Freedom of speech is an ideal - as such it is not easily achieved or maintained, even by the "best" of us - or those who claim to believe most in it.

If you read Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media you'll find this "irony" repeated throughout history. It's a problem of human nature, and that's what ideals arduously seek to overcome.

https://www.amazon.com/Free-Speech-History-Socrates-Social/d...

As much as I don't like it, calling your political adversaries nazis is pretty typical in the Anglosphere. People usually mean those people over there are authoritarian in some vague sense and I don't like what they're doing. It's obnoxious, shitty, and I wish they would stop but I fail to see why it should be a crime.

> Tyranny is what happens when we don't confront this behaviour

The history of speech codes doesn't provide evidence for this claim. Actual historical Nazis were arrested for violating hate speech laws in the Weimar Republic, and used those arrests to promote their cause and their own victim narrative. Then when those same Nazis came to power they used speech laws to ban political dissent. Speech codes in the south in the US were used to arrest and harass civil rights activists on the basis that the were promoting racial animus and hate. The US used to lock people up for protesting the draft along similar arguments.

Anywhere you look speech codes are either used for oppression, or are useless in stopping hateful people. This happens because the either operate like the Streisand Effect or prohibit legitimate discussion and create zone of forbidden speech where hateful people can gather and disseminate their nonsense free from scrutiny and public debate. I highly recommend Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media by Jacob Mchangama[1].

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Free-Speech-History-Socrates-Social/d...