FIRE also rates academic institutions based on their free-speech policies. And, boy, do they have their work cut out for them. As their own data shows, male and female American college students, where left-wingers outnumber conservatives two to one, are broadly intolerant of opposing viewpoints.
But the girls are far worse than the boys.
The males consistently display far more tolerance than females, regardless of their politics. In fact, with the exception of male libertarians, who are slightly more tolerant, men of all political ideologies have roughly the same level of tolerance as each other. The same is true of women.
So, it turns out the picture of left-wing intolerance is slightly more complicated than you might think. Rather than being a simple left-right thing, it’s a much simpler female-male thing. It’s just the fact that women are much, much, more likely to be left-wing (and growing more so) means that intolerance is more noticeable on the left.
It’s not that liberals are more tolerant than conservatives, or vice versa. Liberal and conservative men are more or less equally tolerant, as are liberal and conservative women. It’s being a man, liberal or conservative, that makes the difference.
While political affiliation makes people more biased towards speakers who share their views, it affects their overall willingness to let speakers speak, regardless of ideology, very little. But regardless of party or ideology, men are so much more tolerant than women that the gender tolerance gap dominates the ideology difference. In fact, men are over 3.5 times more likely than women to be “perfectly tolerant” of opposing views, meaning they would definitely allow any campus speaker.
FIRE’s research doesn’t identify the causation behind this stark gender divide, but it does rule out some possibilities.
You might wonder, for instance, whether women are more censorial due to being more personally affected by the positions of the hypothetical speakers our surveys asked about. But only one of the speakers argues for a position that disproportionately affects women (banning abortion), and the gender gap isn’t greater for this speaker, so that doesn’t seem to be what’s causing the gap. My suspicion, corroborated by other research, is that women prefer social harmony.
That is the nice way of putting it. The ‘un-kinder’ way might be that, this is, as I said, classic female bullying behaviour.
Consider, after all the characteristics of female bullying:
Social aggression, exclusion and ostracism, emotional manipulation, gossip and rumour spreading and gaslighting.
Sound familiar?
