Stephen T. Stone 's Techdirt Comments

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• On the post: Charlie Kirk Doesn’t Deserve What’s Happening To Him

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 15 Sep, 2025 @ 12:42pm

  Charlie Kirk was the nice one, and most of your accusations have been proven wrong numerous times.

  If you’re saying that Charlie Kirk never said any of the following… ⁠* “I think it's worth it. I think it's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the Second Amendment.” ⁠* “I think empathy is a made-up, new age term that does a lot of damage.” ⁠* “They were actually better in the 1940s. It was bad. It was evil. But what happened? Something changed. They committed less crimes. … Black America is worse than it has been in the last 80 years.” ⁠* “The answer is yes. The baby would be delivered.” (in re: a hypothetical situation in which his 10-year-old daughter has been raped and made pregnant) ⁠* “A man who calls himself trans is wearing 'woman face,' no different than I would wear Black face trying to be a Black person. It's assuming an identity that isn't yours.” ⁠* “If we would have said that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative action picks, we would have been called racists. Now they’re coming out and they’re saying it for us … You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.” ⁠* “If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified.’ ” (in re: the plane/helicopter collision earlier this year and Trump blaming “DEI” for the collision) ⁠* “Now, I will say that for future retirees, people under the age of 45, we should absolutely raise the retirement age. I'm going to say something very provocative. I'm not a fan of retirement. I don't think retirement is biblical. … You say, 'Charlie, I'm just gonna retire and I'm just gonna go golf.' I think, what a waste of the gifts that God has given you.” ⁠* “Are you comfortable with both London and New York having Muslim mayors? That doesn’t feel right.” ⁠* “America does not need more visas for people from India. Enough already. We’re full. Let’s finally put our own people first.” ⁠* “We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the mid-1960s.” ⁠* “24 years ago a group of Muslims killed 2,753 people on 9/11. Now a Muslim Socialist is on pace to run New York City.” (in re: Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the Democrat primary for the NYC mayoral election) ⁠* “America has freedom of religion, of course, but we should be frank: large dedicated Islamic areas are a threat to America.” ⁠* “America was at its peak when we halted immigration for 40 years and we dropped our foreign-born percentage to its lowest level ever. We should be unafraid to do that.” …you’re gonna need to prove wrong about a dozen different news agencies and Snopes, because that list has been fact-checked for accuracy without the use of AI and I don’t think you have the balls to deny actual reality.

  you are celebrating his death

  Nobody here is celebrating his death. But by the same token, we’re not going to celebrate his life as if he was anything but a bigot. His death doesn’t redeem his life.

  You and most of people writing on this site are responsible for encouraging violence.

  I haven’t seen anyone here endorse or encourage political violence of any kind and be taken seriously. Hell, one guy’s been trying to make me endorse political violence for months, and he still hasn’t made it work despite numerous attempts to emotionally manipulate me into seeing things his way.

  You are not the good guys in this story.

  Yeah, so, how about you go back and look at the violence committed by Trump supporters in the past few years? Like, for example, the murder of Melissa Hortman and the shooting of John Hoffman, the beating of Paul Pelosi, the arson that targeted Josh Shapiro, and the insurrection on the 6th of January 2021. I haven’t seen nearly as much political violence from the “far left” as I have from the far right, so please feel free to cite examples of “leftist” political violence from the past ten years. Make sure to include factual citations and not AI hallucinations!

• On the post: The Trump FTC’s War On Porn Just Ensured That Accused CSAM Offenders Will Walk Free

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 15 Sep, 2025 @ 12:26pm

  Somehow, I’m not surprised that the political party leading the charge to cover up the Jeffrey Epstein files⁠—the same party that has several members who openly support child marriage!⁠—is involved in making sure child rapists (and the people who financially support child rapists) have an easier time of staying out of jail for their crimes.

• On the post: Stop Begging. Start Building

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 15 Sep, 2025 @ 11:02am

  The issue with Substack becomes one of sunken costs: If people who make a decent living from Substack try to move to a new Substack-like platform/protocol, they risk losing a number of their subscribers because the way Substack operates won’t allow people to transfer their subscribers from one platform to another. As someone gets more and more subscribers, the risk of losing a significant amount of income by moving off Substack grows higher. At that point, it becomes a matter of economics vs. ethics: How much of a monetary loss is someone willing to take in exchange for leaving Substack?

• On the post: Charlie Kirk Doesn’t Deserve What’s Happening To Him

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 15 Sep, 2025 @ 10:55am

  the completely unearned celebration of his life

  To quote a video I saw earlier today: “How you die does not redeem how you lived.”

• On the post: Stop Begging. Start Building

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 15 Sep, 2025 @ 09:34am

  But this assumes there’s something to take back. There isn’t.

