We Need to Be More Intolerant

The case for drawing hard lines around people who refuse to draw any themselves.

Tolerance has a death wish, and it’s self-inflicted.

If you tolerate everything without limit, you’ll eventually be consumed by the very forces you chose not to confront. The intolerant don’t play by the same rules. They exploit openness as a vector because it’s useful to them. They use free speech to argue against free speech. They use democratic platforms to undermine democracy. They walk through the door you held open and then try to lock it behind them.

And we let them, every single time.

The Collapse of Standards

Tolerance was never supposed to mean “anything goes.” It was a social contract: I’ll respect your right to live and think as you choose, and you’ll extend me the same courtesy. That’s the deal. But we stopped enforcing the second half. We turned tolerance into a performance, a competition to see who could absorb the most abuse without reacting, as though the measure of a good person is how much poison they’re willing to swallow with a smile.

This created an arms race for the worst voices in public life. Andrew Tate built an empire telling young men that women are property. Alex Jones broadcast Sandy Hook conspiracy theories to millions while the parents of murdered six-year-olds received death threats. These weren’t fringe figures whispering in dark corners, they were amplified, algorithmically boosted, and defended under the banner of “free speech” by people who understood perfectly well what they were doing. The fear of being called intolerant has become more powerful than actual intolerance, and the people poisoning public discourse know this. They’re counting on it.

The Line

Tolerance doesn’t require agreement. It requires one thing: the baseline acknowledgment that the other person has a right to exist and participate. Argue about tax policy, immigration, the role of government. Argue fiercely. That’s the system working.

The line gets crossed when someone’s position isn’t “I disagree with you,” it’s “you shouldn’t exist.” When the message is that entire groups of people are subhuman, that violence against them is justified, that they should be stripped of rights. That’s a declaration of war wearing the costume of debate, and treating it as just another perspective worthy of equal airtime is how you lose everything.

Call It Out. Every Time.

This starts with individuals. With you. With the deeply uncomfortable decision to open your mouth when it’d be easier to stay quiet.

No violence, no mobs. Just the simple, unglamorous act of saying “that’s wrong” every single time someone tries to pass off hatred as opinion, conspiracy as research, or bigotry as tradition. At the dinner table, in the group chat, in the meeting, in the comments.

And I want to be absolutely clear about what this isn’t: it’s not about rounding people up. That’d make us the thing we’re arguing against. This is about creating a culture where bullshit gets challenged at every step, where saying something objectively harmful in public carries the social cost it deserves, and where the rest of us stop treating our own discomfort as a reason to let it slide.

Every time someone spreads a lie and nobody corrects it, that lie gets a little more real. Every time someone makes a hateful argument in a room and everyone stays quiet to keep the peace, that argument gains legitimacy it never earned. Silence isn’t neutrality, it’s permission.

Put Them Behind the Bush

Individual confrontation is the foundation, but it’s not enough. The structure matters too.

Every platform, every media outlet, every public forum makes editorial choices every day about who gets amplified and who doesn’t. The idea that these choices are value-neutral is a fiction, it’s always been a fiction. When a news channel books a guest who argues that a particular ethnic group is inherently criminal, that isn’t neutrality, that’s a choice. When a social media algorithm promotes rage-bait calling for the deportation of citizens based on their religion, that isn’t free expression working as intended. It’s a machine optimized for engagement feeding on the worst impulses of the worst people.

Nobody’s saying these people can’t hold their views. Think whatever you want. But you don’t get a studio, a verified account, a primetime slot, or a seat at the table. You don’t get to borrow the infrastructure of a civilized society to dismantle it. The megaphone isn’t a right, it’s a privilege, and privileges come with conditions.

Earn the Microphone

Here’s the idea that’ll make people most uncomfortable: maybe not everyone should get to broadcast to millions of people about subjects they know nothing about.

