By Matt Stone
There is a lie peddled in polite company, a cheap intellectual parlor trick used to shut down dissent. It’s called the “tolerance paradox,” and it is wielded like a cudgel to protect the most vile ideas from scrutiny. The argument, in its dishonest form, goes like this: if you are truly tolerant, you must tolerate intolerance. Therefore, any attempt to silence a bigot makes you a bigot yourself. This is not a paradox; it is a surrender. It is a philosophical suicide pact dressed up as a high-minded principle.
Let’s be clear about what the actual paradox is, as conceived by the philosopher Karl Popper. He did not argue for a limitless tolerance that swallows its own tail. He argued that a tolerant society must be intolerant of intolerance. He wrote that a tolerant society that extends unlimited tolerance to the intolerant will ultimately be destroyed by the intolerant. His conclusion was not to tolerate the intolerant, but to defend a tolerant society by not tolerating the forces that seek to destroy it. It is a right to self-defense, applied to a culture. The paradox is not a puzzle; it is a directive.
But this concept has been twisted and corrupted by cowards and bad-faith actors. They have stripped it of its core meaning, self-preservation, and reframed it as a requirement for self-annihilation. They use it to create a false equivalence between the voice of the oppressed and the fist of the oppressor. They demand that the platform given to a historian discussing genocide be shared with the neo-Nazi who denies it happened. They insist that the fight for LGBTQ+ rights is incomplete without giving equal time to those who believe LGBTQ+ people should be eradicated. This isn’t tolerance; it is moral idiocy. It is the elevation of nonsense to the level of sense, and it is done deliberately to muddy the waters and paralyze meaningful action.
This weaponized paradox is the favorite tool of those who have lost the argument on every conceivable front. When you can no longer justify racism on its merits, you cry “tolerance” and demand your right to be racist in peace. When your homophobia is revealed as baseless superstition, you hide behind the banner of “free speech” and claim your right to spread hate is the same as another’s right to exist. It is the last refuge of the scoundrel, a way to demand the protections of a liberal society while actively working to dismantle it from within. They want the tolerance of the open society they despise, using its own rules as a shield while they sharpen the knife to slit its throat.
The most insidious part of this lie is that it rebrands “consequences” as “intolerance.” A bigot being de-platformed for spewing hate is not a victim of intolerance; they are facing the consequences of their speech. A corporation losing customers over a racist executive is not experiencing cancel culture; it is the market working as it should. A nation banning politicians who advocate for the overthrow of democracy is not descending into authoritarianism; it is taking the necessary steps to preserve that democracy. Intolerance is being fired for who you are. Facing backlash for what you choose to say and do is simply accountability. The deliberate conflation of the two is the central lie of this entire rotten enterprise.
A healthy society does not tolerate a cancer. It cuts it out. A healthy mind does not entertain a delusion; it confronts it with reality. A tolerant society cannot afford the luxury of tolerating the intolerant, because the intolerant have no such qualms. They will not debate you in the marketplace of ideas; they will burn the marketplace down. They do not seek to add their voice to the chorus; they seek to silence every other voice until only their noise remains. To extend them the hand of tolerance is to hand them the weapon of your own destruction.
The true paradox is not that tolerance must tolerate intolerance. The true paradox is that in order to have a truly free and open society, you must be absolutely ruthless in defending it from those who would use that freedom to end it. There is no moral equivalence between those who seek to build and those who seek to destroy. There is no obligation to tolerate the intolerant. There is only the obligation to survive.
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“A corporation losing customers over a racist executive is not experiencing cancel culture; it is the market working as it should.”
I guess it’s also “working as it should” then, in regard to Dylan Mulvaney and Bud Light.
(For what it’s worth, I liked those commercials more than I like Bud Light.)
But it is true that no private organization has to provide a “platform”. Someone like Matt Walsh already has his own platform.