The reasons to protect freedom of speech are numerous and extremely practical.

Censorship is exclusively the domain of oppressors. You can’t silence someone if you don’t have power over them, and every ruling class feels justified subduing their moral inferiors by any means necessary.

The words, “By any means necessary,” bring to mind gas chambers and gulags. Those words have been spoken frequently lately.

Morally, it does not matter who is being censored. The ethics are the same, and so are the consequences.

George R. R. Martin was right when he said, “When you tear out a man’s tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you’re only telling the world that you fear what he might say.”

When a ruling body begins to attack a marginalized group it makes that group look justified.

Self described white advocate and “alt-right” thought leader Jared Taylor said, “The Democrats, the lefties, the black bloc are behaving exactly as we would wish, in ways that will just drive people into our arms.”

It’s unclear how many attendees at these rallies even are white supremacists or fascists. At the Boston rally earlier this month the number appeared to be zero. The tiny group of “Nazis” 30,000 people turned out to oppose included GOP Indian-American senate candidate Shiva Ayyadurai and anti-GMO activists and hippies.

Before you riot ask, “How can you tell they’re Nazis if they’re not permitted to speak?”

Extremists are always a small percentage of the population, but even if they’re only one percent that’s still three million of them in the US. And extremists are always the loudest voices, so any group containing any seems like a horde of them.

People keep crediting Nazis as the people “antifa” are attacking, which steals the support from any non-extremist right-wing or centrist movement.

The actual Nazis aren’t silenced. They are barely inconvenienced and the hate mobs, personified by “antifa,” have given them an enormous audience.

For the first time in decades, white supremacists and neo-Nazis have an enemy foul enough to make them seem palatable by comparison.

It’s damn embarrassing that our current political climate has turned Nazis into relatable underdogs.

While the violent “antifa” thugs are the villains of this historical moment, that doesn’t mean anyone sane wants their opposites to win either.

Societies formed by political extremists all suck.

Maybe you don’t care. Our trusted self-appointed moral guardians say the people they’re censoring are Nazis and deserve it.

But what are you going to do when they call you a Nazi? They don’t care about reality, they care about ideological purity. If you aren’t one of them, you are dangerous and to be silenced by any means necessary.

The weapons they are testing on your enemies today are the weapons they will use to crush you tomorrow.
The extremist left is declaring anyone who isn’t like them to be “alt-right Nazis.”

They’re trying to murder the political center, so there’ll be no one but the extremist left and right.
It shouldn’t reach the point where moderate left-wingers are willing to put aside their differences with fascists to fight the greater evil. That was how Nazi Germany happened.

Words are not violence, by definition, and should be countered with better words.