Free speech cannot mean a free pass for hatred.
Uh, yes it can. I mean, your hatred is ok, right?
It also can’t mean that you lose your livelihood for saying the N word.
I was a member of a political site, attended mostly by liberals and leftists. It was a “no holds barred” site and most of the arguments against my position were simple ad-hom attacks.
But then the site changed their rules. They no longer allowed ad-hom attacks. most (but not all) of the leftists would continue with the ad-hom and when scolded they would respond with something like, “his position is so obvously wrong, we shouldn’t have to respond to it”. But the admin said that if it was so wrong, they need to demonstrate that with their argument or not respond at all.
Half of them eventually got permabanned. The rest were able to clean up their act quite a bit, but posting on that site is where I came up with the trifecta of leftist argument tools:
1. Ad hominem attack.
2. Projection
3. Deflection.
That is, the ones still there mostly just go for number’s 2 and three. For number three I found a perfect response to their posts: “That’s an interesting thought. You should start a thread on it, but it’s outside the scope of this thread.”
One of the reasons I’m all for free speech is that ideas are able to stand or fall on their own merit, or lack thereof. Free speech allows bad ideas to collapse of their own nonsense.
I used to say that the left owns the MSM, but the right owns the internet, and the right will prevail because of that. Then came cancel culture. But it appears to have run its course. Heck, I think Youtube is even becoming more wary of cancelling videos because of Bitchute, Rumble, et al.
Epilogue to the above: I was cancelled from that site during the plandemic. Not for breaking the rules, but for saying “dangerous” stuff. Things like, “my brother and his friend got ivermectin from his friend’s health clinic in a third world country and both of them were cured of Covid with it.” Or that the vaccines were not fully tested and were not really vaccines.
BUt the cancel culture seems to be running its course. It will be interesting to see what Musk does with Twitter. For all I know, he bought it not to increase free speech, but to take the wind out of the sails of Trumps new Social Media site. What would happen to Bitchute and Rumble if Youtube did a 180 on cancelling videos?