Free Speech And Hypocrisy

Is wanting leftists punished for speech hypocritical?

No.

It’s no more hypocritical than objecting to an innocent man being imprisoned but WANTING a guilty man imprisoned.

It is not the imprisonment that is a moral crime, but deliberately imprisoning the innocent (or deliberately not imprisoning the guilty) that is a moral crime.

I said elsewhere-inalienable rights are real, but so are inalienable responsibilities. The first is not destroyed when the second is demanded, unless the demand is applied unjustly.

Leftists calling for and supporting murder are clearly guilty of a real crime, whilst others who have merely offended leftist feelings or challenged their delusions, are not.

The difference between cancelling people for broad, real, true, non violent opinions or for opinions that signal themselves as non literal, and responding to minority, unreal, untrue, violent opinions is obvious.

And no society can survive either having no limits at all, or letting the limits be decided and applied by the most insane people in that society.

The truth is that free speech absolutism is like pacifism, an idealistic position that is not sustainable in reality. We never have absolute free speech. But what we can have is the limits judged accurately by the sane, instead of being inaccurately judged by the insane.

What is being imposed on the Left in the US for the first time in 70 years is some modicum of basic civilisation, some accountability for reckless and delusional lies, and some limit on their ability to drive their supporters and society as a whole insane. It is a reassertion of some decency, not an imposition of a tyranny.

And therefore it is in every way different to what leftists did (and still have the power to do in the UK and Europe) when mandating lies, criminalising truth, and applying tyrannical measures to vast categories of thought and opinion, none of which have any real link to violence, extremism or negative social impacts.