>"I defend the right for you to say bad things about people, but if you harm them or try to restrict their rights, we put a stop to that hard, right now".

Why tolerate speech whose purpose is to threaten, plan or incite violence, but only ban the violence itself? Surely if all speech is to be considered equal, then intended consequences of all speech should also be considered equal. Speech that can't be acted upon is no different than speech that's been censored.

Preventing a fire by denying it fuel is easier than putting it out afterwards. Likewise, preventing the effects of harmful speech is easier by preventing its spread.

>Theoretically, if the idea is sufficiently infectious, it could infect enough levels that laws can be passed that change it so that the harm is legal (but never moral); but, I hope that humans will resist long before that.

The history of the 20th century would like a word with you after class.

The problem with banning "harmful" speech is creating the justification to ban any speech by labeling it harmful.

You fight harmful speech in the marketplace of ideas, by convincing those who might listen to ignore or counter it. Fighting it by forcibly banning it is just might-makes-right.

> The problem with banning "harmful" speech is creating the justification to ban any speech by labeling it harmful.

Let's rewrite your assertion in more general terms: The problem with banning any "harmful" activity is creating the justification to ban any activity by labeling it "harmful."

Further: The problem with banning "murder" is creating the justification to ban any activity by labeling it "murder."

It's logically consistent, and grammatically coherent. "Harm" is just a word like "murder" that can mean anything we decide it does. But there's nothing about speech within a framework of regulation which makes it more amenable to the slippery slope than any other activity, yet somehow we manage to live in a society where arbitrary activities aren't persecuted as murder, because human beings are capable of exercising judgement and discretion, and of appreciating context and nuance.

Therefore it should be possible to define "harmful" speech in such a way that distinguishes harm from not-harm.

The slope may exist, but it isn't that slippery. And if it gets too slippery, we're perfectly capable of installing a railing.

>You fight harmful speech in the marketplace of ideas, by convincing those who might listen to ignore or counter it.

Do you think that QAnon or anti-vaxxers or white supremacists are unaware of arguments to the contrary of their beliefs? That they only believe what they do because no one has ever engaged them in a debate in the "marketplace of ideas" and convinced them otherwise? If that was all it took, these cancerous memes would not have gotten as big as they have. The majority refuse to be convinced, so you've already lost on that front.

By the time you've laid out your well formed and thoroughly sourced counterargument to whomever you find who actually cares to listen to it, Facebook memes and retweets by the President of the United States have already convinced ten thousand people that Bill Gates created COVID as an excuse to implant mind control chips into the populace so he and the Illuminati can more easily harvest their brain syrum, and the person you tried to debate is now convinced you're a disinfo shill and that Alex Jones was right after all.

You fight harmful speech with both education and regulation.

>Fighting it by forcibly banning it is just might-makes-right.

No, it just means that a marketplace of ideas can still have standards and be a marketplace. A marketplace without rules is inevitably overrun by bad actors, charlatans and snake oil salesmen.

As a society, at least in the United States, we've decided that the free flow of ideas is more important than creating censor or ban lists for ideas. It goes hand in hand, in particular, with freedom of religion, a core tenant of the United States.

This list has a vanishingly small list of exceptions.

The fact that the list of exceptions exists at all implies that the US recognizes the paradox of tolerance, it just happens that the bar for intolerable speech in the US is lower than elsewhere. But American freedom of speech still doesn't meet the bar you set in your earlier comment. I'm still not allowed to stand on a soapbox at the town square and organize a mob to kill the President.

I'm confident the people trumpeting "the paradox of tolerance" do not tend to mean the laws as they officially exist presently.