I hate how the feminazi "left" loves to cheerlead for censorship by non-state actors. No, censorship is not exclusive to governments, when Catholic bishops ordered priests and nuns to be silent about child sex assaults, that was absolutely censorship, and I'll metaphorically fight anybody who wants to give them a pass because they don't have state authority.

If we allow organized groups of non-state actors to censor, eventually on of the organized groups will take over the state. The ability to genuinely censor people is a force multiplier. Of course, it's extremely unlikely that Twitter, for example, which censors nonfeminists, terfs and Alex Jones will ever become part of a government. But by employing censorship successfully, they are certainly laying the groundwork for a break-up of the USA. One of the successor states to the former US might, and indeed likely will (if a break-up happens) become an outright dictatorship which doesn't permit freedom of speech. Europe doesn't have freedom of speech, which is why Europe spends most of its time under dictatorial rule.

Democracy is not a stable system. Just because a system of government is the best (which democracy is) does not mean it's stable. Suppression of speech is how democracy dies. Look at Athenian democracy. For centuries, when it embraced full freedom of speech, it was almost invincible. Sparta was only able to defeat it in a war with help from the superpower Persia. But as soon as it degenerated so much that a gang of oligarchs were able to get Socrates executed, it was easy meat for conquest.

One of the more dramatic examples of a censorious non-state group taking political power in recent memory is the Islamic State. Another example is the bolshevik revolution, another is the Cuban one.

So my prediction is that all democratic societies that cherish freedom of speech will never succumb to dictatorship from within, but only if they limit the ability of non-state actors to censor.

And don't give me the Nazis, they are an excellent example of hat I'm talking about. The Nazi party internally censored its members, and so did the Communist party of Germany. Because the Weimar republic allowed internal parties to censor its members, and expel dissidents, it fell, and the world got the Holocaust. The Holocaust is the direct result of a state allowing internal groups to censor.

If you disagree, tell me how Hitler could have taken dictatorial power if he had been unable to expel individual Nazi party members who disagreed. Remember, part of his rise to total power required not just censorship of internal Nazi dissidents, but outright murder. The same applies to all dictatorships that ever existed.

This contradicts the "repressive tolerance" theory advanced by anti-democracy activists on social media, because it's simply wrong.

So much for theory, what's the practical implication? How do we make a society bulletproof against takeover by internal dictators?

Make it a crime to attempt to censor anybody. If you (as an individual or a group) impose any non-trivial negative consequence on a person or group for expressing a political thought, that should be treated as an attempt to overturn democracy (because in fact, that's precisely what it is). Censorship should be treated as terrorism. The penalties should be severe, and should multiply in severity for recidivism. We need to really get it into everybody's brain that everybody gets to have their own thoughts, and express them, and no matter how vile the thought, suppressing that thought's expression is always, always, always worse in the medium term.

There is no thought an individual can hold that is so vile that it's worth collapsing the foundations of your democracy for. Preserving democracy is the most important thing there is.

So what's the relevance to this subreddit? We need light moderation, we need to permit expression of views, and the fact that we aren't a government is completely irrelevant to the principle.

So it's a cost-benefit analysis: the cost is that you have to hear some words sometimes (remember, only a small minority of people hold views that are truly distressing to hear), the benefit is that there are no more Holocausts, for as long as the human race lasts. That's a fucking excellent deal!