Literal white supremacists and nazis however, do not. Those people should be pushed so far off any platform that their only option left is to be the crazies screaming on Times Square that the end of the world is coming.
These people actively contributed to fostering hatred in societies, And no, you will not fight them off with debates. The time it takes you to rebuke a single one of their arguments means they can spew a dozen more of theirs.
By the way, it's not free speech. The government isn't banning them.
Free speech is a principle outside of the 1st amendment.
It's not too dissimilar to message board culture from the aughts. You essentially had federated versions of Reddit. It looks like we're destined for that again because people can't stop peeing in the grownups pool.
If social media companies will be bifurcated as you say, it’ll be a tiny fraction of their American audiences - leaving the rest of the world sticking with the mainstream. Those smaller Ameri-centric sites will fail to reach critical-mass needed to sustain themselves in the long-term and hopefully those movements will fade into the background.
Your comparisons to the *chan imageboard splintering is apt, but look at how the more extreme chan sites have been having in finding a web-host (with enough capacity) to host them.
Not really. Many other countries also have a left-wing/right wing split in their politics. There is a lot of sharing of thought and cross-influence between right-wing politics and left-wing politics in different countries. Figures on the British right like Lord Monckton [1] or Nigel Farage [2] find many admirers in American and Australian conservatism. Conservative American journalists write puff pieces extolling the virtues of Marion Maréchal [3].
And I think you will similarly find a lot of exchange of ideas and thinkers on the political left between different countries too.
[1] https://www.heartland.org/about-us/who-we-are/lord-christoph...
[2] https://ukipwsx.org/nigel-farages-speech-at-us-heritage-foun...
[3] https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/marion-marech...
After Biden wins, I'd guess we'll have a couple years of laxer enforcement and that will doom the alternatives.
This is a false equivalence. The worst of the alt-right are far, far worse than the worst of the extreme left (antifa, maybe? Though there is no alt-left).
Good riddance to them, I say. If you want to lead the KKK, and advocate for a white ethnostate, I won't lose any sleep when you can't post videos trying to convince others of the same evil ideas.
Nope it’s just equivalence: https://panampost.com/panam-staff/2020/06/23/the-links-betwe...
(FWIW: I’m quite pro-BLM. I don’t believe in guilt by association. My point is that there are high-profile people in relatively mainstream organizations that are proponents of murderous leftist dictators.)
Supporting Maduro doesn't invalidate their fight. Supporting marxism doesn't invalidate their fight. Supporting Cuba doesn't invalidate their fight.
Oh, by the way, those three are countries or ideologies the US have actively tried to destroy. Should I go and make my own website claiming the US government for dozens of years has been the number one exporter of terrorism in the world ?
Oh, right, it actually is. And still, it's still not related to the damn subject.
That’s exactly what I said:
> I’m quite pro-BLM. I don’t believe in guilt by association.
I’m responding to an entirely different point:
> The worst of the alt-right are far, far worse than the worst of the extreme left
I don’t think this statement is accurate given how many people on the extreme left embrace murderers like Maduro. Violent extremism is a problem on both sides.
As to Pan Am Post, your assertion that it’s a “far right” site is exactly why so many people are concerned about Twitter and Facebook censorship. Pan Am Post is libertarian with a Latin American focus both in terms of content and the contributors. From Wikipedia:
> According to Richard Scheines, dean of the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences of Carnegie Mellon University, PanAm Post is "an incredibly rich online site that covers news and offers excellent analyses of all regions in the Americas".[6][7] In 2019 and 2020, the PanAm Post was ranked in a Forbes article as one of the most prominent free-market magazines in the world measured by social media impact.[8][9]
I do not support Maduro, in fact I'm pretty ignorant overall about Venezuelan politics. But if the same measurement stick is applied to US presidents, a lot of Americans are neck deep in trouble given the usual US foreign policy.
Nah, there are plenty of people advocating for explicit ethno-separatism on the far left -- just look at Louis Farrakhan and his lefty pals. They just don't have very big YouTube channels. People more-or-less naturally ignore them except when they turn out to protests to hijack an ostensibly liberal or socialist cause.