Consider what the current system has produced. Anti-vaccine influencers whose content was directly linked to measles outbreaks that killed children. Climate denial funded by oil companies and amplified by creators who can’t read a graph. Medical misinformation that led people to drink bleach during a pandemic. But it’s not only one side. Unqualified activists broadcasting sweeping claims about biology and pharmacology to millions of followers. The years-long suppression of lab-leak discussion as “conspiracy” by people with no virology credentials and a lot of institutional loyalty. Wellness influencers pushing unregulated hormone protocols to vulnerable teenagers. All of it, left and right, spread by individuals with zero expertise and massive audiences, because we decided that the right to speak and the right to be amplified are the same thing.

They’re not.

We already credential doctors, lawyers, engineers, pilots, and electricians. We don’t let unqualified people wire a house because “everyone deserves a voice in electrical engineering.” We accept that expertise matters when the stakes are high. Public health is high stakes. Climate policy is high stakes. The information environment that shapes how millions of people understand the world is about as high-stakes as it gets.

Now, the obvious objection: who decides? Who credentials the credentialers? What stops this from becoming politically motivated gatekeeping?

It’s a fair question, and anyone pretending it’s simple is lying to you. History is littered with examples of “expert consensus” being weaponized. COVID-era lab-leak discussion was labeled misinformation and suppressed by platforms acting on institutional guidance, only for it to become a legitimate line of scientific inquiry months later. Gender medicine recommendations that were treated as settled for years are now being reversed across multiple countries after independent review. Retracted papers became instant orthodoxy. Trusted sources turned out to be captured ones. Anyone proposing credentialing who ignores this track record is building on sand.

So the mechanism matters more than the principle. It’d need to be independent of government and independent of the platforms themselves. Rotating panels drawn from accredited institutions across political and geographic lines, not a single committee that can be lobbied or packed. Transparent criteria published in advance, not retroactive judgments. A formal appeals process with public rulings. And critically, a scope limited to verifiable empirical claims, not policy opinions. You can credential whether someone is qualified to discuss vaccine efficacy. You can’t and shouldn’t credential whether someone’s view on immigration policy is “correct.” The moment the system touches opinion, it’s dead.

Is this perfect? No. Will bad actors try to capture it? Absolutely. But the question isn’t whether this system has flaws, it’s whether it has fewer flaws than the current arrangement, which is no system at all.

And here’s the part that should make everyone pause, including those who agree with this article so far. This principle cuts both ways. If you want to credential the right, you have to credential the left. If a conspiracy theorist shouldn’t be able to broadcast unqualified medical claims to millions, neither should an activist. The standard isn’t political alignment, it’s competence. The moment this becomes a tool to silence one side and amplify the other, it becomes the very thing it was designed to prevent. If you’re not willing to apply this to your own tribe, you don’t actually believe in it. You just want a weapon.

The alternative is what we have now: a world where a dermatologist and a man who sells brain pills have equal authority on epidemiology because they both have a camera and an internet connection.

Require credentials for reach, not for speech. Say whatever you want. But if you want the algorithm to put you in front of a million people on a topic where misinformation kills, show your working first.

The Real Intolerance

Here’s the irony nobody talks about. The people who scream loudest about being silenced are never actually silent. They’ve got podcasts, platforms, millions of followers, and book deals. Their version of being “cancelled” is getting criticized on the internet and having slightly fewer speaking engagements. Meanwhile, the people they target face harassment, violence, legislative attacks on their rights, and the slow erosion of their safety and dignity.

When someone tells you that refusing to platform hatred is “just as bad” as the hatred itself, understand what they’re really asking. They want you to treat the arsonist and the firefighter as morally equivalent because they’re both involved with fire. Don’t fall for it.

So Be Intolerant

This isn’t hypocrisy. This is the immune system of a free society doing what immune systems do, identifying threats and neutralizing them before they kill the host.

A tolerant society that refuses to defend itself isn’t tolerant. It’s terminal.