#3 Look again: Merkel was recorded talking to Zuckerberg about suppressing "anti-immigrant" postings. No idea what she would have done if he had said "No, go jump in a lake.", but he showed he had zero courage.
Weimar Germany -- to give just one example -- was replete with hate-speech laws intended to limit speech the state did not like. These laws did nothing whatsoever to limit the rise of extremism; it only made martyrs out of those it pursued, and persuaded an even larger number of people that the time for talking was over.
The sinister reality of a society in which the expression of majority opinion is being turned into a crime has already been seen across Europe. Just last week, reports from the Netherlands told of Dutch citizens being visited by the police and warned about posting anti-mass-immigration sentiments on Twitter and other social media.
Keep in mind the Fascist model (which the Germans perfected to a fine art): private companies own the means of production (the media equipment and what is said on it), but the government tells the private companies what to ban and what to allow to say. Voila! No violation of the First Amendment because the private companies did it "voluntarily"! Besides, its regulating companies, not "free" people. In Facebook's case, quite willingly. (And technically, if the government bans the sale of bullets to private individuals, then a "literal" reading of the Second Amendment would allow the ban since bullets are not "Arms". Clinton-style vocabulary definition-alteration.
The thing to do now is not talk about the "immigrant" invaders, but about the ban on talking about the "immigrant" invaders. When they ban talk about the ban, talk about the ban of taling about the ban on talk about the "immigrant" invaders. |