Here’s the problem: everyone is fundamentally misinterpreting free speech. It doesn’t mean what people think it does: it’s not about stopping government oppression, it’s about enforcing fundamental respect for human beings, which means hate speech is banned regardless – because bigotry and hate speech by its nature censors other human beings, because it creates an environment where people are discredited and shunned by their peers for stupid reasons, denying them their right to be respected and heard. Hate speech isn’t speech, it’s censorship, and needs to be treated as a censoring act and not as speech since it’s not speech, it’s an action done with intent.

When people adopt that definition of free speech, we can go back to having our cake and eating it too and we’ll start to get back on the right path.