Censorship of hate speech is an unconditional surrender to hate.

[True Blue Door]

14. The topic of criminalizing hate speech was raised earlier.

I thought it prudent to chip in my own thoughts on the matter, and they were too extensive to just be a comment.

As for your Putin-esque attempts to Godwinize liberalism, you may have noticed that the Nazis themselves practiced pretty rigorous political censorship.

And if there had been hate speech laws on the books in other countries, how likely would a statement like "The Germans have gone mad and are about to soak the world in blood" have been tolerated rather than suppressed as anti-German bigotry?

You may be aware that such arguments (calling objective assessments of Nazism "anti-German&quot were indeed made by Hitler's defenders in the United States against his critics, but somehow their position was unpersuasive - probably because Mein Kampf was not censored here, and people could see for themselves what was going on, at least well enough to resist domestic fascist movements.