  And even if the space was “taken back”, it already has such a poor reputation that trying to rebuild the space and improve its reputaiton would take literal years. Twitter is a Nazi bar now; it will be a Nazi bar even if someone less extreme than Musk manages to buy it from him. Trying to rebuild it makes no earthly sense. Let the place rot and collapse upon itself.

• On the post: The Murder Of Charlie Kirk Didn’t Help Anyone

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 15 Sep, 2025 @ 06:15am

  an imperfect law criminalizing calls to violence

  We already have laws against incitement. What you’re asking for is a law against stochastic terrorism that could, on a long enough timeline, criminalize any rhetoric that offends others on the claim that such rhetoric is likely to make someone commit even a small act of violence. You won’t find support for that idea here, and you won’t get it from me. I support free speech rights to a degree that some might call “suicidal”; this is a hill on which I will figuratively and literally die. Can you⁠—will you⁠—say the same for your anti–free speech beliefs?

• On the post: The Murder Of Charlie Kirk Didn’t Help Anyone

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 15 Sep, 2025 @ 06:08am

  one of the lessons we need to learn is when it’s necessary, appropriate and possible to criminalize firearms ownership and certain types of speech

  Hey, so, here’s a fun little question for you to think about: Do you think the people who want to censor adult-oriented videogames⁠—i.e., porn games⁠—will stop with those games? Collective Shout, the group of censor-happy assholes who started the whole situation with paypros and credit card companies getting adult games taken down from Steam and Itch.io, have said that they don’t care if the games they target are legal to sell. They even plan to go after mainstream games like the Grand Theft Auto series. When you align yourself with censors, you align yourself with their mission to have speech removed from public view. Their mission will always expand because it has to⁠—they will always find some kind of speech that disgusts or offends them, and once they get a taste of success in banning that speech, they don’t fucking stop. Me? I don’t have that problem. I believe in the idea that even if certain kinds of speech are distasteful, offensive, or otherwise not to my liking, it still deserves to be expressed even if I would prefer it remain unexpressed. Like, there’s a whole bunch of sexual fetishes that you couldn’t pay me enough to watch voluntarily⁠—and so long as everyone in such videos are consenting adults, those videos should have the right to exist regardless of my feelings. Sympathizing with censors will earn you no points here. Only a relative handful of people who comment here regularly would ever support censorship. They’re trolls and right-wingers (whoops, tautology!). Don’t be like them, son. Be better than them.

• On the post: The Murder Of Charlie Kirk Didn’t Help Anyone

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 14 Sep, 2025 @ 05:24am

  Preventing these sorts of excesses is actually already a solved problem in the US legal system of checks and balances.

  You say this like that’s a perfect safeguard. But innocent people have been convicted of crimes they didn’t commit and the Supreme Court once ruled against free speech that dissented against the government before walking that decision back years later. (That anti-speech decision also gave rise to the “fire in a crowded theater” bit that anti-speech people love to use.) The judiciary is not a flawless panacea against violations of civil rights; if you believe otherwise, you may want to go talk to the Central Park Five.

  I believe that this speech should be criminalized

  And everything I’ve asked you up until now remains on the table: How would you prevent the excesses of censorship and the danger of partisan power grabs from taking over your idea of criminalizing “hate speech” and risking the lives of people whose only “crime” was saying something that the government doesn’t like? Because when you talk about putting people in jail, you are talking about fucking up their lives in a permanent and irreversible way. When one wants a perfect “order”, the “law” can and will expand to make that possible. Just look at Donald Trump and the GOP: Trump has an idea of what order looks like in this country, and both the rest of the GOP and the Supreme Court are effectively turning a blind eye to the law to let him make his idea a reality. I hope you’re ready to tell me how you wouldn’t be Donald Trump if you suddenly had the power to censor speech you didn’t like.

• On the post: The Murder Of Charlie Kirk Didn’t Help Anyone

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 13 Sep, 2025 @ 03:46pm

  I suggest you look up Stephen King where one of those quotes came from.

  I didn’t use him as a source. Every one of those quotes is sourced from at least one credible news agency, and Snopes has confirmation on several of the quotes as well.

  Lots of people getting cancelled for saying things about Charlie their employer didn’t like. Hope you guys are for that as much as you were when Gina Carano was fired by Disney for same reason.

  FAFO. I have less sympathy for Carano because of her politics, but the principle of “make yourself a liability for your employer and you might end up getting fired” holds true for everyone.

  Now show us how much this site is for free speech by holding my comment for hours if not forever…

  At the time of this post, I have a comment being held up by moderation, but you won’t see me whining about it.

