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this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2025
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Without exception, "free speech absolutists" just want to say a specific brand of horrid shit themselves without social blowback. It never applies to free speech as a legal concept, and certainly never applies to speech they disagree with.
Without exception? No, I don't think that's true, it's just the loudest ones, unfortunately.
For genuine free speech supporters like me, this is a problem because it makes the phrase "free speech" look bad and thereby contributes to a decline in it.
That's why I specifically called out the phrase "free speech absolutist".
In my experience the vast majority of people who truly do advocate for freedom of speech are willing/able to understand nuances such as the fact that your freedom of speech does not grant you immunity from the social consequences of unpopular speech. I.e., other people exercising their freedom to disagree or opt not to use their private platform to host your speech. The "absolutists" will unironically call that censorship, rather than recognize other people are not compelled to engage with their 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".