There are people that support Stalin and Mao, which is just bad as supporting Hitler.
>The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.
>Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production
You can't get communism without having a dictatorship or some other massively authoritarian government first (or at the very least, if you can, there's no precedent for it on the nation-state level), and autocracies, once installed, have a peculiar desire to continue being autocratic.
He said this because for him the Paris Commune was proof that initiating socialism is possible without State power. Since he profoundly disliked the State, he thought that it was better to abolish the state and instead implement a government of direct democracy and freedom.
Lenin, although he had read this and agreed with this anti-statist assessment, judged that it was not possible to implement such a strategy in Russia, because Russia was too big to rule coordinately in such a way, not in size of population, but in physical size and disparity. This was not necessarily an issue, but given the war that was raging at the time he decided that it was too risky to fragment the country at that point. He was also expecting that the rest of the world would see socialist revolutions, which was not unexpected at the time, but this was very optimistic. Since that did not happen, the state of the Russian Empire was maintained. This was, obviously, a huge mistake. He realized as much later, but did not see a way to fix that issue immediately. As he was making plans to prevent Stalin from taking power however, he unexpectedly died of a stroke at a very young age. All in all, Lenin, in the founding of the USSR made a series of mistakes that were so obvious that he eventually realized them. If he would have attempted to rectify them is an open and unanswerable question.
The conclusion from all of this, that most socialists realize nowadays, is that attempting to install an autocratic Leninist state is a huge mistake. This is why most modern socialist experiments have been centered around libertarian socialism, that attempts to implement the ideas that Marx was persuaded by after the Paris Commune.
In conclusion, you should read Marx's preface to the communist manifesto, in which he makes the points I have made above and warns against following the manifesto, claiming that history has proven him wrong and that it should not be considered as anything more than a vestigial document of nothing but historical interest.
He also warns that his ideas on how to implement a socialist society are, unlike his analysis of capitalism, nothing more than suggestions and that one should let them be empirically proven or disproven.
Edit: I'm sorry someone is down-voting you. While I'm not sure I get it yet I want to hear your side.
You got this the other way around. Private property needs force to be upheld.
The sacralization of private property is so deeply ingrained that people actually prefer the KKK to even thinking about limiting it. It's so dogmatic that it's depressing.
I don't follow this at all, but I'm willing to listen? How does private property require any more force to uphold compared to any other possible system? Even anarchy, if you want it to stay anarchy requires force if you have defectors.
Property (and we're mostly talking in the context of "real" property - i.e. land and maybe structures/improvements - since that's what's typically most scarce/valuable in a society given the fixed supply, though some resources like water might be subject to similar discussions for similar reasons) has two states: "owned" and "not owned". Asserting ownership inherently requires force. Not asserting ownership requires no force at all.
Typically, in an implementation of absolute anarchy, there would be no ownership of property beyond, at most, two categories:
1. Property which you individually (plus perhaps your family) are actively occupying/improving/using and can prevent use by others
2. Property which you and other people interested in occupying/improving/using that property (a.k.a. a "community") can cooperatively do so
Category #1 is a difficult proposition in a stateless society, since it definitionally means that your occupation is at the exclusion of a broader community. All but the absolute smallest of "communities" (if you could call them that) would likely outnumber you. You could probably recruit other community members to your cause, but - definitionally speaking - if you're able to get enough people on your side to avoid being outnumbered, then congrats, your property is probably in Category #2 and collectively-used.
You're right that private property and community property require an equal amount of force to uphold, but the thing is that per person community property requires less force per occupant. Thus, unless you've got a force multiplier that's unavailable to the broader community, you're gonna have a pretty hard time asserting "private" ownership of anything that the broader community claims to "own".
From a purely anarchistic point of view, European settlers were within their rights to settle upon and use that unowned land. They weren't, however, within their rights to to use that "unowned" land at the expense of other people already using that land, and thus the Native Americans were within their rights to defend against such a deprivation of access. Unfortunately, the Europeans had numbers, guns, and smallpox on their side, and as the Native Americans retreated further West the Europeans continued to spread.
