Fundamentally, liberals seek full acceptance and understanding when they raise their picket signs and share Facebook petition links to aid the end of social inequality.

This is a noble and consuming cause that has laced itself into the pages of history and sparked controversies as small as newspaper headlines and incidents as big as civil wars.

And how do all these incidents start? Through every staged lawv  suit and street protest, social rights advocates their voices as a platform for louder battle cries, and the hope that the protests so consume the media that government has no choice but to hear their pleas and draft policy change.

For the most part, this media-control tactic has led to significant results.

Perhaps most famously, media attention is how Martin Luther King Jr. justified peaceful protests over more immediate, violent actions. It’s how the violence of the Vietnam War ignited the sympathies of the 60s flower children; it’s even how those original liberal rebels- the Founding Fathers- sparked outrage against the laws of the British.

Perhaps it will even be how this generation of liberal millennials wins their war against sexism, racism, and every other –ism they take issue with.

Yet it’s possible this media craze ends with millennials. Ironically, this end would be the result of the liberal movement itself, and its frankly obnoxious insistence on safe spaces.

That’s right, safe spaces, the overhyped weapon of choice by every liberal activist. Whether it’s demanding them in schools, friend groups, or government, safe spaces will prove to be the double edged sword of modern social activists.

It’s one thing to recognize changing idioms and an evolving language, but it’s another to slap a “bigot” label onto any poor soul who forgets to ask every person they meet their preferred gender (even though Pew Research Center reports only .3% of Americans identify as transgender).

Quite frankly, the trend of hushing inappropriate terms is destroying the very movement fighting for the respect and understanding of minorities. By hastily shaming anyone who misuses the incredibly new and rapidly changing adjectives to describe minorities, activists are hushing a conversation that is vital to the growth of their movement.

Further, the willingness to bend to the whims and comforts of minorities should be alarming for anyone with a sense of civil rights.

By forcing people into safe spaces—into areas with no room for mistakes or questions about why activists are fighting for what they are—people, typically older people, find themselves swept in a whirlwind of change with little context and a lot of fear about where they’ll fit into this new, progressive America.

On top of that, they find themselves questioning the authenticity of these liberals: who despite their preaching on social rights, 40% are okay with “limiting speech offensive to minorities” through legal regulations, according to Pew Research Center.

Without an open platform for conversation between confused conservatives and progressive liberals, activists end up shunning a substantive population of both conservative and moderate people who aren’t inherently malicious or bigoted, just in the dark about why previously okay terms and assumptions are suddenly not okay.

This miscommunication, rather than encouraging people to research, forces them into a position of shame, with liberals harshly labeling them as uneducated oppressors.

It should be no surprise, then, that these uninformed people grow to hate social activists and begin to long for the conservative days of old—where they weren’t viewed as sexist bigots for assuming their daughter wants a Barbie doll instead of a toy truck.

Of course, there is value in building communities in which everyone feels accounted for and heard, but to fight for the silence of conservatives and traditionalists in order to accommodate minorities is a battle for hypocrites.

America was founded on free speech and liberty for all people, and while the fight for liberty and equality is an ongoing and necessary one, it is not so righteous, nor is it necessary, to merit the restriction of free speech in its pursuit.