> Free speech while extremely important cannot be used as a blanket cover to say whatever you want and expect not to suffer consequences.

That's what Joe McCarthy and the House Committee for Un-American Activities (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism) said to leftists, union organizers, communists, and others in the 1950s. Is that the kind of company progressives prefer to keep, intellectually speaking?

Apparently the only difference between progressives and conservatives is which sacred cows that they're willing to mob you for for insulting. Fellow liberals, I beg of you, take heed; progressives are not our friends.

The difference in your example is that McCarthy was a government official, attacking political ideas, making what he did an absolute violation of free speech from the perspective of the first amendment. Is this really your best example?

I wonder where progressives get the silly idea that the Enlightenment philosophers that birthed liberalism said "Punishing people for speaking is bad if the government does it but its 100% A-OK if a mob does it." Perhaps you could show us some citations?

Because people listening to the speech also have the right to react to it. Or are you saying regardless of what you say I cannot take action because of it?

Should you also have a right to misrepresent the speech while agitating for someone's termination, in order for community and news outlets to pick it up, turn misrepresentation into lies and effectively force the termination to happen?

I don't like using the word "emergence", but there is a phenomenon here that's much more than a sum of its parts, and maybe should be considered differently. There's also the element of intent.

The bitterest pill to swallow is that the main intent on the part of Vice Media et al is advertising pageviews. Maybe Bollea can pay it forward.

> Or are you saying regardless of what you say I cannot take action because of it?

"Take action", my, my, what a genteel phrase to describe ruining people's careers and personal lives. Very civilized of you. One wonders whether those crowds who stoned unbelievers in an earlier era would have simply described themselves as "taking action" as well?

The answer to bad speech is good speech, period.

I really don’t get this attitude of being able to say whatever one wants in whatever context and not have any consequences. If I’m in a position of leadership and openly discriminate again some group, especially repeatedly and consistently I should not expect to go on business as usual.

the very fact that you feel the need to use a throwaway account to make this comment is sad

Maybe they dont care what enlightenment philosophers and liberalism has to say, when it's such a broken ideology that had no problems with tolerating gross inequalities related to race and gender, and have found philosophers and philosophies to follow that are less tolerant of blatant evil.

Or maybe they both value something higher then free speech when push comes to shove. For the far left its equality and protections of the vulnerable. For the far right is race, country, tradition and religion. So that seems like a pretty big difference actually.