And to be clear: the Native Americans were using that land. A reasonably-healthy wilderness ecosystem is crucial for hunting, as any hunter can attest even in the modern-day; kinda hard to hunt bison if there ain't any bison.
If there is no concept of private property, the need to defend ownership ceases. If no one owns anything, there can be no claims - and counter claims. Like a happy family where your brother's meal is also yours, and vice versa - depending on how hungry you are.
For the record, I don't support the latter stance and believe Marxism is catastrophically ignorant of innate human tendencies. But as an ideology, it is worth exploring to reexamine our own relationship with and understanding of private property.
Is it to oppress everyone equally?
If you want to base it on application/reality, the Klan and white supremacist have murdered a lot more people than Marxists in the past 20 years in the United States (maybe not always the case but I don't have that data). Maybe in a country like India where Marxism and armed rebellion are a more real threat I can see your point but the Klan doesn't operation in India.
I am not a fan of revolutionary Marxism, but in terms of actual danger to people I don't see them as nearly as much of a risk. They also have far less funding than the extreme right and seem to be far fewer in number.
If revolutionary Marxists start killing people or conducting acts of domestic terror, then yes ban those people. Let me know next time a revolutionary Marxist shoots up a school.
If we can look globally, even within 50 years, Marxists (e.g., Khmer Rouge, and Mao's Cultural Revolution) have killed many orders of magnitude more people than have racial separatists or supremacists.
If we look back further, you at least pick up the Nazis on the racial supremacist side, but that still doesn't get you within an order of magnitude of Mao, Stalin, and friends.
Within the USA, the Constitution has protected us, but we can still see pernicious effects of Marxism. It's harder to quantify this, but I don't think there's a clear case that either side is "winning".
Again, I am not a fan of hard core authoritarian Marxism and would be concerned if these people had real power or larger numbers and serious funding. I was simply pointing out that as of today they are few, lack funding or serious organization, and seem to advocate and enact violence much less often than the extreme right. They can be just as trollish though, I'll give them that.
BTW /r/ChapoTrapHouse was also banned for advocacy of violence and trolling/brigading.
>Days of Rage is important, because this stuff is forgotten and it shouldn’t be. The 1970s underground wasn’t small. It was hundreds of people becoming urban guerrillas. Bombing buildings: the Pentagon, the Capitol, courthouses, restaurants, corporations. Robbing banks. Assassinating police. People really thought that revolution was imminent, and thought violence would bring it about.
>One thing that Burrough returns to in Days of Rage, over and over and over, is how forgotten so much of this stuff is. Puerto Rican separatists bombed NYC like 300 times, killed people, shot up Congress, tried to kill POTUS (Truman). Nobody remembers it.
>Also, people don’t want to remember how much leftist violence was actively supported by mainstream leftist infrastructure. I’ll say this much for righty terrorist Eric Rudolph: the sonofabitch was caught dumpster-diving in a rare break from hiding in the woods. During his fugitive days, Weatherman’s Bill Ayers was on a nice houseboat paid for by radical lawyers.
Bill Ayers bombed the US Capitol building, something completely forgotten today. You might remember him - he was Obama's mentor. Someone tracked down a rare first edition of his manifesto and reviewed it and scanned a bunch of pages in.
http://www.zombietime.com/prairie_fire/
>Page 40 of the manuscript is typical: It outlines the Weather Underground's strategies for overthrowing the United States. Among the many strategies are: eliminating the feeling of patriotism among the general public, destroying the government from within, and starting a mass insurrection among the lower classes.
"Our final goal is the destruction of imperialism, the seizure of power, and the creation of socialism."
