Back when Substack was getting grief for letting Nazis on, a bunch of people told me that making dangerous extremism illegal was absolutely the right thing to do and necessary, and a bunch of them asserted that Nazi speech was already forbidden on some level in the US.

I told them that any legal restrictions on speech will instantly be used, vigorously, against what the people in power think is “dangerous extremism,” and not with objective fairness against the stuff that’s actually dangerous extremism, and so it’s a bad idea to have those restrictions.

Every single one of them lectured me confidently about how that’s not how it works and I was wrong.