This is how I’ve always felt. Let a fucking neo-Nazi or KKK person or whoever speak publicly wherever they want, because if their argument is terrible and can easily be broken down with reason and evidence, their position is invalidated and that’s clear to everyone else. That’s the point of free speech, to allow bad arguments to be stated so they can be broken down and discarded. Just ignoring them and keeping them from talking near you just lets them go talk to other people and lets the ideas fester and grow. You can’t erase bad ideas and arguments and opinions by pretending they don’t exist.

And that’s even in the best case scenario where the silenced person is factually wrong. Lots of people either realize THEY’RE the wrong one or don’t want to risk being the wrong one, so anyone making an argument against theirs just silences them to prevent that, which just proves further that they’re wrong to anyone observing the incident. 

Exactly, there are times I want to smack those that are idiots, just use force to shut up the idiocy, the people that blindly buy into things, hear and believe rather than think and question and then repeat it till even the sane and unbiased people start to believe.

But then I remember that solves nothing, they do more harm to themselves speaking freely and stupidly, than censored and secretive, polluting the well from shadow than do it openly.

This is one line that I think about always with topics like this, even though I have lost interest in the show, this one line is the most important given it was at a time where he was being framed for something, blamed for something, made the scapegoat to punish, and they wanted to silence him with threats of cutting out his tongue if he didn’t keep quiet, because the truth was what he could speak.

Keep in mind free speech also means if someone says something you dislike, you CAN protest. That is also freedom of speech.

You cannot suppress people, though. There’s a fine line, and it’s a little bit fuzzy. Example, if a company has a social stance you oppose, and you boycott them, it’s sorta standing with a foot on either side of the line. On the one hand, you are perfectly allowed to not support them. On the other hand, deliberately going out of your way to trash their income and livelihoods is clear suppression.

I wish this stuff were more easily defined. I really do.