The following quote is taken from page 128, from the portion of Prairie Fire having to do with the Middle East. I include it here to show the amazing consistency of the radical left-wing view of the area -- the issues and arguments remain almost unchanged from 1974 to today: ending Zionism, no "war for oil," stopping U.S. support for Israel, etc. Aside from a few current events details, this exact same text could have appeared in any contemporary left-wing essay about the Middle East. This shows that what once was a radical communist view has now become mainstream: http://www.zombietime.com/prairie_fire/pfpg128_2.jpg
It does. I've also been confidently assured by my conservative friends that conservatism is a very different politics from racism, fascism, and neo-Nazism. I would not really consider the question of whether I myself am a human being or, as Richard Spencer has posited, a "soulless golem", to be a conservative vs liberal fight.
Experience has taught me that people who enter into an argument with disingenuous red herrings such as this one are not interested in a good faith discussion, but I am always willing to give people the benefit of the doubt.
My argument isn’t that gassing Jews and conservatism are inherently the same thing, that’s a completely preposterous interpretation of my previous comment. My argument is that fear of losing status is at the core of all of these ideologies, and nowhere is that more explicit than conservatism.
Edit: also, it’s equally amazing and horrifying to me that anyone could think a middle-ground between white supremacy and racial equality is “healthy”.
The types of people that moved to Gab hate "big government" and are against market regulation, but suddenly want the government to step in when companies blacklist them. They want the ability to "just ask questions" when it's clear they only intend to create inflammatory arguments so they get the excuse to degrade people. People like that complain people shouldn't force their views onto other people and then force their own hateful views about abortion, birth control, etc.
I mean hell, r/conservative said this point themselves, in a strikingly moment of hilarious self-awareness:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfAwarewolves/comments/hle529/goo...
The reason they get turned away from every and all social networks thusfar is because they cannot conduct themselves in a civil manner.
If Visa won't let you fund your hate speech, then I guess go find someone who will. If no one is willing, maybe that says more about you than about them.
Gab (twitter alternative) was just blacklisted by Visa last week. There is no recourse. What, should these people build their own consumer credit company too?
> Imagine calling jews who want to have their own country in Israel "jewish supremacists".
Jews wanted to have their own country because of thousands of years of persecution by basically everyone, everywhere, after they were driven out of their own home. When that happens to white people, I'll accept your argument.
I mean, if you go back far enough basically every identity group has been on the receiving end of something terrible done by some other group. If that's all it takes for separatism to be legitimate and praiseworthy then more or less anyone could argue they deserve their own ethno-state.
Aren't you arguing for banning them, though? You can't have it both ways.
which would never have happened if they had been separatists in the first place. it took thousands of years to figure it out.
But you're saying that after persecution its no longer "toxic, exclusionary, and racist bullshit"? That illogical and steeped in slave morality. persecution is not a currency.
Why would racist Whites stop there? Pretty soon they'll want to build their own governments: literal White nationalism. Republicans are already talking about secession in a positive light…
To protect minorities, the 2nd Amendment has to be gutted as much as possible before that kind of thing happens, even if we must seriously bend the existing Civil Rights legislation to do so (Republicans can't stand up to the NRA, even if they wanted to).
Biden has the right kinds of policy ideas, but he needs to go further. https://joebiden.com/gunsafety/
> Close the “hate crime loophole.” Biden will enact legislation prohibiting an individual “who has been convicted of a misdemeanor hate crime, or received an enhanced sentence for a misdemeanor because of hate or bias in its commission” from purchasing or possessing a firearm.
No laws or "due process" are being broken when Gab—a social network created to host as much hate speech as possible—is denied access to Visa's financial network.
I'm not suggesting we "subvert the rule of law", I'm suggesting we use the existing laws (and pass new ones when needed, like Biden wants to do) to disarm racist Whites before they attempt to kill vulnerable minorities.
Literally yesterday there was a racist White couple in St. Louis [0] pointing guns at peaceful protestors—safeties off, fingers on the trigger. Under Biden's proposed legislation, they could easily be given a (well-deserved) hate crime misdemeanor and then have their guns taken away. That's "due process" and "the rule of law" at work.
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/29/us/st-louis-couple-protest-fi...
