Blowhard, Esq. writes:

• • “KEVIN SYSTROM, THE CEO of Instagram, was at Disneyland last June when he decided the internet was a cesspool that he had to clean up.” Oh goodie. I’m sure he’ll only use his powers for good.
  • Telling Zuckerberg to fuck off is now hate speech.
  • Discord has decided to “take action” against “all forms of hate.” Thank you, Discord, for deciding what constitutes hate and doing your part to shield my precious little impressionable mind from it.
  • GoDaddy, who until yesterday was apparently unbothered by the Daily Stormer, decided that DS’s mean post about Heather Hayer’s death was too much.
  • Mark Bray, author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook and visiting historian at Dartmouth College, in a WNYC interview a few months ago: “Well, unfortunately, terrible ideas have risen to the top throughout history. The liberal ideal is that the government is a referee in a game that all parties are invited to play but, in actual fact, whenever left groups have become threatening you get red scares, you get repression, you get COINTELPRO in the 1960s and ‘70s. And so, essentially anti-fascists are arguing that, we want a political content to how we look at speech in society, which is drastically different from a liberal take, and that this entails shutting down the extreme manifestations of fascism and neo-Nazism.

    And we need to recognize that this is not simply a question of whether a fascist government will come to power or not – I’m skeptical that such an explicitly fascist government would come to be – but that those who carry out hate crimes, they feel emboldened when their ideas become mainstream, and so, the idea with anti-fascist politics is to prevent those ideas from having that opportunity.”

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Related

• Popehat on the Nazi exception and the narrow and well-defined limits of incitement.