Liberal fascism is alive and well, and seemingly everywhere one looks these days. Not since the dark days of Stalin’s purges have so many so-called progressives exercised so much violent aggression against their enemies. It is indeed a dark time to be considered an enemy of the left-liberal alliance, as so many recent victims can attest.

First, a bunch of Twitter users got mad at Stephen Colbert, leading to Comedy Central agreeing to end his show — forever. Regardless of the merit of the anti-Colbert complaint, it was chilling to see free speech trampled upon as a gaggle of vaguely organized people on Twitter successfully browbeat a massive media conglomerate into sort of apologizing for a joke.

As bleak as that episode was, it was just the warmup for the unprecedented onslaught of rage unleashed against Brenden Eich, the former CEO of Mozilla, who was hounded from his job merely for donating $1,000 to a political campaign organized around stripping same-sex couples of the right to have their unions recognized by the state. The gay mafia is real, my friends, which is why Eich is now dead in an unmarked grave somewhere outside Philly. Or at least no longer the CEO of a tech company, which is basically the next-worse thing.

Sure, Eich’s resignation was his own decision, prompted in part by the resignations of some members of Mozilla’s board — in other words, it was internal strife, not external protest, that led to his decision to leave the company — but the gays and their gay-sympathizers were frightfully unfair to Eich, by expressing disapproval of his totally legitimate decision to spend money denying them various rights. The entire affair reflected a terrifying new status quo, in which tech executives don’t have the complete freedom to say whatever they like. What’s next? Will it no longer be socially acceptable for men to make unwanted sexual advances toward women?

Still, the worst of the new intolerance was yet to come. Last week, Brandeis University announced that it would rescind an honorary degree it planned to award to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an internationally feted survivor of horrific abuse as a Somali-born former Muslim. Hirsi Ali is now a best-selling author and critic of religious extremism — a hero to the victims of Islamic Extremism worldwide, or at least a hero to various Americans and Europeans who imagine themselves the foot soldiers in a global war against Islamism. Brandeis’ decision to cave to pressure from the left-wing/Islamofascist militants and cancel Hirsi Ali’s honor has been castigated by champions of freedom around the world.