“These efforts are a lot more subtle. Just as becoming a terrorist is a gradual, step by step process, people do not become part of the alt right overnight. These events represent a kind of soft recruitment into more extremist ideas.” ~ Dawn Nowacki, dean of faculty at Linfield College in Oregon, commenting on events sponsored by the campus chapter of Young Americans for Liberty to promote free speech.

First we lure them with honeyed free speech, then we turn them into white supremacists and terrorists. How do we protect ourselves from these villains? I wonder what Ms. Nowacki thinks about her own pattern of thought, and of those who agree with her. When did free speech become a pretext for recruiting terrorists and racists? She did not reach a position like that overnight. How do you account for processes – rational or otherwise – that lead to reasoning like this? They must be subtle.

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