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Comment by mlloyd | Hacker News Reader

I think people no longer feel fine with lip service to hate speech as free speech. You have the right to believe that Hitler was right and to share that, you don't have the right to make people listen or respect that view.

People are no longer as religious as they once were. Gender and race equality are accepted more than dissented. These ideals are the cornerstones of conservative beliefs, as well as the whole Fake News era. It's not surprising to me that people are choosing not to share their space with ideas that are so obviously discriminatory and outdated.

All that said, I'll defend, against the country and every other government apparatus, any conservative's right to say such things. I will not be sad when a company or a person doesn't want those views affiliated with them or their brand though.

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> These ideals are the cornerstones of conservative beliefs

You have zero idea what you're talking about. It's as if you derived your concept of conservatism from The Daily Show.

> hate speech as free speech

Speech is speech. It's free (to be spoken) or it's not, regardless of its content. Anything else is a path to censorship.

I shouldn't respond but I will anyway.

Free speech is only protected by and from the government. It's not protected by and from any other repercussions. I don't have to like you or accept you because I support or defend your ability to exercise your freedom of speech to the government. I do not have to allow that in my home, my business, or my friendship circles.

The rest of what you said isn't worth a response.

At what point is it discrimination, though? Sure, you can fire me for "bigotry", but at a certain point your definition of "bigotry" is my definition of "discrimination".

Is it cool if I fire all democrats from my company because I don't like their speech?

>Is it cool if I fire all democrats from my company because I don't like their speech?

Only if they bring it to work or make it affiliated with your company/brand outside of work and then only individually, not as a whole. Ultimately though, you can fire whomever you wish for whatever you wish outside of a narrowly defined set of restrictions in most states.

Evidence because I'm being downvoted.

>Employees, as well as many employers, commonly but mistakenly believe that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees "freedom of speech" at work. In fact, the First Amendment applies only to government action and neither limits the rights of private employers to regulate employees' communications nor provides any constitutional right for those workers to express thoughts or opinions at work. As a result, there is no constitutionally protected right of "free speech" in the offices and factories of private employers. Although employees may be entitled to express their views freely on their own time or on a soapbox in the park, they have no such wide-ranging constitutional rights at work. Absent rights provided by one of the limited exceptions discussed below, there are no legal protections for political activities in the workplace, so private employers generally may refuse to hire, adjust pay/benefits and even discharge "at will" employees because of their political views.2 In short, "political discrimination" often is not unlawful discrimination.

https://www.hklaw.com/publications/politics-in-the-workplace...

I think a big part of this divide is semantics. What is a conservative? Is it a Rockefeller republican (center right)? Is it a populist Trump supporter? Is it a member of the current Republican party? Is it a traditional social conservative? Is it a traditional economic conservative?

You say that religion and (it seems) discrimination are cornerstones of conservativism but I would categorically disagree with that notion. I hold many of the classical conservative values (limited gov, thoughtful regulations, primacy of the constitution, belief in public investment in education, health care, defense, and research to support the public good etc) and would consider myself to be at least an economic conservative in the classical sense, yet I am an atheist, am socially liberal, and do not support racism, sexism, or xenophobia in any way. I would say some of these negative ideas are represented by the Republican party in its current incantation, but the ideals of the Republican party and conservative ideals are not necessarily one in the same, in the same way that the ideals of the Democratic party are not equivalent to classical liberalism.

> I would say some of these negative ideas are represented by the Republican party in its current incantation...

That's largely fair, but I'll point out that Trump didn't get a majority of the Republican primary vote. I think it's largely because there are plenty of Republicans who dislike Trump and weren't looking forward to all the blowback we're discussing in this thread even though Trump was in their bottom two choices for who would make a good President.

Painting entire people groups as bigoted due to election results they didn't necessarily even want is... well it's a conclusion based on an incomplete view of reality. With some charity, I can say there's an opportunity to share and learn what people actually think, but at some point the ignorance seems more willful than accidental.

Frankly, with the proclivity of all sites to either push these conversations into bubbles (Twitter, Facebook) or suppress them (professional settings, Hacker News), I'm not sure there's any suitable public space for actual understanding to happen. The problem is that all the spaces I listed seem (to me) to be controlled by the same social forces that conservatives are concerned about with respect to free speech and actual dialogue.

>The problem is that all the spaces I listed seem (to me) to be controlled by the same social forces that conservatives are concerned about with respect to free speech and actual dialogue.

Whenever I hear conservatives talk about free speech and dialog I think about Fox News and Breibart and think that I'll pass on whatever amounts to the conservative version of free speech and dialogue.

>That's largely fair, but I'll point out that Trump didn't get a majority of the Republican primary vote.

True, but he got enough to get the nomination. It also shows a lot about conservatives that more than not thought he was the best option and also how bad the other options had to be to get to this point.

You and I are not going to have a conversation about this on Brietbart or Fox News. There's really not a healthy place to have this conversation anywhere. That's what I meant.

> I'll pass on whatever amounts to the conservative version of free speech and dialogue...

Conservatives love Lincoln-Douglas, Adams-Jefferson, the Federalist Papers, the Declaration of Independence, etc. Asking people to reach for (philosophically) liberal ideals from the enlightenment about civic mindedness and rational debate are a conservative version of free speech and dialogue.

> It also shows a lot about conservatives...

"GOP voter" and "conservative" aren't synonymous. Conservatives generally dislike pettiness, identity politics, and strong-man tactics and those qualities defined Trump's candidacy more than any given policy issue.

Actual conservatives mostly split their vote between Rubio and Cruz at the end, though, it might have been too late. Trump doesn't have to be the "best" option to get a plurality and win out based on first-past-the-post rules.

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