Comment by karmakurtisaani

I know about the paradox of tolerance. It cuts both ways. You can't have free speech when you have some people banning anything they don't like on some pretense of "intolerance." You can't dismiss this as "we will just make exceptions" because the left is demanding censorship of just about anyone that doesn't agree.

"Cancel Culture," while legal, is fundamentally against the concept of free speech. It is true that religious conservatives once upon a time orchestrated censorship and public shaming of people they disagreed with. But the recent instances of political persecution put anything the right did in our lifetimes to shame. The closest would be the way suspected communists were treated during the Red Scare, and that actually had at least a plausible justification.

I honestly don't know that much about AfD (nobody but you has even tried to answer my request for proof that they are the new Nazi party, despite downvotes, which I find is suggestive of it all being a fabrication). I can tell you that conservative populists are taking heat in most of the West. It's like there's a conspiracy to work against the will of the people orchestrated by an international coalition of powerful people. I would take anything that any Western media outfit says with a grain of salt. They have been whining about populist conservative wins just about everywhere (for example, the US, Germany, Italy, Romania, Argentina...), and trying to paint all conservatives as racists and fascists.

In closing, I would like to say beware of fascists who claim to want to protect you from fascists, or claim to have the moral high ground. We can't have democracy without free speech and autonomy over ourselves in general, and we can't have free speech without people being free to offend each other and say even horrible things. Almost any rule you can think of to regulate mere words can be contorted into something that can silence anyone not in a position to enforce the rules. I mean that literally. How long before demanding lower taxes is deemed hate speech and violence against those who don't pay? I know it sounds insane but politics since 2016 (and I would say, much earlier) has shown us that quite a few powerful people are willing to enforce arbitrary ludicrous limitations on (or retaliation for) free speech like that.