this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2025
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How can you claim to support naziism without claiming support for the Holocaust? And about Trump, he will do what he wants regardless.
Obviously you can't, but allowing the judicial system to make this kind of conclusion on behalf of the people is not a good idea. You can get a judge that will say anti-Zionism is the same as anti-Semitism and therefore hate speech. This is not a slippery slope argument; Germany for example literally does this.
I mean yes and no. He's Trump, but he's still bound by the law and can't just arrest everyone he doesn't like. Therefore giving him a way to arrest innocent people for "hate speech" is not a good idea. And again we're not talking hypotheticals in the far future; the political will to do this sort of thing is there and only bound by Americans' first amendment rights.
Any law can be taken too far. And Germany has an especially difficult historic situation. But just because a law might be abused (and frankly many US laws are, you don't have to look abroad) that doesn't mean we don't make laws. The line could easily be drawn at "not calling for genocide" I think that's fairly safe.
And yeah many anti-terror laws (hot since the early 2000s) are perfect examples of this. So this abuse is already happening today and has been for some time. Anyone remember George Bush's "free speech zones"? If the powers that be want to abuse the law, they don't need this pretext. So I don't see how banning Nazis speech will make things worse.
The problem is that you don't get to draw the line; you only get to erase the previous line and mark the general vicinity where the next line might be.
There's always room for things to get worse. Hate speech laws in particular tend to be pretty draconian so they've got a lot more room for things to go wrong than anti-terror laws (which, as you said, are already abused).