Maggie's Farm

The facial expression of the involuntary smile (which the kid could not suppress) -- is a base primate reaction to a sense of threat from another in a potentially violent social encounter. It is in fact an involuntary signal that the threatened primate is not trying to escalation a dominance contest, and is in a submissive mode, not contesting for dominance.

This is seen all the time in military basic training where the drill instructors will be screaming within inches of the new recruits face and the recruit simply cannot suppress a smile, even though he may have just seen someone else punished for smiling.

Drill instructors then work very hard (much the the pain and discomfort of the recruit -- though for his own good) to punish and redirect this involuntary reaction. They do this not because they feel insulted (as they suggest in their screaming response) -- but because their purpose is to take ordinary, non-dominant males who naturally respond to attack with submission and to make them into males that respond to attack by NOT submitting, and instead to become immediately aggressive in the face of aggression.

Taking this principle writ large in society, and in this specific instance -- whatever the progressive left thinks they are accomplishing -- they are in fact taking a non-dominant group of juvenile males who responded to social attacks with calm and submission signals -- and they are effectively training them to exert dominance traits and to respond to aggression with aggression.

It will not result, I fear, in the reaction of coercing the greater submission that they intend by their invectives. It just doesn't work that way. Militaries the world over have proved this time and again in their training methods.