Well, yes. Open societies are vulnerable in a way that authoritarian ones are not. Absolute free speech is a weakness, adversaries will take advantage of the op

Well, yes. Open societies are vulnerable in a way that authoritarian ones are not. Absolute free speech is a weakness, adversaries will take advantage of the openness of your mind and the leverage that fake news will provide them. And that’s even with some of the most disagreeable speech (active threats etc) still banned. Like we’re not even absolute free speech and it still sucks just how easy it is to ride the line with vague threats, knowing mistruths (Fox News etc), and other “valid” speech. It’s better to take stricter approaches like Germany etc and have the lines drawn a bit broader and have nazis banned entirely etc. The “discourse banishes bad ideas” thing is a wishful fairy tale. Adversarial actors will parasitize your openness and use it to spread their message, and rebutting it only spreads the “debate” and gives it legitimacy. It’s better to stamp that shit out and force it out of mainstream channels and into separate “racist services” like gab, truth social, voat, etc. It is what divides us from china but it’s also what’s tearing down our political system from the inside, because propaganda still works regardless of what you think about it. It’s marketing for ideology, nobody thinks marketing works either but companies aren’t spending billions of dollars for nothing. And the open western dialogue and interchange of information makes the propaganda more effective and propagate quicker. An open mind is like a fortress with its gates undefended. There are some things you shouldn’t be open to even rebutting because they are simply so far out of the window of acceptability. We don’t debate people’s right to exist, for example.