Yep. Hitler himself talked about this:

> “And so, I established in 1919 a programme and tendency that was a conscious slap in the face of the democratic-pacifist world. [We knew] it might take five or ten or twenty years, yet gradually an authoritarian state arose within the democratic state, and a nucleus of fanatical devotion and ruthless determination formed in a wretched world that lacked basic convictions.

> Only one danger could have jeopardised this development — if our adversaries had understood its principle, established a clear understanding of our ideas, and not offered any resistance. Or, alternatively, if they had from the first day annihilated with the utmost brutality the nucleus of our new movement.

> Neither was done. The times were such that our adversaries were no longer capable of accomplishing our annihilation, nor did they have the nerve. Arguably, they furthermore lacked the understanding to assume a wholly appropriate attitude. Instead, they began to tyrannise our young movement by bourgeois means, and, by doing so, they assisted the process of natural selection in a very fortunate manner. From there on, it was only a question of time until the leadership of the nation would fall to our hardened human material.

>You cannot just beat ideas out of peoples' heads, whether it's nazis, BLM, communists or whoever really.

This isn't the goal of such laws; the goal is to hobble the spread and reach of those ideas, not to change individual peoples' minds. It's forward-looking, not present-looking. It is also a show of the state's policy towards a particular ideology, and it carries the state's discursive authority with it. In a similar way, the point of laws against child pornography isn't to change the mind of the child pornographer, it's to slow and aim to stop the spread of the material, while attaching the state's authority to the idea that child abuse and its recording and distribution is wrong.

As a counterexample, it's documented that segregation laws had two effects; the first is keeping blacks and whites separate, the second is the authority of the law, as crafted by the sovereign body of the country, enshrined the inferiority of blacks, which reflected in the attitudes of whites and the psychology of blacks at the time. Something being legally enshrined has a very similar effect to how taxes discourage the goods they are levied on in the marketplace.

There were times when if you said something critical about the establishment, you were simply disappeared, never to be seen again. And it still didn't stop the ideas from spreading, it only gained you sympathy from the population and converted more people to your side. You can say that the goal is this or that, but it doesn't change the fact that 64% of Republicans said that they are extremely/very concerned about the censorship[1]. Which sort of confirms what I am saying, people will be more sympathetic to you if you got censored. If you're a serious political activist, I'd expect you to perceive the censorship not as a disaster, but just another opportunity to further your political goals. Which doesn't mean that it's dishonest, censorship is bullshit and they're right to feel that way, but politics is still politics.

1) https://twitter.com/KSoltisAnderson/status/13646149211163443...