Obvious as it may sound, people with authoritarian beliefs hiding behind free speech actually consider it as a weakness akin empathy. It allows losers like them to amplify their reach despite not being in power. They abandon their “free speech absolutist” postures the moment they think they are in power.
If you pay attention to the reactionaries, they always steal ideas from the left. Fake news, media bias? That’s Noam Chomsky. Incels stole the idea of critical examination of gender from feminists. Racists are banning books on the theory that they target people based on their race.
That’s why they’re called reactionaries. They cannot organize and ideology or a movement except as an opposition to the left dragging society forward. And like anyone motivated by spite and envy, they study us closely.
It is always a little sad and funny to me when they essentially put on a suit made of the hollowed-out skin of a leftist concept. They heard people say “we want to see more women in electoral politics” and so they started running the Sarah Palins and Marjorie Taylor Greenes of the world. The point of the ask isn’t just to have women - it’s to have people who will use their experiences of marginalization to empathize with voters and with other marginalized people, to build coalitions. Not because we wanna see tits on CSPAN.