The Democratic Party is Dead. It’s lineage has been usurped by the Socialist Party

“Over the years, the ACLU has represented or defended individuals engaged in some truly offensive speech. We have defended the speech rights of communists, Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members, accused terrorists, pornographers, anti-LGBT activists, and flag burners. That’s because the defense of freedom of speech is most necessary when the message is one most people find repulsive. Constitutional rights must apply to even the most unpopular groups if they’re going to be preserved for everyone.”

What? Defended Nazis? They must be destroyed! Damn the ACLU! They’re Nazis too!

It would be pretty funny if the mainline Democrat party started calling out the ACLU for not being progressive enough.

😂 IKR!

20f68v.jpg (click to show) Upvoted!

So would you get paid by the meme?

Like 50 cents?

Nope: I do remember this argument, promoted by notably Chomsky, that liberals should be free speech absolutists. I love me some Chomsky, but while this argument may have had merits back in its day it is wrong now.

https://youtu.be/zwojLDxOWGA

Here’s a snippet of a recent interview from Summer 2020 — tried to find one as recent as I could to get an up-to-date snapshot of his thinking. It really hasn’t changed much from the Chomsky I read back in college. I think he’s being kind of a dinosaur about this.

Chomsky was a product of his time, having grown up in the Civil Rights and Vietnam War era when government suppression of dissenting liberal speech was the issue. There was no question that speech opposing the draft or fighting for equal rights and representation for blacks was righteous, and that’s even more apparent in historical hindsight.

In the social media age, the social context and issues are different. Namely, there’s a burgeoning Neo-fascist movement that exploits social media companies’ unwillingness to aggressively rid their platforms of fact-free slander and violent speech. It’s metastasized and curdled to the point that “conservative” views in the social media realm amount to racist and bigoted slurs and QAnon conspiracies. A conspiracy that holds that the government is controlled by cannibalistic pedophiles which can only be stopped by Trump is a coded appeal for violence against all who stand in Trump’s way.

Liberals had been warning about this for a long time particularly throughout the Trump years, but the two months of Trumpist lying about the election outcome, endlessly repeated in right-wing echo chambers, and culminating in the Trump-led coup of Jan. 6, 2021 was the wake-up call for many tech platforms. Most sites doesn’t want to be unwitting accomplices to the destruction of democracy, and they don’t have to.

Chomsky talks about “winning the argument” but it’s becoming increasingly apparent there’s no way to argue with a person deeply enmeshed in a universe of invented facts. Experts in deradicalization hold that logical debate can’t do it — if there is any hope, it’s from extricating the individual from the toxic community if not busting up the community itself and thus eliminating the social benefits they get from participating in it.

Tl;dr — we can’t have a free speech conversation divorced from reality and morality. We have to put on our big boy pants and make judgments about those things.

Free speech is the foundation of our Republic. What you propose is to break up the Republic because you can’t abide by your own theories about logic and morality. You believe you are the arbiter of morality and reality. Who appointed you to tell everyone else what is moral and real? You are a bunch of anti American petty tyrants who want everyone to do what you say without question. Your entire statement is a treatise on totalitarianism.