A principle isn't a principle until it costs you.

I'm realizing more and more that, despite my best efforts, people still don't understand why free speech is the hill that I'm willing to die on and why I'm going out of my way to defend people's right to say responsible despicable things.

How can I defend the right of Nazis to march while hating Nazis?

Since this is the anniversary of the event that made me realize that free speech needs all the help it can get, this is relevant.

So, why?

Well, first of all, the second that you take a "Freedom for me but not for thee." stance, you're gaining Nazi points. At best, you're fighting brown shirts with brown shirt tactics.

I also know what it's like to have unpopular ideas. I don't have any disgusting ideas like Nazism, Socialism, or racism; but, I'm an anarcho-capitalist which is easily less popular than those other ideas.

Unpopular ideas are the first to go. It's simply wrong, if you understand history, to think that governments are just going to censor the bad ideas and allow the good but unpopular ideas to be expressed.

It should never be forgotten that Frederick Douglass and Willam Lloyd Garrison were silenced and attacked for expressing their crazy idea that people shouldn't be permitted to own other people. It shouldn't be forgotten that Olivier Wendell Holmes once sent Yiddish-speaking socialists to prison for opposing the USA's involvement in WWI. I'm not blowing smoke when I talk about people being jailed for jokes in Europe. An Austrian woman was jailed for criticizing Muhammad for having sex with a nine year-old. That's just the Western world, wherein we're supposed to be following the enlightenment traditions of free speech and expression.

Outside of the Western world, things are even worse.

At least 53 people in Hong Kong were arrested by China yesterday and are facing life in prison for what they said. There are thirteen countries in the world where you can be killed by the state for leaving Islam. The Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda punishes any speech that they find offensive to God by cutting off the lips of the people who spoke, puncturing their mouths, and slapping padlocks through them.

The atrocities being committed against those who offend the orthodoxy aren't the exception, it's the rule. It's been the rule for all of human history. The First Amendment is the greatest progress that we've made and we're still screwing it up and having very loud voices telling that it needs to be altered.

Some how we believe that we're going to have reasonable people in government who will step in and navigate our way through truth and falsehood. Most of the people saying that seem to think that Trump is literally Hitler. You're gonna give him the power to censor your speech? Even if you're convinced that Biden is qualified to decide what you're allowed to hear or think, what makes you think that we won't have another Trump in the future?

William Bernbach once said that a principle isn't a principle until it costs you. If you don't defend your enemies, I'm convinced that you don't believe in freedom. If you don't understand how you can defend the right of people to speak even when you hate their guts, you don't get freedom.

I defend the right to speak of people who would kill me. I'm okay with that. A principle isn't a principle until it costs you.