• On the post: The Murder Of Charlie Kirk Didn’t Help Anyone

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 13 Sep, 2025 @ 03:18pm

  So, hey, here’s the funny thing about this “irony” you brought up. The guy who killed Charlie Kirk seems to have been radicalized online, and the statements he put on the bullets found by the FBI⁠—none of which had anything to do with trans people!⁠—all point towards him being terminally online. Whether he was someone who believed in leftist ideals or someone who believed Charlie Kirk wasn’t right-wing “enough” is unknown at this point. But let’s examine some other notable bits of political violence in recent years, shall we? Three months ago, Melissa Hortman, a Democrat state rep for Minnesota, and her husband were shot and killed in their home. State senator John Hoffman, also a Democrat, and his wife were shot in their home the same day. The man who committed these acts had a list of 70-something people he intended to kill⁠—a list that included abortion providers, pro–abortion rights activists, and prominent Democrat lawmakers, including Tim Walz, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Tammy Baldwin. The killer was a Trump supporter. Five months ago, an arsonist targeted the Pennsylvania Governor's Residence with the intent to harm (if not kill) Governor Josh Shapiro, a Jewish Democrat, mere hours after Shapiro held a Passover seder. The arsonist was a Trump supporter. On the 28th of October 2022, a man broke into the home of Nancy Pelosi and assaulted her husband, Paul, in an act that can also be described as torture. He intended to take Nancy hostage and torture her as well. The man who did that was a Trump supporter. On the 6th of January 2021, thousands of people descended upon the U.S. Capitol to protest the results of a free and fair election. Hundreds of those people broke into the Capitol, which was closed off that day due to Congress carrying out the certification of the 2020 presidential election. The building was vandalized and several people threatened, either implicity or explicitly, the lives of several lawmakers, including Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence. One of the people who broke in was shot and killed by a Capitol Police officer who was trying to protect members of Congress. All of the people who broke into the Capitol that day were Trump supporters. On the 8th of October 2020, thirteen men were arrested for plotting to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan and a Democrat, and to use violence to overthrow the state government. Many of them were, to some degree, Trump supporters⁠—but all were opposed to Whitmer and her actions as governor during the COVID-19 pandemic. On the 19th of July 2020, a man shot Daniel Anderl and his father, Mark. Mark was married to Esther Salas, a U.S. District Judge in the District of New Jersey; Daniel was their only son. Mark survived the shooting, but Daniel did not. The killer, who died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound as befitting his status as a coward, was a Trump supporter. There are many, many, many more examples of right-wing violence that I could cite. But here’s a fun experiment for you: How many examples of left-wing extremist violence can you cite going back a decade, and how does that number compare to the number of incidences of right-wing extremist violence in the same timeframe? And for bonus points, how many of those left-wing examples are as heinously violent as the right-wing examples? Make sure to include factual citations and not AI hallucinations!

• On the post: The Murder Of Charlie Kirk Didn’t Help Anyone

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 13 Sep, 2025 @ 02:47pm

  I do not believe that Nazis have the right to speak their mind

  Then what happens to people whom you label Nazis because they’re not sufficiently left-of-center enough for you? Is an accidental deadnaming enough to take away someone’s free speech rights? What if someone says something unkind about a single gay person⁠—are we meant to extrapolate that statement to encompass all gay people and silence the person who said it? There’s always more hate to be found it you look hard enough; your quest to silence those whose rhetoric you oppose will never end if you keep looking for the slightest little bit of dissent.

  I believe that Nazis generally have the right to breathe, unless they’re actively engaged in trying to take that right from someone else.

  And at that point, putting a bullet through their skull is both morally righteous and legally acceptable.

• On the post: The Murder Of Charlie Kirk Didn’t Help Anyone

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 13 Sep, 2025 @ 02:44pm

  it also has separation of church and state

  And in case you weren’t aware, that wall is meant to separate both the church from being too involved with the state and the state from being too involved with the church. The government shouldn’t establish one religion as the only state-approved religion, nor should it attempt to stamp out all religion in favor of forced atheism or whatever.

  Opposition looks like a silencing.

  By your logic, Charlie Kirk was “opposed”, but I don’t think you’ve really thought through what you’re saying beyond a superficial level.

  borrow something from the many countries that have worked it out

  How about we don’t and say we didn’t.

• On the post: The Murder Of Charlie Kirk Didn’t Help Anyone

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 13 Sep, 2025 @ 07:46am

  There’s too much speech right now.

  See, that sounds to me like the speech of someone who very much wants to censor other people⁠—possibly including me. And I don’t necessarily disagree with your worries. They’re actually worth worrying about. But jumping straight to “we have to get rid of a lot of speech, so let’s start making some legally protected speech illegal and fining/jailing people who say it” will only make me think you’re way too eager to start playing censor with your preferred ideas/vibes and going after your political enemies. As someone who has literally defended the rights of Nazis to speak their minds: Fuck. That. Shit.

• On the post: The Murder Of Charlie Kirk Didn’t Help Anyone

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 13 Sep, 2025 @ 07:39am

  How come all of these countries[ c]an figure out hate speech laws, but the USA is distinctly in the position where doing so is a slippery slope to fascism?

