Hate Mail

For people who can discern the difference that Trump refused to make, the complete and qualitative difference, distinguishing between people, Nazis demonstrating for hatred and racism and violence and those other people who were protesting against them, and rightly slamming Trump for that, it's amazing to me that you now claim to not be able to make a similar qualitative judgement about the ideas of the two groups.

If the people who are Nazis are qualitatively different from anti-Nazis, as I hold they are, they are different ON THE BASIS OF THE IDEAS THEY HOLD AND ARTICULATE.   To hold that the ideas, somehow, have to be pretended to be equivalent in terms of their acceptability and their protection ignores that it is the ideas of the Nazis which make them dangerous.  That such ideas are responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people within still living memory makes pretending that they are deserving of equal status under the law is insane.   

Your position gives hate speech an equal status to speech for equal justice for people under the law.  

In reality, due to the difference in intent,  it privileges the hate speech of Nazis who are trying to gain power to make their hate into a reality over the lives of their targets, so it empowers and values that speech above the lives of their current and intended victims.  

That is the real position of the lawyers and judges and justices who hold that position.  It enables and empowers the very real, and historically proven possibility of such hate speech gaining power and doing that.  It did in Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and under the Jim Crow era in the United States which the current Attorney General and members sitting on the Supreme Court clearly want to go back to. 

Anyone in a group targeted by Nazis is entirely justified in feeling that those professionals are ready to sacrifice them on their altar of Holmesian First Amendment Purity in ways they never would themselves. 

Update:  The difference in intent of speech is a basic and crucial difference in whether or not that speech can lead to results that damage the rights and lives of other people.  If I said that someone should give you a hundred dollars and there was a chance someone hearing that might do that it would be entirely different than if I said someone should kill you and there was a chance someone hearing that might do it, the first would, in no way, endanger your rights, the second one would.  

Pretending that all speech is somehow neutral and that, therefore all speech deserves equal status under the law is an absurdity that is asserted only when the results are likely to hurt someone else, to deprive them of their rights and lives.  It is only when that's the case that judges and justices play stupid and pretend that can't reliably be done.  If it were commercial speech, or even commercial "speech" under copyright or something, they'll tease out the most obscure and technical of points to make that judgement.