Can you not see the new loophole? Simply convict anybody we don't want owning a firearm of a made up misdemeanour or hate crime. 2A BTFO.
Right? Incredibly clever, and I think that kind of precedent can be taken much further by the courts if they had any kind of backbone...
I wholeheartedly agree, and I've not heard of anyone calling to censor conservatives. Most or all of the people being de-listed are people who are breaking their platforms' terms of services. They might happen to be mostly conservative, but it seems like today it's mostly conservatives who are breaking the rules and calling for violence, doxxing people, etc. Reddit just kicked out some leftist groups for doing the same stuff, as was appropriate.
> I'm a free market capitalist
"...except when I disagree with it."
There seem to be some idea here on HN that racism/white-supremacy bullshit is somehow comparable with an oppressed scientist being persecuted by a dogmatic clergy for their new found facts. That maybe, in the future, these ideas will prevail and become acceptable again, when the oppression slowly subsides.
Is this really what you think racism is? Some oppressed idea that needs a room because maybe it's actually a bit correct and we'll only know about it if we don't suppress the racists?
But these things are objectively wrong. The above scenario isn't there. If you somehow think so, I think that says more about you than those that want to be intolerant towards intolerance. Please explain yourselves.
Like where were you guys when Arkansas literally banned Howard Zinn? What about when South Carolina banned the words 'climate change'?
Sorry but you all just don't come across consistent enough to be taken seriously.
--
[1] https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/ark-bill-introduced...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/12/north-caroli...
Luckily the "ban Howard Zinn" bill was never actually passed, and actually led to far more people reading him (Streisand effect there):
> Rep. Kim Hendren’s bill to prohibit use of the late Howard Zinn’s books in Arkansas public schools died quietly in committee, of course, but it had great unintended consequence: Some 700 copies of Zinn’s book, “A People’s History of the United States,” were sent free to teachers and librarians throughout Arkansas thanks to the controversy.
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2017/04/04/how-kim-hendre...
Until I realize that some people are now defining silence as complicity with white supremacy. So let's hope that definition doesn't spread, right?
I said, silence -is- complicity with white supremacy. If you, after all of the injustices demonstrated in enormous detail over the last 400 years, are still silent when white supremacists continue to oppress the oppressed, you are complicit in white supremacy.
So white supremacists should be purged, but those who are complicit with them should not?
Let me turn it around, do you think that white supremacists deserve a platform?
However, since you insist upon evading the obvious logical conclusion that your own freely-offered premises suggest, there is no turning anything around. This thread is over.
We _know_ it's wrong to advocate for the ethnic cleansing of people. We _know_ it's wrong to talk about how Blacks are genetically inferior. We _know_ it's wrong to spread lies about how Jews control mass media. We can silence these evil, ignorant beliefs without being afraid that all other beliefs are at risk of being silenced.
I'm not seeing the slippery slope. To say that purging one ideology is the same as all means that you see no difference between hateful supremacist positions and any other types of ideas. Which is ridiculous.
This is total slippery slope. Zooming out to the point that you ignore all the specifics isn't useful.
But this is a purge like being asked not to come back to target is a purge.
And it's just as much of an infringement on your rights: none.
Edit: I've asked variants of this question several times in this thread, all without response. I can safely assume that those who won't freely answer this question are (attempting) to hide their bias.
Censoring/deplatforming will not have the effect you think it will. Nor is it ethically palpable.
> Nor is it ethically palpable.
Do not ascribe your ethics onto me. I think it is extremely ethical to deny white supremacists a platform. In fact, it is the most ethical choice. Those who refuse to interact with our society in good faith do not deserve the stage.
I'd love to link you to a Scott Alexander essay at this point which examined that very question and concluded, based on evidence and data, that there might be a few thousand genuine white supremacists in America. But of course he deleted his blog so I can't.
This is why so many people are arguing with you. The statements by the left and the observable reality are so out of whack it's clear it's a "dog whistle", as they like to say. The revolutionary left are using the word white to mean something quite different to its normal definition. It seems rather to be used to mean "anyone who isn't black" or more perniciously, "anyone conservative". Alexander had a great essay on this redefinition of whiteness as well, but alas ...
it's literally a straw man to imply people are focused on individuals in this situation, they are just worried about precedent and the future.
