Free Speech Is Great. Nazis Aren't Interested In Free Speech.

Laurie Penny cuts to the chase when it comes to the pressures of "being civil" with fascists, Nazis, MRA's, etc.:

"If we deny racists a platform, they feed off the appearance of censorship, but if we give them a platform, they’ve won by being respectfully invited into the mainstream. Either way, what matters to them is not debate, but attention. There is no perfect choice.

But there is a choice, and this, to my mind, is the sensible one: To refuse to dignify these people with prestigious public platforms, or to share them. To refuse to offer them airtime or engage them in public debate.

Fortunately, we live in a brave new world where real censorship is something that is almost infeasible unless you are extremely rich and venal and have an army of lawyers. If you want to hear what Bannon thinks, you can. Extensively, at many, many websites and forums. If you want to try to tease out and challenge the deeper truth behind far-right ideas, you’re free to do so, although be prepared to be disappointed. You see, the deeper truth is that there is no deeper truth. No hidden nuance. The new right have already shown us exactly who they are. Now the rest of us get to choose who we want to be."

There are many, many very stupid Trumpers and White Nationalists and #GamerGaters who are literally too dumb to understand, behind the thick veil of their White Privilege, that "freedom of speech" does not mean a) freedom from consequences of speech and / or b) the freedom to force people to listen to you when they'd rather just ignore and mock and shun you.

Penny is right on that the smarter ones, the Bannons for example, are just better at playing the victim-hood game.  So can we dispense with the myth that there's some latter-day, mind-blowing series of Symposia just out of reach, just waiting for Richard Spencer and Bernie Sanders to sit down with one another?  (Maybe Charlie Rose could moderate!)

It's bullshit all the way down.  They're aren't worth the time or effort, let alone the normalization (and often, significant payday) that comes with pretending they're here to engage in substantive discourse, rather than just throwing rhetorical bombs and spreading their poison to the hopelessly ignorant.