I think that free speech laws are what stopped us from being proactive against these intolerant fascist views.
They turn tolerance from a social contract into a “paradox” where we have to tolerate the intolerant until they take over.
If we didn’t have such strict free speech laws, we could have deplatformed and jailed these people back when they were at the “protest with confederate and Nazi flags” stage and not had to deal with the neo-fascist government stage.
To put it another way punching Nazis should be legal. A Nazi is a direct existential threat to Jewish people and other minorities. Parading with Nazi paraphernalia in public is violence towards others and punching Nazis is valid self defense. American free speech and self defense laws were written to exclude “inducement” of violence, but that’s been whittled away by the supreme Court, including a ruling that walking around with Nazi flags in a Jewish neighborhood wasn’t bad enough to permit the residents to retaliate in any way because of “free speech”.
I prefer to think in these terms: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/moderation-is-different-from-censorship
I think that free speech laws are what stopped us from being proactive against these intolerant fascist views.
They turn tolerance from a social contract into a “paradox” where we have to tolerate the intolerant until they take over.
If we didn’t have such strict free speech laws, we could have deplatformed and jailed these people back when they were at the “protest with confederate and Nazi flags” stage and not had to deal with the neo-fascist government stage.
To put it another way punching Nazis should be legal. A Nazi is a direct existential threat to Jewish people and other minorities. Parading with Nazi paraphernalia in public is violence towards others and punching Nazis is valid self defense. American free speech and self defense laws were written to exclude “inducement” of violence, but that’s been whittled away by the supreme Court, including a ruling that walking around with Nazi flags in a Jewish neighborhood wasn’t bad enough to permit the residents to retaliate in any way because of “free speech”.