Shadow Wolf
Certified People sTabber
Censoring doesn't work either. I agree Trump crossed some lines that shouldn't be crossed (like his "second amendment people" remark or his lies and telling people to fight for it), but censorship just doesn't work. There are still Nazis in Germany, and far right ideologies. There have always been coded messages.Exactly. How did they feel empowered in the first place? Someone took the platform and used it to tell them as much. That’s the point.
When the Alt right was rising in power they hid behind “freedom of speech” in order to promote their views. Subtly at first but over time they began to shift their audience’s perception of socially acceptable opinions and phrases to espouse. Under the guise of “it’s all just jokes, bro.” Hitler did very much the same thing. Only without the internet, obviously.
You can't ultimately ban an idea. It's inherently doomed to fail, there are often punishments that exceed the alleged crime, and more often than not used to censor necessary information.
I don't know if this was the case in Nazi Germany, but in America it's also a reflection of two different Americas. A deeply conservative rural America and a coastal, liberal metropolitan-minded America. They tend to hold very different views. Things may he censored either way, but things get discussed (like in churches, a traditional spreader of misogyny and racism) and meetings still happen. It's not just banning books or forbidding platforms. Most people usually don't self identify with unacceptable things unless they feel safe and empowered, but they are there already discussing these things. Today there is the internet so it's basically futile to even try now.
What's here is here and has been here a long time. You can't ban it away. You have to meet it head on. Unfortunately, America is very deeply divided. It's not a matter of censorship, it's a matter of declining empires. America had a good run, but the support beams aren't looking too good at this time.