  We have the First Amendment. For the past 250 years, the United States has prided itself on having more freedom of speech than maybe any other country in the world⁠—for better or for worse. Banning speech on the basis of it being “hate speech” opens several doors for abuse, none of which you seem all that concerned about the government going through:

  1. How would you define “hate speech” in such a way that it dings as small an amount of speech as possible and doesn’t turn a molehill (e.g., an accidental deadnaming) into a mountain (e.g., someone being convicted and sentenced to jail/prison for said deadnaming)?
  2. How would you prevent mission creep⁠—i.e., the government using the ability to ban hate speech as a pretext to start banning other kinds of speech?
  3. How would you prevent partisan-driven changes to the law⁠—i.e., a political party redefining or adding onto what qualifies as “hate speech” in such a way that it targets speech associated with the party’s sociopolitical “enemies”?

• On the post: The Murder Of Charlie Kirk Didn’t Help Anyone

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 13 Sep, 2025 @ 07:15am

  I’m tired of the violence. Other countries don’t have this level of violence.

  Other countries also don’t have the amount of guns and the lax gun control laws that we do. How about going after the Second Amendment before you go after the First, mmm’kay?

• On the post: The Murder Of Charlie Kirk Didn’t Help Anyone

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 13 Sep, 2025 @ 07:14am

  One of the root [causes] is that people are allowed to say these things largely unopposed.

  What does opposition to hate speech look like to you? Because plenty of people decry hate speech all the time

  in terms of overall harm to freedom of speech, banning hatefulness and calls to violence would do much less harm

  Oh, really? Because hey, here’s a fun idea to think about: If you ban hate speech, you’re gonna have to ban books that include it as well, and that takes several American classics off the table⁠—including To Kill a Mockingbird. Is censoring literature a side effect of your law that you’re okay with?

  No exceptions for religious speech that is also hateful, of course.

  Does that count only for religious groups that aren’t Christian, or would you actually have the balls to try and tell large Christian congregations⁠—including those in places where a significant part of a congregation are likely to be gun owners⁠—that their preacher is being censored by the government because he didn’t fawningly praise queer people?

• On the post: The Murder Of Charlie Kirk Didn’t Help Anyone

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 13 Sep, 2025 @ 07:04am

  I love it when people who are trying to argue with me agree with me.

  I both do and don’t agree with you. I agree that the ghosts of centuries-old dead men shouldn’t have the final say over the laws and social progress of the United States. I don’t agree with the kind of changes you want made to the Constitution.

  You take it to court and see what happens.

  If you forgo thinking through the logical consequences of a law in favor of vibe-based “it’ll all turn out exactly like I want it” thinking, you’re not writing a good law.

• On the post: The Murder Of Charlie Kirk Didn’t Help Anyone

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 12 Sep, 2025 @ 03:53pm

  If the law is worded correctly, it doesn’t matter so much what the people in power this week believe is hate speech

  This is why such a law will never exist: You won’t get both “sides” of the political aisle to agree on what speech objectively counts as hate speech, especially if that definition would cover a lot of speech from one particular side. What political party would ever want to pass a law that would censor the members of that party?

  We’d live in a more placid society if public speech was more carefully regulated

  We’d also live in a society ripped right of Nineteen Eighty-Four, where Big Brother is always watching and everyone must use Newspeak. You might be fine with that society. A hell of a lot of people are not⁠—and I’m one of them.

• On the post: The Murder Of Charlie Kirk Didn’t Help Anyone

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 12 Sep, 2025 @ 02:40pm

  Censorship has historically worked very well for many countries, including but not limited to Singapore, China, Russia, Indonesia, and Saudi Arabia.

  How many of those countries jail or execute people for political dissent?

  Censorship is absolutely a solution to speech issues.

  And it’s a shitty solution that leads to fascism and authoritarianism. You might think you’ll be the one doing the censoring, but if and when you lose that power, you’ll be the one being censored⁠—and I highly doubt you’ll be happy about having your rights abridged for the sake of “the social order”. Then again, who knows, maybe you’ll enjoy being beaten by a cop for daring to use anything other than Newspeak.

• On the post: The Murder Of Charlie Kirk Didn’t Help Anyone

  

  Stephen T. Stone ( profile ), 12 Sep, 2025 @ 02:36pm

  The violence is unacceptable.

  Then start looking for and treating the root causes of violence instead of going after speech. Seriously, under your suggestion of banning hate speech, I wouldn’t even be allowed to quote Kirk’s hateful rhetoric as examples of his hateful rhetoric⁠—and while you might go “well that’s good, too”, how am I supposed to say that Kirk’s rhetoric was hateful if I’m not legally allowed to quote it verbatim?

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