You ignore the “legitimate” part of “legitimate fear”.
Although I’d have said "justified. Your example of MAGA and so on are people expressing fear of imaginary or harmless things. Being afraid of somebody burning a cross on the other hand is simply self preservation.
“Bothsides”-ism ignores reality.
Following the 100K anti-migrant march in London a couple of weeks ago, someone I follow on social media reported that this was the first time he and his wife (a mixed race couple) were too afraid to hold hands in public. They will hardly be the only ones.
This is a direct measurable loss of freedom of speech. Lost to intimidation by a hate filled mob.
The idea that we lose freedom of speech by allowing the angry and resentful to harass and intimidate the rest of us out of the public square is self-evident nonsense. There has to be a line and ultimately it has to fall to the government to enforce it. Anything else is a bully’s charter.
Again, not particularly taking cues from the US administration on this matter.
No that’s what makes it your freedom of speech meaningless if there is an exception for causing “legitimate fear”. Its the government that gets to decide what is and what is not legitimate. And they absolutely cannot be trusted to do so. As demonstrated by the multitude of examples in this thread.
And if even a reasonable moderate government like the current labour government in the UK demonstrably can’t be trusted with that power to crush freedom of speech.Then a Trump or Farage would clearly use these kind of laws to outlaw all descent and imprison their opponents.
I’m pretty sure many Israeli students in the US felt intimidated and harassed by pro-Palestine protests on campus, and not unreasonably so. Should they be banned?
If someone who has the same views as Charlie Kirk feels intimidated and harassed by a colleague declaring that he deserved to be killed, can they have that colleague arrested?
If the police feel intimidated by protesters chanting “ACAB”, do they get to arrest and prosecute them?
Who is your reasonable person, here? In America, Trump recently won the popular vote. In Britain, Reform is ahead in the polls. This seems like a recipe for tyranny of the majority, as unpopular kinds of speech are squashed, while popular targets are allowed.
This is very unfortunate. But what do you want to do about it? Ban marches for causes you don’t approve of? The sentiment doesn’t go away if you ban people from expressing it. And they still vote.
Then freedom of speech is meaningless, and all that matters is terror, force and the willingness to kill. Because any public “debate” will be won by the side most willing to threaten force, and carry it out if defied. We know that, because that’s what has historically happened.
Well you really really should. If we were just talking about regular democratic governments of the kind that have ruled Europe and the US since the end of WW2, that would be one thing. For all their faults they did fundamentally believe in the freedom of speech and civil rights, or at least were not fundamentally opposed to them.
That does not apply to Trump, Farage, Le Penn, etc. if your protections of freedom of speech has a huge “makes people unhappy” (offended, scared, distressed, whatever) loophole then it will do jackshit to protect you when they decide to use the law to criminalize dissent.
Stop putting this shit in scare quotes. A mixed race couple were afraid of being beaten up by a racist mob, in London, in 2025. Do them and others like them the credit of treating that as a serious threat to their liberty.
Did I say one word about banning marches?
None of that matters. Such people can and will simply declare what they want illegal to be illegal, or not even bother. You are worrying about a non-issue.
Meanwhile, allowing thugs to terrorize people guarantees escalating terror, violence and eventually massacres.
A mixed race couple
A mixed race couple! Someone marrying a different race to them, and, eve more terrifying, having children with. Wow, that’s a pretty “legitimately” scary concept! Sounds like the whole thing should be criminalized.
No I won’t. As someone in a mixed race marriage who’s taken my wife to the post industrial Reform heartland, I can confirm it’s pretty damn scary. But a future Reform PM having the power to send people to prison for speech he doesn’t like is much scarier.
And they’d have the power to do that regardless of the law. Or they wouldn’t need to, they’d just have the mobs whipped up by “free speech” murder the people they don’t like.
Your describing this like it’s some hypothetical dystopian future. It’s not, it’s a reality, and Trump (and Orban and Ergodan, etc) did not declare all laws null and void, and have themselves crowned dictator for life.
What they did (and are doing) is find all the loop holes in the legal framework and push through them with all their strength. If your protections on freedom of speech are basically “the government can criminalize whatever speech they want, we trust them not to do bad things”, them those protections are not worth the paper they are written on (or not written on). Saying “oh it doesn’t matter they can do what they want” is objectively false. Modern day dictators do not “do what they want”. They find the weaknesses in the constitutional system and exploit them.
And ignored the law when there weren’t any loopholes. They don’t care about the law.
On due reflection, I am afraid I still believe it is possible to protect freedom of speech even in the event of a Reform PM and prevent cheap bullies from driving ordinary people out of the public square by using inimidation and harassment. And in fact that one of the most important safeguards against such a Reform PM silencing opponents is the maintenance of basic standards in public life and shared norms around people’s rights not to be driven into silence by fear.