“Freedom of speech is only for punching down” is one of those stupid left wing university tropes that people like Ben brought into the general culture. See also: sex and gender are different, paradox of tolerance, rape is about power, racism = prejudice + power.
Thought-terminating cliches of pure wrongness that they say over and over in hopes that the normies start repeating them a la Brave New World.
What shits me the most about a lot of these is that they've taken out a key word here and there to turn a true statement false, and motte and bailey the results.
Sex and gender
roles are different - biology and cultural norms that come from it aren't the same thing, though the first strongly influences the second.
The paradox of tolerance is only applicable when you think about their strawman of a centrist, like from Collins' tweet above - the person who hears one side saying 'let us live in peace!' and the other side saying 'kill them all!' and goes, Solomon-style, 'well, kill some of them'. This is a moronic oversimplification of every single aspect of these kinds of idpol disagreements, but appears to be exactly what they believe centrists are like.
Some rape
is about power, though getting into the motivations can be difficult when you are pretty much restricted to the word of the perpetrator. But in cases when the victim has been disabled or infirm, especially, the motivation has often been more about exerting power over the vulnerable target. It's meant to counter the idea that rape is purely men targeting women they find attractive, because it can be far more complicated than that on many levels - while in other cases, that's exactly what it seems to be.
Systemic racism = prejudice + power. They've just taken away the 'systemic', like they took away the 'roles' in the sex is different from gender, and the 'it' from equality, and then reapplied it to all examples. To normal people, systemic racism and ordinary racism are different things on different scales, but if you accept that then the people who have conflated the two would have to accept that, yes, they're very racist, and that goes against their personal view of themselves as Good People, so it must be everyone else who is wrong.
Freedom of speech is meant for punching up is pithy, but as you point out it's being said by the same people who redefine all power dynamics to suit their narrative. They have decided that if you say anything bad about a troon, you're automatically punching down because troons are the most oppressed people in the world - even if said troon is a rich straight white man spending all their time attacking women and trying to molest kids. But that doesn't matter - transphobia! Ebul Kiwis!
Journalists really do see themselves as an oppressed class because of their profession, mostly it seems because people tell them they're bad at their jobs and they hate that. They demand to be the arbiters of what is and isn't 'punching up', and lean incredibly heavily on whatever minority status they have, eg Taylor Lorenz only gets criticised because she's a woman, Carlos Maza because he's gay and latino, ignoring that in both cases their incredibly privileged upbringings and also some objectively reprehensible behaviour.
So what's Ben Collins' excuse? Or the excuse of the guy he's responding to in the above tweets? After all, aren't they both mediocre straight white men, aka Current Year devils, at least to the left? No, their only oppression is that they're terminally online and pretend that their job is reporting the truth when it's actually the opposite. Sounds like punching up to me - and certainly by their definition it is.
Tl;dr: Criticising Ben Collins is punching up. He should check his privilege and promise to do better, not whine about all the totally real things he's doing with his time instead of sperging on Twitter.
