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Among a certain sect of internet libertarians, maybe. And we saw that the result of that was the proliferation of communities on popular websites dedicated to l

• busterarm 5y ago
  I'm sorry but Evelyn Beatrice Hall first wrote those words in 1906, as a description of the beliefs of Voltaire, who died in 1778 and whose ideas were extremely mainstream at the time the US was founded. These ideas long predate the internet and the Libertarian political party and to box them in as such and dismiss them carelessly is extremely intellectually dishonest and bordering on flamebait. Additionally, if your best evidence against freedom of speech is Reddit, I suggest you retool your arguments from scratch.
  • mrguyorama 5y ago
    I'm not convinced the US considered these values mainstream, as exclusion of most people from voting, and from slaves their natural rights shows
    • nemo44x 5y ago
      Western Liberalism is a self correcting, evolving system of ideas and rigorous analysis of what is considered knowledge. So yes, per the people that were considered "the people" during those times, this belief was very strongly held indeed.
    • busterarm 5y ago
      Following on nemo44x's response, we also don't really have much written evidence to the contrary. Literacy rates in late colonial America were 85-90% north of Virginia and around 60% in Virginia and south of it. If large numbers of people were disagreeing, they surely weren't writing about it.