The events at the capitol were very bad yes.

But I get the sense people are talking past each other to a degree because there are levels to this.

It goes beyond trying to figure out what the hell happened at the capitol and figuring out how best to prevent it in the future, while maintaining a healthy non-repressive society.

One issue is that these private businesses have become something close to, if not de facto public utilities/infrastructure.

If you ask around you can learn that this "private business overreach" of "big brother" drawing the bounds of "permissible free speech" has actually been going on for some time.

The "private business overreach" part of the story is getting more attention because it has been directed at the most visible person on the planet. Or, was the most visible until Twitter et al, performed "private business overreach" reducing his visibility considerably and simultaneously getting people's attention and raising questions about the nature of power, communication, etc. in the current age.

Another issue is that the "rules" for who and what gets booted and censored from these realms by an always shifting, opaque, and selectively enforced set of rules is to a statistically significant degree clearly bunched in certain areas of the ideological matrix. Are the actors in these areas of the matrix just more prone to breaking the rules
or are "the rules" whatever they are today, selectively and over-zealously enforced in order to repress certain ideas and perspectives?

Is there some objective standard against high level US politicians doing things that could be interpreted as inciting, instigating, or glorifying violence?

How about Kamala Harriss posting a bail fund for violent rioters and criminals this past summer, wouldn't that fall squarely over the line of inciting, or instigating, or glorifying violence?

Curiously, crickets around that one...

> just tells me that things really went too far and should have been shut down much sooner.

So is this advocating for enforcement of "pre-crime?" We should keep an eye out for people saying things we don't like then repress their ability to act in the digital age, to prevent them from committing a future crime we have projected onto them?

> The fact that all these institutions just allowed this horrible hateful speech for four years, in the name of free speech etc, despite all the harassment, harm (mental and otherwise) it caused to so many people in America actually emboldened so many to the extent that now that they crossed this invisible line, they can't even really understand the ramifications of what happened. That what gets me.

Hate is an emotion, emotions are subjective. There is no clear objective measure of what is "hateful speech." "Speech" is a noun, an objective thing. Free speech, as in, as little restrictions on speech as are feasible was a great insight by America's founding fathers as to what would contribute to a healthy, dynamic, non-repressive society. Turns out they were right about a lot of things.

Americans today have to be adults and understand that content of speech and someone's actions are different things. The speech of someone like Trump is actually much closer to being an action. But you can't just start repressing speech no matter how "hateful" unfortunately. How about contributing with Love wherever you see hate?

> a few feet away from irreversibly staining American history

Sometimes I think back to another time in the recent past when there was an even more clear and present danger to members of the highest level of the federal govt. I think back in a shocked disbelief of "Holy cow... what if some large fraction of the Congress was murdered in one day?"

Does anybody even remember that?! It was just a couple years ago, multiple shots were fired at Congressmen at a baseball game. It's shocking to think what could have been then.

But it just seems to have dropped off the radar. I wonder why there wasn't a crackdown then on speech about things like Rachel Maddow/NYT/Media Establishment type conspiracies, or even any interest in a public airing of the attacker's motivations.