We should stop and punish actions, but the state should not punish the speech. My 2c.
But we should not ban speech when there has not been any crime.
For the mob boss, he is committing an actual crime of extortion. If a shopkeeper goes to police, the mob defense would not be "we were in our rights to threaten", but "we never said this; no idea what the shopkeeper is saying". A prosecutor would have to prove that it was indeed an extortion, but if he proves this to a jury the specific words said would be irrelevant and a first amendment claim would fail.
The same way if an insider is telling a friend about a stock merger during a quiet period, it is an actual crime. The specific words and methods do not matter.
It is tempting to restrict the speech in an attempt to minimize the evil. But giving state this power sooner or later vests it in some political clique that will use it for political suppression; original noble goals be damned. And this is almost impossible to undo.
He could just go ‘i really don’t like this guy’ and that would be understood at ‘kill him’ without him saying. Would that be ok or you still would want to prosecute him?
The problem with free speech absolutism is its childish view of causality. It only views the end cause of a sequence of causes as bearing any responsibility. Reality doesn't work that way.
The decision to absolve person A of criminal (and often moral) culpability leads to obviously pathological outcomes in certain situations. For example, what if person A is a master manipulator, and person B has an IQ of 60. Who really has the culpability in this scenario? The free speech absolutist would still lay the blame at the feet of person B, but most reasonable people that aren't possessed by ideology would clearly identify person A as bearing a significant chunk if not most of the responsibility for the murder, even though all they did was use their speech.
But almost any action is compelled by speech. I think allowing the state to control the speech to guide actions always leads to misuse. My 2c.
Even the US has histories of this happening, plenty of hated minorities were silenced, threatened and punished if they spoke up.
You're basically thinking like a "crunchy mom" anti-vaxxer who thinks that measles are harmless because she doesn't know anyone who's died from it.
Imagine for a moment that you're a black person living in 1920s Mississippi. You personally know people who were hanged by lynch mobs. You've read about Mary Turner who was burned alive while 8 months pregnant for daring to speak out against the lynching of her husband. And now white people tell you they'll kill you if you register to vote.
You seriously argue that banning those threats would be a worse infraction on people's freedom than allowing them?
If you don't see a way of defining hate speech in a way that won't be misused any worse that free speech is, it just means you haven't thought very hard about it, and suffer from status quo bias.