I see that a new poster was quickly downvoted into oblivion for writing "Clearly you can say this stuff. It's just that the speakers seek to demand no consequen

I see that a new poster was quickly downvoted into oblivion for writing "Clearly you can say this stuff. It's just that the speakers seek to demand no consequences from their speech," but...I think that's largely true. I'm not making a moral judgement about that, per se, but it's worth engaging with the sometimes uncomfortable truth that free speech entails both what you say and how people react to it. Furthermore, this isn't a new thing. One of the other things "you can't say in Silicon Valley" is that black people are only fit to be slaves to white people, but if anyone's out there shaking their heads and clucking their tongues about how great it'd be to be able to say that if it weren't for those terrible lefty PC liberals always SJWing up the place, do you wanna be associated with them? It turns out that being openly racist in that way is, to most people in most parts of the country, really unacceptable. Also, I've noticed that when these discussions come up, nobody ever talks about the "stuff you can't say" in more conservative parts of the country. Perhaps part of the reason people out here in the Bay Area are so "intolerant" is because so many of us have suffered consequences for what we say--or even what we don't say, but just what we are--when we've lived in other parts of the country. Try putting a "Black Lives Matter" bumper sticker on your Prius, drive to rural Alabama, and strike up conversations about your strong support for Obamacare, abortion rights, and gun control. Then get back to me about how gosh-darn friendly everyone was to you.