The American Illusion of Freedom

If you read HN comments, or the European press, you'd be forgiven to think that the US is at the developmental level of a sub-Saharan African country...

Yes, this article is so bad it's hard to believe it's not deliberately disingenuous. It completely elides some of the many egregious examples of abuse such as those you mention, and pretends the sole issue at hand is "hate speech." It then declares that there is no "slippery slope" to hate speech, that it is a black and white issue...while then going on to give perfect examples of the slippery slope. (Boomer feelings about kneeling are transformed into "leveraging racial hatred.") You can find quite similar examples in the UK, where people were arrested for "hate speech" that wasn't.

The US needs to do much better with freedom of speech, but this is essentially an article about how the US needs more censorship, not less. The regulation of speech for public order and morality is the justification used by every censor in history, but we increasingly live in societies where people no longer care. Instead, they want the government to shut up their ideological opponents, using the most extreme and evil examples as justification.

One final comment: speech alone cannot cause violence and extremism. No amount of speech is going to convert me or you into a violent extremist. Violent extremism is possible only when democracy is already failing, when the bonds of civil society are already dissolving, because its custodians are failing abjectly. It happens when social conditions lead to atomization, when there's no rootedness and no trust, whne there's mental illness and poverty. Then, one ideology or another becomes the excuse for the violent impulses.

No amount of censorship in Weimar Germany would have stopped bloodshed. Before the Nazis numbered more than a few hundred, assassinations and political violence in Germany were already common. If the Nazis had not taken power and killed people, it would have been another party, maybe other nationalist, maybe communists. That's why the censorship that was employed against the Nazis and others was ineffectual. The end result would have been the same. The Nazis rose to power because of the total failure of the existing social structures, not because they had magic words that convinced people to do evil things. Governments lashing out with speech restrictions are doing so out of weakness, and it bodes nothing well. People want to keep fighting the battles of the 1930s without learning anything from them.

I totally agree with your statement about the state of things in the UK! I also bookmark your post as one perfect example of whataboutism!