You are spectacularly missing the point. You are not required to listen to anything Thiel says. But you are required to tolerate the fact that he says things.
Except according to all these eerily-similar HN commenters, if I speak up and say I don't like what he says, or that I'll refuse to associate with him or his supporters, or encourage other people to do the same, well, clutch my pearls and fetch the smelling salts! That's tyranny! Despotism! Bullying! Shaming! Witch hunting! Extortion! Blackmail! Coercion! Censorship! Oppression! Groupthink! Punishing thoughtcrime!
So what it seems these folks really want is "Trump and Thiel can say what they want and nobody's allowed to speak up or out against them, and must associate with and financially aid them or else". Which is not how I envision freedom of speech working.
Given that they were largely government-imposed (in the sense that the government actively threatened businesses who didn't blacklist suspected "Communists"), I don't see an analogy to private individuals advocating for/against particular views or associations.
If Trump called for a boycott of a company, would you condemn him for it?
Those "threats" were prominent politicians saying negative things about the businesses. So the blacklists were exactly as "government-imposed" as boycotts of Trump, given the many prominent politicians saying negative things about Trump and his voters today.
That is to say, not at all.
>If Trump called for a boycott of a company, would you condemn him for it?
Depends on the reason for the boycott, of course. If he was calling for the boycott of a company because its founder donated to Hillary Clinton, or Jill Stein, or American Socialist Party nominee Mimi Soltysik, or even the Devil himself, then of course I would condemn him for it. I'm sorry to hear you wouldn't have the same resolve.
(I'll save you a few minutes of Googling, by the way, and pre-emptively condemn him just in case he has done something like that and I haven't heard about it. Trump is a jackass.)
Ah yes, "politicians saying negative things". That's a nice euphemism for "Congressional hearings".
Let me just ask, then: were you this vocal and this active on the internet when the whole "people don't want to bake wedding cakes for same-sex couples" stuff was making news, and lots of people were showing support for the cake-bakers and encouraging association/disassociation based on "beliefs"?
Just asking because despite claims, an awful lot of y'all who make these arguments seem to be inconsistent on that stuff (I think pg describes it as a "blind spot").