And we can even see what happens when platforms try to truly allow all speech. Voat [3 NSFW] is a good example, Gab is another example. The worst content takes over and your platform gets rejected by most of the world. Way before reddit banned the_donald they had to specifically delist it from the front page because awful content would end up being the first thing people saw. [4]
I also don't expect that Youtube or reddit or Twitter would end up banning all ideological content, religious videos will not get banned one day, discussing electoral politics will not get banned one day, we're not going to slide off the slope because the slope isn't there.
1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/02/reddit-c... 2. https://www.theverge.com/2015/7/15/8964995/reddit-free-speec... 3. NSFW: https://voat.co/ 4: https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/30/13797712/reddit-trump-th...
The thing that still continues to shock me is that there are people here that argue on behalf of white supremacists but still argue that they themselves are not, instead they are playing "devils advocate". At some point, let's call a duck a duck.
If you are, you should really take a step back and evaluate the gravity of that statement.
Edit: Saw your edit. You can usually click the timestamp to reply when there is no reply button.
Thank you for the clarification. I'll repeat my previous statement because it still applies, I can tell that you simply don't grasp the gravity of your statement. It is -hilarious- to be called a nazi for calling for white supremacists to be deplatformed. I think I might print this out and put it in my cube (when I eventually get back into the office). Turns out, I was the Nazi the whole time, not the white supremacists! /s
Edit, again: For the readers, he edited-in, and then edited-out, calling me a Nazi for saying that white supremacists shouldn't have a platform. Just wanted to make that clear.
Edit, again, again: I did understand your point, I just refuse to engage with it, because it is ridiculous.
Edit, again, again, again. This edit-back-and-forth is funny, but I have to go now. I sincerely hope that you do some research and realize that your defense of white supremacists only entrenches them into our culture further. I hope that one day, you look back on your views here, and realize that you truly did not have to defend them, but chose to anyway.
except they're banning liberals:
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200627/23551144803/as-pr...
You will do that, won't you? It's about racial superiority, after all.
edit: I may have been wrong, it seems deplatforming might work. [0] TIL! I had often read that echo chambers exacerbated radicalization but it seems more research has yielded better data to turn over that conclusion.
edit1: it seems like radicalization is more nuanced, and different ways to handle communities based on its composition (eg. it is different to introduce someone to an ideology vs pushing a person already exposed into a more extreme view). Found this video to be informative [1].
[0]: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bjbp9d/do-social-media-ba...
How many communist organizations do you see, these days? How much reach do they have, compared to the 30s? How much political power do they have, compared to the alt-right, today?
Extinguishing that idea into the fringe seems to have worked rather well. As did de-nazification, post WWII. It's only more recently, when platforms started enabling fringe groups, has fascism crawled back into the light of day.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Control_Act_of_1954
So, yes, this actually proves my point. Buring ideas, and canceling the people espousing them does, in fact, kill political movements.
If your goal is to drive a political movement into the fringe, deplatforming works. If your goal is to have an utterly tolerant climate for political movements, regardless of how abhorrent they are, then, well, we're all observing how it's working out right now. Not very well, I must say, but there's always time for things to get worse.
And really, communism didn't actually die. It just altered its terminology a bit, but the core ideas remained widespread. How do we know this?
Well, one reason is that academia is still full of people who claim to believe in Marxism:
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2015/03/the_prevalence_1.ht...
At least outside engineering subjects. So that's a pretty big hint it didn't really go away.
But another is that what we're seeing happen now is pure Marx. Divide the world into two camps, one that oppresses the other. Argue that the oppressed group is victimised, which is why it's the oppressors that own the assets and the wealth. Argue for fixing this with forced wealth transfers, forced replacement in positions of power. Then start to actually implement it, all backed by reams of impenetrable ideological texts, purges, witch hunts, show trials and so on. Claim at all times it's all about equality, even as deeply unequal systems are created before everyone's very eyes. Dare people to point out the double standards and attack them when they do.
