Spotify, SoundCloud and other platforms have pulled the song, but its spread underscores the challenges tech platforms face in removing content that violate their policies.
Spotify, SoundCloud and other tech platforms have worked to remove a new song from Ye that praises Adolf Hitler, but the song and its video have continued to proliferate online including across X, where it has racked up millions of views.
On various mainstream and alternative tech platforms this week, Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, has been able to share his latest song, titled “Heil Hitler,” along with its companion title, “WW3,” which similarly glorifies Hitler, the architect of the Holocaust.
While some platforms have taken steps to attempt to pull down the song, others have seemingly let it spread freely.
That’s a lotta words to say we should tolerate things I say we shouldn’t. We can disagree, but I’m not all that interested in getting scholarly about it - the writing’s on the wall, we have real - not theoretical - fascism headed our way within this 4 year presidency and we’d better be ready to fight.
Enjoy your Stanford political philosophy. I’m gonna keep watching for further sieg heils on national stages, and I know what I’ll do if they become too widespread.
I wish you’d help, but above all, I wish you well.
The civil rights movement overturned defacto ethno-fascism & advanced equality by using & promoting civil liberties, not opposing them. Freedom of expression & the free speech movement were instrumental.
Even when the threat is real, compromising civil rights to combat it spills beyond the threat & backfires. Read about the Red Scare & McCarthyism to see government restrict civil liberties in the name of security (the Soviets were spying in the Manhattan Project & Federal government), Congress seize the chance to wield a partisan weapon against anyone they flimsily accuse of “Un-American” activities, the lives ruined through rights abuses, the work it took to wind back those laws. Truman criticized those restrictions as a “mockery of the Bill of Rights” and a “long step toward totalitarianism”. For his reckless witch hunt against communists, Joseph McCarthy was criticized as “the greatest asset the Kremlin has”. Persecution ultimately harmed anti-communist efforts more than help them, and critics argued it distracted from the “real (but limited) extent of Soviet espionage in America”.
Read about how basic freedoms like speech & assembly were indispensable for disenfranchised activists to advance universal suffrage as they fought to lift restrictions due to property ownership, race, poll taxes, tests, sex, age.
Read about the considerable work those activists performed using their civil liberties to organize, picket, resist, & act in civil disobedience to gain the expanded freedoms you take for granted today. Look at their work & struggles from the abolitionist movement to black lives matter, and look at the work the activists of today are not doing. Notice how they didn’t organize to weaken basic protections whereas people who think like you argue we should.
Arguing to squander basic protections with some wishful thinking that elected authority will reliably fight your causes for you without as easily turning against you
Like you, I oppose fascists and (more generally) authoritarians, but I’m very clear about why. Authoritarians don’t respect limits to authority: they would tear down those pesky rights & liberties that protect free society & stand in their way, and they would readily crush people & everything we hold dear for their unworthy cause.
“Resisting” authoritarians chipping away at free society by chipping away even more is exactly what authoritarians would want. How thinkers like you don’t see that is beyond me.
Your prescription is wrong & serves authoritarians: I cannot abide it.