Maybe the problem is more an unequal distribution of "freeness" of speech across the society; grouped as the ruling political class, the opposition political class, and the distribution of thought in the populace.

The ruling class says whatever it wants with belief that there can never be any negative results for any action they take (max "freeness"),

the opposition can't talk about anything in a substantive way because all they do is react to the inane and random political grenades thrown by the ruling party (very constrained "freeness" really. Being forced to respond to propaganda-maximizing controversy after propaganda-effectiveness-maximizing controversy is a record that sucks to play and is definitely forced onto the air more than everyone wants -- and the targets of the propaganda blame the wrong people for why they have to keep listening to it ... )

the people are left with no meaningful political voice (0 freeness of speech) because there's virtually 0 correlation between anything being talked about in the political dances and anything that is actually sufficiently practical to talk about as to be worth the cognitive attention required to talk about it ... You can't have free political speech when there are no political engagements worth talking about ...

The "team sport" that is the current political landscape is not at all a fun or useful game -- some amount of fun and usefulness is gonna need to be found and introduced to the process of defining government to help move out of this ...

I don't really think so - because I don't see the splits that way, as many of the people angry about "reduced speech" are people with extremely high levels of speech as members of the ruling political class, like Ted Cruz - but this is somewhat similar to one of the theories about the modern American Right's appeal in the South - increased opportunity for minorities is seen as a threat to the folks used to having it all their way. Increased speech for previously-censored groups is interpreted as censorship of themselves.

Sorry I didn't mean to imply that the anger component here was related to any specific party complaining about loss of political speech in a disingenuous way -- I was more attempting to diagnose the current overall bad state of the politics as being a result of the way that pressure is put onto "freeness" of speech when an authoritarian regime actively creates an engine that makes reasonable discourse difficult or impossible ...

People express themselves politically through voting. These people in particular had every form of expression available to them. They discussed whatever they wanted, and I can provide you with links where you can see those discussions

I clarified in my other comment -- I wasn't trying to imply that the violence here was a consequence of the extremists involved having any legitimate claim that their free speech has been curtailed.

I think this riot is best understood as being actively organized by the current ruling party.

I think there is a clear free speech issue in the current politics though -- systematically devaluing the potential for productive political talk is a form of free speech restriction -- it's a ddos attack against rational discourse - which has the effect of reducing the value of political discourse in general.

A good example for your point would be McCarthyism. The idea of a more ideal free speech society we had in the past is probably naive, and that's likely true in the US and elsewhere.

I doubt that this is a technical issue. Sure, the internet, social media and filter bubbles will have an influence. But there are so many political forces at play, so many angles under which the situation could be explained.

> How many previous presidents would be inciting this sort of thing? How is that the result of less free speech?

That's an old debate in history - are specific events caused by specific people, or are the political currents so strong that no matter who would've been in a specific position, history would have likely taken the same course?

But here it is for certain that this specific coup hinges on the absolute leader figure Trump is for his followers. And it follows what he says all the time.

> That's an old debate in history - are specific events caused by specific people, or are the political currents so strong that no matter who would've been in a specific position, history would have likely taken the same course?

> But here it is for certain that this specific coup hings on the absolute leader figure Trump is for his followers. And what he says all the time.

Even there it's both, I think. Trump is part of a trend towards valuing immediate power over everything else, and being willing to play dirty to keep that power. His followers listen to him in large part because they've been primed by the media for decades to distrust the "mainstream" (where "mainstream" apparently doesn't include some of the people with the largest audiences, but actually just means "people who disagree with you").

The mystery is just how those people maintain the cognitive dissonance of being "pro speech" and "pro democracy" when they've tuned out everything else and are just focused on power in what they perceive as a war...

From War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy:

> Equally right or wrong is he who says that Napolean went to Moscow because he wanted to, and perished because Alexander desired his destruction, and he who says that an undermined hill weighing a million tons fell because the last labourer struck it for the last time with his pickaxe. In historic events the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like labels they have but the smallest connection with the event itself.

Has been a few years, but War and Peace takes indeed one extreme position in that debate. That's in the whole book, including the chaos of the battles. It's a great perspective, thanks for citing it here.

Sure, that follows. In an environment where the US-american public would be immune to someone who can rack up 100 lies in 5 minutes, someone like Trump would not have followers. So an individual can influence history as much as the environment permits. On the other hand, people are forming that environment and again and again there are specific situations where a single person seemed to change the course of history. Does that count as paradox? I always found that part of historical perspectives fascinating.

> The mystery is just how those people maintain the cognitive dissonance of being "pro speech" and "pro democracy" when they've tuned out everything else and are just focused on power in what they perceive as a war...

Yes, that is a fascinating mystery. But one has to keep in mind: Many of the people that just tried a coup today and effectively tried to dismantle the democratic system in the US by installing a dictator will think of themselves as defenders of democracy. There will be of course hard right wing nationalist terrorists in that crowd - the last pro-trump protests have shown that - but there can only be so many of those.