> After 9/11 radicalization on the Internet was a serious concern - but most people seemed to understand that freedom of speech meant tolerating speech you didn

> After 9/11 radicalization on the Internet was a serious concern - but most people seemed to understand that freedom of speech meant tolerating speech you didn't like. Maybe in the filter bubble of a comp sci student lounge. You've forgotten how everyone else lost their mind in 2001, and rallied behind a folksy strongman, and his cabal of stooges, useful idiots, and bad Boyars. Most people at the time seemed to believe that finding and exterminating every terrorist (Alleged or otherwise) the government could get its hands on would be the only way we could remain free. They hate us for our freedom, and all that. Things like the PATRIOT act have support outside the nerd-sphere, and the NSA revelations were a nothingburger to most people, and torturing people in Abu Ghraib and Gitmo, well, they are all guilty anyways. The only reason those views and motivations get any airtime is so they can be attacked (without opportunity for debate or rebuttal). Had his values and goals had been less comically antithetical to ours, or if he wasn't condemned by his own actions as an irredeemable monster (which further damns anything he has to say), you wouldn't have seen a whiff of them. We only hit those we can beat.