I mean, I want to agree with you.

I genuinely appreciate you saying that, and for what it's worth, I actually understand the fear driving your perspective.

The media and political machines run on algorithms designed to make us terrified of each other. When you are constantly told that the people you disagree with are an existential threat to society, the instinct to just shut them down completely—even physically—makes sense emotionally. But history and psychology prove it is the absolute worst way to actually fix the problem.

Some things shouldn’t be debated. Some “opposing views” shouldn’t be given a platform or granted the light of day.

If you want to actually change minds and protect society, declaring that bad ideas "shouldn't be heard" is the biggest mistake you can make.

Think about it from the perspective of psychology. If a child or a patient comes to a therapist with deeply troubled, harmful, or antisocial views, what happens if the therapist says, "Those ideas are unacceptable, and you are not allowed to speak them in here"?

The ideas don't go away. They just fester in the dark. The therapist loses any ability to understand where those ideas came from, diagnose the root cause, or help the person untangle them. Listening to someone’s ideas—even abhorrent ones—isn’t about validating them. It’s about exposing them to the light so they can actually be treated and dismantled.

When you push bad ideas off the public platform, you don't destroy them. You just force them into echo chambers where they are never challenged by better arguments, and where they metastasize into actual extremism.

Does that mean things may get messy and that mistakes may be made? Yeah. Probably... You can’t reason someone out of a position they haven’t reasoned themselves into.

You might not always be able to reason them out of it, but you absolutely cannot beat them out of it.

Using violence against bad ideas is a trap. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. understood this better than anyone when he wrote about the descending spiral of physical escalation: "Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate."

When you use a street mob to violently silence someone, you don't prove their ideas wrong. You just prove their paranoid worldview right. You convince them—and anyone watching—that they are a victim, and you guarantee that the next time they come back, they will bring their own weapons. Violence begets violence.

The only way to actually defeat bad ideas is to drag them out into the open, expose how weak they are, and defeat them with better ones. It is harder, it takes longer, but it is the only method that doesn't end with us destroying society to save it.