We've seen it all before. The words change - proles and bourgeoise were replaced by black and white, imperialism with white privilege or patriarchy, and so on. But scratch the surface and you find Marxist arguments, still there, they never went away.
Why? Perhaps because anti-communists got intellectually lazy. The USSR and to some extent the Nazis made their case for them (Nazi being "National Socalist", lest we forget). Anti-communists didn't really have to build intellectual arguments for their case when the Berlin Wall was making their case for them.
But it's been decades since the wall fell. People haven't really been pushing back on Marxist arguments until very recently and even now, their intellectual muscles are weakened by inactivity. Meanwhile the Marxists have been camping out in academia for decades, brainwashing generations of students into believing - against all data and evidence - that the world can be neatly split into black and white, victims and oppressors. And now we're reaping the whirlwind.
Your thesis can't be correct, because:
The idea of fascist ethnostates also ended poorly, the last time around - and yet here we are, watching their ideas enjoy a renaissance.
Observing that ideas have been tried, and have failed, clearly does not kill those ideas. If it did, we wouldn't be having this conversation now.
1. Marxist terminology and the notion of class war ("proles" and "bourgeoise" are now anachronistic)
2. Marxist economic theory and the goal of replacing capitalism
The dream of overthrowing capitalism lives on in squats and hard-left fringe groups, but it's dead and buried in the mainstream. China's adoption of it put the final nail in that coffin.
The more generalised Marxist theory of dividing the world into oppressors/the oppressed lives on and is seeing a resurgence. With that I agree.
>"Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left."
>"The whole post-fascist period is one of clear and present danger. Consequently, true pacification requires the withdrawal of tolerance before the deed, at the stage of communication in word. Such extreme suspension of the right of free speech and free assembly is indeed justified only if the whole of society is extreme danger. I maintain that our society IS in such an emergency situation, and that it has become the normal state of affairs. Different opinions and "philosophies" can no longer compete peacefully for adherence and persuasion on rational grounds: the "marketplace of ideas" is organized and delimited by those who determine national and the individual interest."
I think most of humanity can live with that.
The fact is that American "conservatism" now is so run through with hate and vitriol and othering that no one can tell where one starts and the other begins.
The logical fallacy that this is a "slippery slope" is ridiculous, and the number of people who are crying about losing the "freedom" to attack, incite, and threaten others is astonishing. The number one terrorist threat in the US right now is right-wing militant groups, condoning threats and violence towards anyone who thinks different than them.
It's pretty clear to most that deplatforming people with hateful, violent, and dangerous messages is less of a threat to society than allowing them to keep spreading their vile hate. This isn't some arbitrary thought experiment or a white-room theorycrafting; people are dying because of this kind of hate.
Conservatives who distance themselves from hate and bigotry and violence are fine, and I can live with those people, but the American far-right are a blight on society and private corporations are within their rights (and, I would say, responsibilities) to actually enforce their own policies against these people.
Conservatism has a place in society. I'm not endorsing any of these guys viewpoints nor am I associating them with conservatism in general, because it's a broad group of over 100 million people in the U.S. with a diverse range of opinions that lean to the right. It's extremely important that society be balanced and not tilted to the extremes of either ideology. This process of selective banning and purging will not end well for Silicon Valley. The problem is they are not approaching the left's extremists with the same fervor. In fact they're turning a blind eye to the vicious hate against cops and conservatives on their own platforms.
And a lot of this hate is disproportionate to reality. That is, the perception of the problem exceeds the actual statistical problem.
I'm of the strong opinion that a society needs it's left and right brain to function properly and constructively in order to tackle the diverse set of problems we face. If there is no push-pull give and take between these two groups, then society will become unstable and increasingly more polarized.
I'm a free market capitalist, but with Silicon Valley's recent muscular intervention into free speech, and the overwhelming propaganda power they possess, I fully support the break up of big tech monopolies in social media, search, and app stores.