Alright, let’s talk about tolerance. More specifically, the weaponization of tolerance—the way people with the worst, most harmful opinions somehow expect a free pass under the guise of “everyone’s entitled to their own beliefs.”
Yes, in a purely legal sense, you can believe whatever you want. You can believe the Earth is flat, that vaccines are a conspiracy, that marginalized people don’t deserve rights. But what you don’t get—what you are not entitled to—is freedom from the consequences of spreading that ignorance, that bigotry, that harm.
Somehow, we’ve gotten to a place where people think calling out intolerance is the real intolerance. As if standing up against racism, homophobia, or outright disinformation is just as bad as the bigotry itself. Spoiler: It’s not. Letting people spout harmful nonsense without pushback isn’t some noble act of free speech absolutism—it’s how societies rot from the inside out.
Look at history. Fascism didn’t rise because too many people were too mean to bigots. It rose because people were too accommodating, too afraid of seeming intolerant toward intolerant people. It rose because bad ideas, when left unchecked, metastasize. What starts as “just an opinion” about who deserves rights or dignity doesn’t stay just an opinion—it turns into laws, policies, and cultural norms that make life worse for entire groups of people.
Tolerance is only a virtue when it’s applied to things that deserve tolerance—differences in culture, lifestyle, perspective. But the moment someone’s “opinion” is that certain people deserve less humanity than others, they forfeit the right to polite discourse. Because tolerance of intolerance isn’t neutrality—it’s complicity.
So no, you don’t have to tolerate bigotry. You don’t have to “hear out” someone whose whole stance is that certain people don’t deserve equality. And if they whine about cancel culture or free speech or whatever else? Tough. Let them cry about it. Because a society that coddles ignorance and hatred in the name of tolerance doesn’t stay tolerant for long. It just shifts the Overton window until the intolerant are the ones running the show.
And we’ve already seen where that leads.
