Thread by @Doc_0

Weakness is always provocative, including weakness in defense of free speech.

When you open the door to politicized censorship, no matter how high-minded your ideals supposedly are, eventually people with knives, guns, and bombs will kick that door all the way open.

Once you signal free speech is on the political bargaining table, some very rough customers will show up to drive hard bargains. You've told them your society is not really committed to freedom of expression, dissent, the exchange of ideas. You won't FIGHT for those ideals.

Poisonous ideas like "hate speech is not free speech" will inevitably lead to very hateful people deciding what gets classified as "hate speech" and banned. To be honest, it STARTS that way. No benevolent ideology has an appetite for censorship.

When you abandon your commitment to free speech, you immediately create a power structure that decides which speech is allowed. Every totalitarian ideology will crave a position in that power structure. Every faction will insist on banning what it considers "hate speech."

Those who fail to demand a seat in the hierarchy of censorship power will soon find themselves on the business end of censorship, because they have no power to resist. Remember, weakness is provocative. Their failure to seize power and impose speech codes is taken as weakness.

Totalitarian ideologies with money and political influence get busy cranking out legions of indoctrinators and operatives, infiltrating both government and private companies to ensure their speech codes are enforced. Those without such influence usually resort to violence.

Everyone else - the well-meaning people who remain sincerely committed to free speech, proudly declaring they will not restrict the speech of others or resort to violence and street theater - will get steamrolled. Ideologies that refuse to play totalitarian games become sheep.

Censorship regimes like to posture as sophisticates, with enlightened rhetoric polished by academia, but in fact their system is barbaric. That's true of collectivism in all its forms: barbarism posturing as the height of civilization. It's all about brute power struggles.

When you say, "We believe in freedom of speech, BUT..." every totalitarian will line up to fight for control over what comes after the "but." Everyone who doesn't fight viciously for control will end up being controlled. Some of the bids for power will be written in blood.

There are some people and groups in America today that cannot be criticized or mocked - and that immunity from criticism, which is really immunity against RESISTANCE, is a ticket to other forms of power and wealth. Other people and groups can be savaged without hesitation.

Of COURSE every predatory ideologue wants the free speech of his victims and adversaries restricted. Of course they all want resistance to their ideas made illegal, so dissenters cannot organize, persuade, or refine their arguments. All other power flows from control of speech.

And those who have no power to control speech, those who can be denigrated at will, in the most vicious terms - tall their other rights become negotiable as well. Punitive socialist government is an endless trial against its citizens. The silenced can mount no defense.

You can already see all of this happening around you today, and it's going to get worse. When free speech becomes not a principle, but a privilege, then everyone who doesn't fight for that privilege is bound to lose it, and much else afterward. Of COURSE there will be blood. /end