Quote Originally Posted by dantheman4248 View Post
OAN said "Black Lives Matter" is a Farce and has doubled down on that as the years have gone on.

Plain and simple it's not ok to be racist. Sure it's your constitutionally protected right to be racist if you want. The government can't arrest you for that. But it's everyone else's right to hate you for your stupidity and no longer support you. That's democracy. That's them exercising their freedom of speech.
This is so feeble minded it's incredible. You can criticize an organization focused on race issues and not be racist just like you can criticize the Southern Baptist Convention and not be bigoted towards Christians.

Quote Originally Posted by dantheman4248 View Post
If you find yourself on the opposite end of cancel culture, you need to 1. reevaluate your opinion. Gundy clearly did. He asked why and had a good conversation and has come forward with a meh apology, but an apology nonetheless. 2. If you don't want to do 1, then understand what the freedom of speech means. It doesn't protect you from someone else saying they don't support you. That is their freedom of speech. If you are mad at people using "cancel culture" to eliminate "wrongthink" then you are literally mad you live in America and are on the losing end of democracy.
People have the right to speak. People have the right to say that what others say is stupid. People have the freedom of speech to withdraw their support based on whatever they feel like. Getting mad at that means you are literally against the first amendment. If you don't like it, go somewhere else. You're free to leave.

Side note OAN is actually considered more trustworthy than Fox News on the media bias chart. That statement is not an endorsement of OAN btw.
There is freedom of speech as a legal concept and freedom of speech as a cultural value. It is not "freedom of speech" to try to drive somebody from the public sphere and/or ensure that they lose their job and are generally unwelcome in "polite" society. It may be legally protected, but it's antithetical to freedom of speech. Freedom of speech would be meeting them in the market place of ideas and convincing other people, if not them, that their ideas are wrongheaded. Trying to shortcut the argument by getting them excluded from the public square is not "freedom of speech".

Also, it doesn't have much to do with democracy, but to the extent it does, it's also inconsistent with democracy. Democracy more or less depends on not trying to treat the minority on any particular issue as unworthy of being in polite society. If the consequences of losing an election are that the minority no longer enjoys the benefits of civil society, then that makes every election an existential issue for them and increases the chances that power will not change hands peacefully.