One of the things that I feel gets left out of 'free speech good' conversations is that the situation that we find ourselves in isn't just 'well, the left doesn't listen to the right' but rather, we don't agree on the underlying facts.

When you live in a post reality reality where it's impossible to have a conversation about, say, whether the germ theory of disease exists and this sort of batshit stuff is peddled by EVERY right-wing media outlet, well...

Look, I don't want to cede control of our (semi) public spaces to companies like Google, but I also don't think that it's responsible to let people just go around saying that, idk, they should take aquarium tablets to fight COVID.

Plus... look, when I engage people about trans topics, it's clear to me that most aren't even familiar with the basic facts, yet everyone thinks they know it. And that's not just random people on the street!

I've said before that I am UNABLE to convince anyone that gender-related surgeries (other than, you know, the forced ones performed on intersex people) aren't actually being done to minors. I can't argue about policy when you're that far off track on the facts.

And this still gets repeated over and over uncritically by all sorts of major outlets. I'm not just mad at, say, JK Rowling because she's transphobic (she is, but w/e), but because she's wrong and spreading lies and half truths and doing that is dangerous.

But this always gets covered and framed (even by leftists, since I'm thinking of Contrapoints rn) as a matter of harassment or feelings, but it's NOT. And that's irresponsible. No one wants to argue policy with me, they want to repeat what they heard somewhere else!

"Oh, well, I would simply counter it with good speech and the truth." Well, yeah, because you're a fucking rube. First of all, that's kind of the problem with marginalized voices: they've been marginalized. And second of all, you're stuck a loop re: the premises.

Who are you going to trust? One marginalized group telling you hard truths, or everyone else telling you what you want to hear? And if you keep pushing, then they get defensive and now it's cancel culture critical race theory SJW shit.

Accepting the right's framing of this as a matter of freedom of speech, of reals vs. feels, is a sucker's game and you can't win with it. I'm not saying that you should never engage, only deplatform, whatever. I'm saying that you need to watch out for this trap.

I don't have any particular way to make this happen, I'm just a dumbass on Twitter, but what I really want isn't to silence them, per se, but to get them to at least agree to live in the same fucking reality. Otherwise you get nowhere.